jane,
        I think it would be good, if we could get permission, to reprint this
in the next newsletter.

ginger

On Wednesday, September 10, 2003, at 08:08 PM, Jane Clark wrote:

>
> From: Prarie Writers Circle
> This Prairie Writers Circle essay argues that we should clean up the
> largest
> sewer in the country -- the millions of miles of drain tiles that lie
> beneath fields in the Midwest and carry agricultural pollution to our
> waterways.  The author is Janet Kauffman, coordinator of the Water
> Monitoring Project for Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South
> Central
> Michigan.
>
> Headline food for thought:
> Midwest agriculture's dirty secret
>
> A dirty river runs beneath it
>
> By Janet Kauffman
> Prairie Writers Circle
>
> The Midwest is flyover country, as they say. From 35,000 feet, the
> landscape
> is a lovely patchwork of geometric field shapes, parallelograms
> stitched
> neatly together. But close up, Midwest farmland is not such a pretty
> picture.
>
> Farm animals are often packed into factory-size buildings. Next to
> these are
> open-air waste pits as large as small lakes.  They hold millions of
> gallons
> of untreated, liquefied manure.
>
> Just as foul, and completely hidden, are the underground pipes
> crisscrossing
> and draining the watersheds of the Midwest. Pieced together, they're
> the
> largest sewer in the country.
>
> These pipes are called drain tiles. From Ohio to Iowa, in a network
> estimated at more than 3 million miles, they underlie most farm fields
> to
> drain away rainwater. But they also carry farmland pollutants directly
> to
> creeks and rivers. They are agriculture's dirty secret.
>
> Across southern Michigan, where I live, 19th century settlers found
> forests
> and swamps. You can't farm in either. So the pioneers cut the trees.
> And to
> make fields from swamps, they dug trenches and buried drain tiles,
> creating
> underground tributaries.
>
> The word "tiles" comes from the early use of foot-long sections of clay
> pipe, made in the brickworks of many small towns. Now farmers use
> perforated
> plastic pipe, laser-sighted downhill.
>
> In the Midwest, tiles drain up to 60 percent of agricultural land.
> When big
> confinement dairies were built recently in my watershed, their builders
> re-tiled the land where they would dump liquid manure.
>
> In cities, sewers once combined storm water and human waste, creating a
> serious problem of contaminated overflows. Now storm water normally
> drains
> through one set of pipes, and human waste flows through another to
> treatment
> plants.
>
> But agriculture has largely ignored its own combined -- and continuous
> --
> contribution of sewage to our waterways.
>
> No wonder -- the problem is huge. The tiles cover vast areas.  Some
> tile
> systems are new, some 100 years old, with fixes from every generation
> along
> the way. In many soils, wormholes -- more than you might think -- and
> large
> cracks are direct pathways, like straws, to subsurface tiles. Liquids
> can
> pour through in minutes.
>
> Across the country, agriculture now contributes more pollution to
> lakes and
> streams than any other industry. The widely reported dead zone in the
> Gulf
> of Mexico is one result of the runoff of excess nutrients from manure
> and
> fertilizers. And now another is forming where streams in my part of
> Michigan
> flow -- in Lake Erie, which had finally recovered from the industrial
> pollution of the mid-20th century.
>
> In large livestock confinement operations, animals are never on
> pasture,
> where they would be spread out feeding on grass and where living soil
> could
> use and absorb their drier manure. Instead, the waste is liquefied,
> pumped
> to a lagoon, then sprayed untreated on fields, where it runs quickly
> into
> the tile drains. The liquefying is done with groundwater -- it's
> polluted
> coming and going.
>
> It is time we fixed the plumbing.
>
> Livestock production, like other industries, should be required to
> treat its
> waste. Technologies exist for liquid-solid separation with accompanying
> wastewater treatment. There are dry systems for manure handling that
> are
> hybrids of rotational grazing and winter composting.   Agriculture
> doesn't
> have to reinvent the wheel. Better yet, livestock operations can
> downsize to
> farm size. Get lean and green.
>
>> From the air, Midwest farmland still looks like a comforting quilt.
>> What you
> don't see is what's unsettling. You don't see the animals inside the
> confinement buildings. You don't see the waste pits holding millions of
> gallons of liquid manure -- they look like innocent lakes from high
> up. And
> you don't see the stream of pollution flowing through subsurface
> drainage
> tiles -- agriculture's unregulated sewers.
>
> ###
>
> Janet Kauffman has restored wetlands on her farm in Michigan. She
> coordinates the Water Monitoring Project for Environmentally Concerned
> Citizens of South Central Michigan. Kauffman wrote this piece for the
> Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute, Salina, Kan.
>
Virginia H. Soelberg
5979 Dogwood Circle
Johnston, Iowa 50131
515-253-0232
[log in to unmask]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Make your voice heard! Find out how to get Take Action Alerts
and other important Sierra Club messages by email at:
http://www.sierraclub.org/email