From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: Re: manure
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 00:36:41 GMT

masonp@physun.physics.mcmaster.ca (Peter Mason) writes:

>countries.  I don't care what country meat comes from, it is still an 
>incredibly inefficient source of food.  So when presented with this (and the
>many related points in this vein), he said that in order to grow sufficient
>food for our needs, we require _manure_ for fertilzer, and for this we need
>animals, and if we have the animals anyway, we might as well eat them rather
>than "letting them go to waste by dying a natural death."

Somehow (don't ask me how), the logic of your friend's argument
reminds me about the incident that occurred to our Burnaby RCMP
station here in B.C., Canada when someone stole all the seats
from the toilets at the station.  The Mounties' official news
statement was that, "To date, we still have nothing to go on"
:-)  :-)
 
Now, let's see what there might be for us to "go on".  In Acker's
book, "A VEGETARIAN SOURCEBOOK", 1989, he cites some very
impressive information from respectable sources on this issue of
vegetarian ecology.  His general conclusion is that:
 
     "Land, energy and water resources for livestock agriculture
     range anywhere from 10 to 1000 times greater than those
     necessary to produce an equivalent amount of plant foods.
     And livestock agriculture does not merely *use* these
     resources, it *depletes* them.  This is a matter of
     historical record.  Most of the world's soil, erosion,
     groundwater depletion, and deforestation -- factors now
     threatening the very basis of our food system -- are the
     result of this particularly destructive form of food
     production" (p. 81)
 
Manure seems to be an very small gain for such loss.  Indeed,
this putative bonus of manure also comes with its own costs.
 
In John Robbins book, there is the cited estimation that
approximately:
 
  US citizens produce 12,000 lbs of excrement every second
  US livestock  produces 250,000 lbs of excrement every second.
 
Now, about 75% of all cattle in industrial countries spend the
last months of their lives where they are fattened for slaughter.
Besides the cruelty of this kind of crowding, the manure from
these feedlots is for the most part simply wasted (pun intended).
We worry so much about the human waste problem, yet the much
larger livestock waste problem goes unmentioned.  Most cities
provide sewage treatment systems for their waste, but in U.S.
feedlots there are no such facilities in any of them.  So where
does the waste go?  Such waste should be applied to the soil as
manure, ideally, after some conditioning to MINIMIZE odors and
water pollution.  Since such conditioning is rarely carried out,
the nitrates and nitrogen from the waste applied to the soils
then begins to seep down and contaminate the ground water.  More
often the land is simply not available for such use, or it is too
expensive and problematic to truck the waste for any distance
afield (at present prices it is cheaper to buy chemical
fertilizers).  Such wastes are then simply dumped into the
streams and rivers.  According to the U.S.  Dept. of Agriculture,
"agriculture is the most widespread cause of nonpoint source
pollution".  Much of this being the livestock waste.
 
 
BOGGED DOWN IN *BOD*
 
To better appreciate the severity of the problem Acker (1989)
elaborates upon the "biological oxygen demand" (BOD) incurred by
livestock waste.  The BOD is the oxygen demand of aerobic
bacteria which decompose waste products.  If there is not enough
oxygen dissolved in the water to sustain the bacteria, the water
is depleted of oxygen and anaerobic bacteria take over, resulting
in water that is stinking and unsuitable for human purposes.  A
further consequence of this oxygen depletion is that fish begin
to suffocate and die.  Hence, a good symptom of water becoming
polluted is the presence of dead fish floating on the surface.
Now, it turns out that the BOD of all livestock wastes for the US
in 1960 was 34.9 billion kilograms of oxygen.  This is over 5
times the BOD of all human wastes.  One finds several large fish
kills every few years being reported.  The oxygen content of the
Missouri River, for instance, dropped perilously close to zero
for several weeks.  Livestock waste is a serious problem.
 
 
DO WE NEED MANURE?
 
We should not forget that about 2/3 of the world's population
lives on a vegetarian or "near" vegetarian diet.  Does that mean
there would be even more food for them if they started eating
like North Americans and used the bulk of their grown food to
feed animals?  Doesn't make sense to me.
 
Here is an interesting table of North American crop usage.
 
