Manure: You May Be Walking On It Soon

The answer is not to make building materials out of manure, but to transition into "growing" our meat as tissue cultures: that technology is not too far away. Many researchers have been working on it from a variety of directions, and currently it is benefiting from research and developments in growing human organs.

I am a meat eater, but I feel we have to move toward a more humane and efficient method of getting it to our table. There will still be hunting but cattle raising will be at a much smaller scale. It is moral and proper to raise animals for our food, but in the present impersonal, mass production, industrialized manner we do it now, it (in my mind anyway) loses much of its moral underpinnings. It is also inefficient from a nutrition and energy perspective and adds a substantial amount of methane (a greenhouse gas) and CO₂ to the atmosphere. Additionally, it can eliminate or at least minimize the possibility of spreading diseases, such as the current problems with "mad cow" disease, avian flu, etc.

Some links:

http://www.hedweb.com/animimag/invitro-culturedmeat.pdf

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3208

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat

Greg

In Germany (and I am sure we are not alone!) they use such dung to produce methane gas for heating and electrical generation. A few pilot schemes with upto 100 houses at this time are in use, but in a few years time.....

Naturally the gas generator must be local and small so that farmers only have a relatively short distant to bring their S**T to!

Perhaps this is (part) of the answer to these problems.

I agree but found pigs a better source. A petrol / paraffin engine was adapted to work on the gas and produced electricity.

Exporting the dung should be considered. Exporting or dumping bad products are already done on a regular basis.

Yes, but after you produce methane with it, you still have solid waste to get rid of.

There's a great book that discusses the sustainability of current agriculture practices in the U.S. In terms of meat, he discusses both mass production and "grass farming" of cattle and poultry which provides much better stewardship of the land - if it can scale sufficiently. He also writes quite a bit about the problem of manure. A big issue is that mass production animals are raised on feedlots, which are nowhere near the corn farms that produce their feed and could use the fertilizer.

The book is: The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

I think that any problems with transport distances for either the manure or the solid material left after the energy is extracted can (and should) be solved, as it would be unfortunate to lose out on the energy potential in the manure in this age when we are searching for alternate energy sources. In some areas, there may be substantial distances between the livestock and the fields used to grow their grain, but that is not always the case. Even if it is, the stream remaining after the manure is processed through a digester can be separated or in some way transformed to retain the nutrients while making transport more economical. Also, the original idea of this thread to use manure for other purposes such as fibreboard would be even more appropriate for the remains after energy recovery as for the raw manure, since the material is in a more stable (and less stinky) form.

Perhaps they should be moved nearer together then.....