Since President Nixon signed the Clean Water Act in 1972, the nation has made substantial progress on cleaning its waterways, practically eliminating direct discharges from factories and power plants. Today polluted runoff including manure from industrial animals factories is the biggest threat to clean water. CAFQ are so prolific and destructive that they ve become the focus of the Club s Clean Water Campaign. But we are opposed to industrial meat factories calling themselves farms as an excuse to avoid treating their industrial wastes. The culprit is easy to spot first follow your nose.
Corporate farms churn out hogs, chickens and cattle in staggering numbers.
Thousands of hogs and chickens are crammed into a huge warehouse-like structure with little space to move around. Their manure falls through metal grates into pits and is then flushed into lagoons and sprayed onto nearby fields in amounts far greater than would be applied in traditional farming. Polluted drinking water and groundwater threaten public health. In 1996, preschoolers in Minnesota became ill from high levels of hydrogen sulfide emitted from a nearby manure lagoon. In Maryland, the toxic microbe pfiesteria, believed to be linked to manure from giant chicken factories, infested Chesapeake Bay, killing 30,000 fish and sickening 27 people who came into contact wit the water.