 
          Agricultural land use in U.S. in 1977.
    Selected crops and their use (in millions of acres)
 
Crop          total acres       total acres      total acres
planted         planted          for feed         for export
 
wheat            75.1              6.7              42.8
rye               2.6              1.0              ----
corn             83.6              50.2             25.9
oats             16.4              15.0             ----
barley           10.6               4.7             1.6
sorghum          16.5              11.2             5.1
soybeans         58.7              34.6             24.1
hay              60.6              60.6             ----
vegetables        3.2              ----             ----
fruits/nuts       3.4              ----             ----
cotton           13.3              ----             ----
tobacco           1.0              ----             ----
peanuts           1.5              ----             ----
other            14.5              ----             ----
 
total            360               185              99.5
 
 
And of course, we must not forget about the losses incurred when converting plant foods to meat.  There is about a 90% net protein waste when grain is fed to livestock to produce protein in the form of meat.- e.g. it takes 16 lbs of grains & soybeans to produce 1 lb of feedlot beef.  Robbins has reported in his book that about 20 vegetarians can be fed on land needed to feed 1 meat-eating person.  The upper number of human beings that could be potentially feed by the grain & soybeans eaten by U.S.  livesto







ck is around 1,300,000,000.  The grain & water resources going into a single beefsteak could have feed 16 people.  To produce 1 calorie from animal flesh, at least 60 calories of petroleum energy must be wasted.  In contrast, it takes only 1 calorie of fuel to yield 20 calories of food energy in the form of grains and legumes.  And so on and so forth.  
 
 
The following comes from Keith Akers book (see ref 1 below).
I've also listed at the end, for the assiduous quibbler, just
3 of the primary sources that Aker's draws upon.
 
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+      Per-acre nutritional returns from oats & Broccoli     +
+       expressed as multiples of the returns from beef      +
+                                                            +
+                    Oats         Broccoli             Beef  +
+                                                            +
+ Calories            25             11                  1   +
+ Protein              7             10                  1   +
+ Calcium             67            650                  1   +
+ Iron                17             24                  1   +
+ Vitamin A            0           9500                  1   +
+ Thiamine            84             86                  1   +
+ Riboflavin          12             79                  1   +
+ Niacin               7             11                  1   +
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
Sources:
     U.S.  Dept.  of Agri., AGRICULTURAL STATISTICS 1979
     (Washington, D.C.: U.S.  Government Printing Office, 1979).
     
     U.S.  Dept.  of Argi, NUTRITIVE VALUE OF AMERICAN FOODS
     (ibid, 1975).
     
     C.  Cook (1977).  Use of Rangelands for Future Meat
     Production.  J.  OF ANIMAL SCIENCE, 45(6):1476.
 
 
 
IS LIVESTOCK PRODUCTION A GOOD USE OF LAND UNSUITABLE FOR CROPS?
 
There is no doubt that livestock `agriculture' is far more
inefficient compared to plant food agriculture.  Some will argue,
however, that these figures are irrelevant since the livestock
industry uses land not suitable for growing crops (land too
steep, rocky or infertile).  Here are just 3 good arguments
against this view:
 
(1) Grazing cattle on land competes with numerous nonfood land
uses, most importantly that of forests (between 1967 to 1975 2/3
of 70 million acres of lost forest went to grazing).  This is
single GREATEST CAUSE OF WORLD WIDE DEFORESTATION both
historically and currently.  Analysis of use conversion of
forests in the U.  S.  estimates that over 2/3 were for grazing.
Between 1950 and 1975 the area of man-created pasture land in
Central America more than doubled, almost all of it at the
expense rain forests.  With the "success" of the like of
MacDonald's, this trend continues.
 
(2) Grazing systems requires large tracts of land and the
consequences of overgrazing and soil erosion are very serious
ecological problems.  By conservative estimates, 60% of all U.S.
lands are overgrazed resulting in billions of tons of soil lost
each year.  The amount of U.S.  topsoil lost to date is about
75%, and 85% of that is directly associated with livestock
grazing.  Overgrazing has been the single LARGEST CAUSE OF MAN-
MADE DESERTS.
 
(3) Especially with present grain prices, "feedlot" or "factory
farms" are more economic and are fast increasing.  These systems
do not use grazing land but use feed grown on croplands.  Feedlot
cattle yield a fattier, more palatable meat and such cattle can
be brought to market faster.  It has been estimated that in the
U.S., 80% of the corn and 95% of the oats grown are fed to
livestock.
 
 
(1) U.S.  Department of Agriculture, "1980 APPRAISAL", pt.  I, p.
50.
 
(2) Land and Food: The Preservation of U.  S.  Farmland" AMERICAN
LAND FORUM REPORT/NO 1, Spring, 1979 (Washington, D.C.: American
Land Forum, 1979).
 
(3) Neil Sampson (1981).  FARMLAND OR WASTELAND: A TIME TO CHOOSE.
Penn.:Rodale Pr.
 
(4) J. Schechter (1977).  Desertificaion processes and the search for solutions.  INDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH REVIEWS, 2(1): 36(Mar).