Who pays the piper?
Dec31.07
In Spew #007 over at the mother-site — Something-stinks.com — I related a conversation I had with a sludge-farmer in Campbell County, Va. in 2006. This guy is laying sludge down on paddocks right next to his yard, where his pre-schooler plays. I mean, this guy is dead-serious and terminally convinced that sludge is good for his pastures, good for his farm, and safe enough to let his kid play in it. Of course, his source of “information” is Synagro who is spreading the sludge on this guy’s paddocks and spreading his picture in local papers as the face of sludge.
Likewise, I met and discussed sludge with a dairy sludge-farmer in Appomattox County, Va. He was equally impressed with sludge, and convinced that the money he was saving in fertilizer was the only thing keeping his farm going in the face of rising land taxes.
These farmers are not bad people. I’ve talked to one who is very testy about not being told what he is or is not going to put on his land, but I believe that generally they are not malicious, and they care about their communities as much as you care about yours. It’s just that they are badly brainwashed. If you’re laying this stuff down within a few yards of where your young boy plays, you gotta’ be badly brainwashed.
To my mind, on at least two levels sludge-farmers represent an exposed Achilles heel in the sludgers’ plans to spread sludge from sea to shining sea (shining again only because sewage is no longer being dumped in them). First, if we can get to the farmers and at least get information in their hands that presents the other side of the BS coin, it might be possible to shut this nonsense down. This is what happened recently in Rappahannock County, Va. where the farmer who intended to spread sludge was convinced to change his mind at a public hearing on the issue. It also happened near Salem, Oregon in late 2007.
I had some e-conversations recently with a lady in Augusta County, Va. where BS had just raised it’s ugly head — her neighbor had applied for a permit. This lady, who is running a farm but is an escapee of Washington’s political scene, put together a brilliant anti-BS PR brochure that presents the other part of the story. This is what we need badly on a statewide or national level — the stories of dead kids and dead milk herds. The court cases. And examples of indemnity agreements the farmers can put in the sludgers face and demand they sign. We need to counteract the misinformation being presented to the farmers by the sludgers.
The second reason the sludge-farmers represent the Achilles heel is that they are the ones who ought to be paying for testing the BS that is being dumped on their land. The greatest danger in BS is that one can never know, short of testing, which load is contaminated as a result of some negligence or criminal activity that results in toxins entering the sewage pipe that ultimately empties out onto the farmer’s field. Prions, heavy metals, and radioactivity have all been dumped on farmland through the BS network.
The only way rural communities can be protected from New York City’s contaminants is by testing each and every load. Since it is, technically, the farmer that is importing the BS and it is he/she that is getting free “fertilizer,” it should be the farmer that has the responsibility for having every truckload tested before it is spread. If it costs $300, or $500, or $1000 per load to test, then that’s the cost of doing business. Why should the community pay it? In central Virginia, these BS loads sit in RR containers in a rail yard at Gladstone, Va. until they are loaded onto trucks for delivery. Each and every container should be sampled while still on the RR tracks and held certified safe. Then the bill for testing should be sent to the farmer. Better yet, each container should be tested and certified before leaving it’s place of origin with spot-checks run before spreading to be sure nothing has been added enroute.
-GG
One Response to “Who pays the piper?”
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Denis, Of course we should be testing every load, but tell that to the legislators who are in the BS industry’s pockets. There is a lot of money floating around connected to this business, but it is very hard to nail down just who gets paid.
Happy New Year!
jwo