pig farms

[mopinko]

i heard a teaser for 'ring of fire' this weekend. they are going to talk about big hog farms.
here's what i have always wondered- they produce this massive amount of waste. but, it seems to me that that waste could easily be turned into biomass energy, couldn't it? or at least turned into usable fertilizer, and save the oil that is now being used for that. (i know you can't just spread it, like the old days.) but, why isn't this a valuable raw material for SOMETHING!
i admit i don't really know much about it. but it SEEMS simple.

[doodadem]

1. What a waste!

Actually, I just heard some stats the other day, about how the waste produced by a large hog operation in a year, outweighs the entire output of the human population for New York City in a year. There's just no place to go with this stuff.
There was also an article in the Fresno Bee last weekend, about how scientists have now determined they have been looking at the wrong end of the cow as a huge contributor to San Joaquin Valley air pollution. For those of you who have not been around cattle, they produce voluminous belches every few minutes to aid digestion in their seven (or is it 9?) stomachs. I can personally testify that this phenomenon in my own CowBoy (the pet Brahma steer), can knock you right off your feet.
So now they don't know what they're going to do. You can capture mountains of manure, and at least try to do something with it. You can't exactly put gas masks on millions of cattle!

[NNadir]

2. When I first saw this thread, I was asking why someone would farm

Republicans.

I was close. The thread is about pig shit.

[Viking12]

3. LOL

:toast:

maybe vonschlogel will be here to tell us how wonderful the pigshit is and how much the communities that have to deal with it love it.

[yinkaafrica]

4. The aroma from pig farms is staggering

How can anyone work around that day in and day out?
It even permeates your clothes.
You would think they could make some use of all that
biscuit.

[NickB79]

5. Most pig farms do use the waste for fertilizer

They pump the waste into lagoons, where it liquifies, then spray it onto fields for fertilizer. The problem is that many hog farms produce so much waste that the farmers end up over-spraying their fields. The excess hog manure runs off into streams, rivers and lakes, causing algae blooms and fish kills (not to mention polluting drinking water supplies). The logical thing to do would be to spread it out more evenly to other farms, either sell it or just give it away to local farmers nearby. The problem with this is that once you calculate the time, fuel and other costs of doing this, it becomes cheaper to buy chemical fertilizers than spend a day hauling 1000 gallons of hog manure 10 miles down a bumpy gravel road.