Cities Turn Sewage Into 'Black Gold' For Local Farms

Er, sorry, municipalities have been doing this for some time. What makes this News again?

When it comes to The United States on items like this, we been lacking about 30 years behind Europe.

I recall back in the 80's, there was an exchange program between farmers.......

The coordinator for the U.S. agriculture extension office were showing the Germans on a farm in the tour our cutting edge technolgy on handling wastes by using a methane digestor on a farm.

The German unimpressed stated, that technology is 30 years old in Germany.

It's only news to us........

Isn't this creating a potential prion loop ? ....also, kinda flies in the face of that ' Don't crap where you eat ' thing.....Plus, it's just disgusting.....

My brother fertilizes his tomatoes with unprocessed chicken poop.

Man, those are the best tomatoes I've ever had.

I heard this on NPR yesterday.

Chicken poop makes excellent fertilizer for vegetables, but is primarily used to supplement cattle feed....This is fine except that cattle waste is sometimes used to supplement chicken feed....A potential prion loop is created when one species is fed it's own waste.....This is the prevailing theory of mad cow disease and similar prion disease in humans....You see the prions are not destroyed through the ingestion, digestion, excretion process....Vegetables fertilized with human waste will uptake some human prions, and these in turn will be ingested by humans which will then excrete these prions and a loop is created....It's been suggested that cows being fed human bone meal and infected cattle waste were responsible for the disease outbreak in UK some years back...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/25/mad-cow-disease-british-crisis

Yeah, when I was stationed at Camp Colbern, South Korea twenty-two years ago, I made the mistake of eating locally grown watermelon. I spent the next three days posted very close to a latrine.

It was (and maybe still is) very common for the honey trucks to dump their loads into farmer's fields.

The really 'funny' thing was this: I was the S-4 for the battalion. As such one of my tasks during field exercises was to make sure we had contracts in place for local contractors to pump out the porty potties at all the field sites. It was against environmental law to dig latrines or dump or burn the barrels from the porta-potties. So the U.S. Government would spend good money to pay local contractors to service the porta-potties. The contractor would fill his truck from our porta-potties, drive a quarter mile down the road and then get paid by a local farmer to dump it in his field. Gotta love it.

This is a widespread practice in developing countries where irrigation water is scarce and fertilizer is expensive....

"Nearly 200 million farmers in China, India,Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America harvest grains and vegetables from fields that use untreated human waste.

Ten percent of the world's population relies on such foods, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080821-human-waste.html

However this would be bacterial in nature, think Cholera....Prion disease causes wasting of the brain, think Alzheimer's.....

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/prions/

". Accumulation of the abnormally folded PrP^Sc form of the PrP protein is a characteristic of the disease, but it is present at very low levels in easily accessible body fluids like blood or urine. Researchers have tried to develop methods to measure PrP^Sc, but there are still no fully accepted methods for use in materials such as blood."

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

http://www.1lec.com/prion/

I have used dried sludge from a waste treatment facility for lawn enrichment. The groundskeepers would take some for their tomato plants. Adding gypsum to sludge balances it, probably ph. Where to get gypsum? Old sheetrock from house renovations. Just don't use that Chinese stuff.

I Knew of the concept at least 65 years ago! At that time, if I recall correctly, the product was completely dried and sold in bags (Indiana, USA).

Milwaukee, Wisconsin was doing it since 1925, with a product called "Milorganite", (MIL-waukee-ORGAnic-NITrogEn).

This was the world's first large scale activated sludge plant at a cost of about $15 million. IN 1920's dollars.

Milwaukee still has a huge problem with raw sewage spilling into Lake Michigan. But a lot of that is politics (incompetent) that was installed by special interests.

Pathogens.... Pathogens.... tick, tock, tick,... the clock is ticking.

jt.

If you join Conservatives and Lib Dems, do you get the Con-Dems Party!!!

Everything can be toxic.

I recall we had a drought back in the mid 70's, and the corn did not reach a very tall height, but the fertilizers we had spread that spring, the nitrogen as nitrates I believe was stored primarily in the in the lower part of the corn stalks. We had learned this total be accident by talking to a veterinarian.

We looked into it and asked around and found it to be true and shared this information with our neighbors, but since everyone had a shortages of feedstuffs for the cows, they chopped their corn silage very close to the ground, while we left and least 12"-18" of stalk remaining.

The neighbors thought that we were foolish. ........ until winter, when we watch the veterinarian DRIVE past our place 3-4 time a day because our neighbor's cattle was suffering from nitrite poisoning.

Both nitrite and nitrate poisoning are well documented....

http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/agriculture/beef-and-sheep/beef/feeding-and-nutrition/nitrite-poisoning-of-livestock

Both nitrite and nitrate poisoning are well documented....

especially when both links are the same.........

You sneaked that one past me.....
http://www.merckmanuals.com/vet/toxicology/nitrate_and_nitrite_poisoning/overview_of_nitrate_and_nitrite_poisoning.html

But excellent reference on your link on the causes of excess nitrate in plants, that validate what we have found.......

This is slightly OT (ok a little more than slightly). but still interesting....... at least to me it is.

^{Yes I am sneaky}