Signs of Impending Environmental Apocalypse
A few years ago, hog farmers throughout the Midwest noticed foam building on top of their manure pits. Soon after, barns began exploding, killing thousands of hogs while farmers lost millions of dollars.
And you thought Santorum was gross.
But seriously, what gives? First, it helps to have an idea of how manure is handled at industrial hog facilities. In his classic 2005 Rolling Stone exposé of the industrial pork giant Smithfield, Jeff Tietz provided a vivid description:
The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The manure itself is pretty nasty, too. Pigs on factory farms are given daily doses of antibiotics and growth-promoting additives like ractopamine, much of which ends up in their waste. So what you get in those cesspools, the ones now exploding in the Midwest, is kind of a stew of bacteria, antibacterial agents, and novel antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains, all mixed with the random detritus described by Tietz.
Flammable feces foam that can cause entire hog houses to explode. It’s really hard to see any problems with our system of factory farming…..
And while not on the level of modified pig manure, when squirrels are turning purple, it’s unlikely humans aren’t at fault.
Scientists don’t know how a squirrel could turn purple. While I have no doubt our lovely environmental skeptics will come up with some kind of dissembling quasi-explanation, you’d have to go a long way to convince me humans aren’t somehow responsible for this.
Not squirrels, but rather a single purple squirrel. Upsetting, for sure, but there’s no telling right now what caused it. Frankly, I think this sort of alarmism is the kind of thing that does the environmental movement more harm than good. If this single squirrel turns out to be the victim of a couple bored teens with some leftover Manic Panic, you look like an ass. I say keep the arguments based on aggregate data and you always will have a better case.
Ah, but Erik was careful to say that it would be hard to convince him that “humans aren’t somehow responsible for this.” Bored teens with some leftover Manic Panic are, of course, humans, so that would not prove Erik wrong.
Yes. One squirrel does not a summer make (nor iron bars a cage, something something … hermitage). The squirrel is woo, just like Christ en silhouette on toast. The pigs, OTOH, are not a sign, they are the apocaplypse. I think I’m going to hairball the bacon I had for breakfast.
Scientists don’t know how a squirrel could turn purple.
Hanna-Barberavirus.
Nicely played, sir
*polite golf clap*
Martini? Purple, of course
Well when I was a small child I caught a black cat in my neighbors barn and painted it white so maybe the same thing happened here. Or he just ate too many blueberries
Fucking Porta-Potties! How do they work?
It’s a miracle!
well with Obama dropping the whole purple thing, that color had to go somewhere and Alice Walker probably wasn’t available
Typically, they have fans that run 24×7 to expel the methane from the pit. If there’s a prolonged power outage, the methane accumulates and kills the pigs.
And then we don’t get into what happens to the swine excrement after it leaves the pit. Typically the stuff is stored in lagoons, with the solids and liquids being combined into a “slurry” and eventually sprayed on fields as fertilizer. Sometimes the lagoons have not been built to standards, so the pit walls collapse and spill the contents into the local water supply. Often, the pig population is such that there’s too much fertilizer and not enough land to spread it on, so a lot of it runs off into the ground water anyway.
As for the purple squirrel, it would be nice to know if somebody has actually tested to see what it is. A one-off purple squirrel could have been dyed that way, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
Beat me to it. There actually are composting toilets that allow you to bottle the methane from your household sewage, as well as make organic fertilizer. I am a bit surprised that the hog farms are not doing this, as it could significantly cut down their heating bills.
A pig waste lagoon would probably have to be enclosed in order to capture the methane, which I think would be a pretty large structure. It may not be economical with that cost included. Or perhaps they think a covered lagoon would lack flexibility, compared to an open lagoon that can be easily expanded as needed.
Some of them that do that. But you need covered structures and lagoons to capture the methane (tip of the hat to Jon H), and you need to buy the generating equipment on top of that. You have to appreciate the scale involved here too: many of these places are producing far more waste than many of the county seat towns in the same area, which means acres of lagoons.
It would save money in the long run, but you have a large initial investment that a lot of these folks aren’t able to fork over. If you put up the chunk of change to get this running, and the markets tank soon afterwards, you’re not going to be in business to reap the benefits.
I can see that. Another example of high opportunity costs killing cost (and environment) saving innovation.
I do grant that, for at least some of these folks, it would be easier to make these sorts of investments if they weren’t paying fines for OSHA violations and lagoon leakage.
If only their were a group that was empowered to promote for the general welfare that could financially and legally help that process occur
Careful with that crazy socialist talk, there.
There’s also transmission-line issues in a lot of places.
It should be cheaper to windrow liquid manure with a carbon-rich waste source to compost it without the methane offgassing, in most places. But even that is pretty capital intensive – if the public wants less methane production, we’re going to have to bankroll it.
1. Squirrel ate a Bic pen. People should stop stealing my pens and then throwing them away where innocent, underage squirrels can be led into a life of pigmentation.
2. Speaking of pigmentation, pig farmers must be stupider than their pigs. All of that concentrated waste is a rich energy and fertilizer source. It is easily collected, and could go directly to methane digesters. It would produce copious natural gas, and would also eliminate the smell, fly and health, and water quality hazards of the manure lagoons. And take up less space. Resulting sterile manure would be an excellent fertilizer for other crops. Biggest problem would be the antibiotics and other contaminants fed to the pigs causing problems for anaerobic digestion and manure quality.
Clearly the purple squirrel was involved in a bank robbery. Perhaps it was the perp. Perhaps it was simply chilling out in a comfy place which turned out to be the bag that the bank placed the money and dye bomb into.
Maybe the squirrel was disguising itself as a mango vole.
The purple squirrel does not exist. And even if the purple squirrel does exist it is almost certainly natural (solar flares or some such). And look even if the purple squirrel does exist and it’s purple pigmentation is caused by human industrial activity, there is nothing that can be done about it; the squirrel is already purple. And even if the purple squirrel exists, is man made, and there is a way to prevent it, who would want to? The purple squirrel looks fabulous.
I think Mr.(Ms.)? squirrel got to see a preview of Niki Minaj’s Grammy exorcism performance.
It is worth pointing out that feeding low does antibiotics to animals is not allowed in many more civilised countries for reasons explained in the post. Why the USA still permits it is unclear unless you allow for the effects of lobbying, in which case you’re all fucked.
Speaking of apocalyptic pig manure:
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls . . . Dyin’ time’s here!