Imagine you are in the Navy with a job requiring a Top Secret clearance and you are found to be sending coded messages to a KGB agent in the Kremlin.
John was.
I am not making any of this up - except the name John.
You should understand there are many "coded messages." The term itself is like "partial birth abortion" or "factory farm" or, more blatantly, "tax-and-spend liberal" that carries a message to the masses.
John laughed when he told the story. But it was a rather nervous laugh.
John had a paranoid fear that he was still being watched and his mail monitored years after leaving the Navy, when I first met John. Perhaps it was not paranoia.
You see John was a correspondence chess player. He played in international tournaments. As such he played opponents chosen for him. Playing consists of sending moves using international standard codes between players who often do not speak the same languages.
I am quite well aware that John had it easier telling the not-always-so-bright people working in "intelligence" [heh heh] that he was innocent than I have trying to tell some of the indoctrinated folk here that CAFO's (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) are not intrinsically evil factory farms.
I grew up on a livestock farm in a remote high desert valley of eastern Oregon. There were few fences in the valley. We had none at all except around the miserable vegetable garden.
Tough growing vegetables in alkali soil and even tougher fencing jackrabbits out. Maybe Robert Frost was writing about rabbits when he said something there is that doesn't like a fence.
When cattle were rounded up and driven to market, it was inevitable that some of the neighbors' cattle would be included. There was no need for a shootout over the issue. The neighbors would simply be paid whatever the market rate was. Needed to save the bullets for food anyway. Deer and antelope were plentiful. The beef was for city folk.
So where did the cattle go?
Most likely to one of those horrid feedlots. The alternative was a slaughterhouse. Given their options, I would guess the cattle would choose the "factory farm."
Got a number of those factory farms within a few miles here in New York as well as one of our nearest neighbors being a dairy.
Purists will perhaps be happy to know that the cows, even while being confined, are free to belch and fart and shit on the ground to their hearts' content. May not always be pleasant for human neighbors but who cares about humans?
Would be better for the air and water and country and planet if the manure was converted to fuel and fertilizer but some people object to that. Those objecting call themselves environmentalists. Isn't that a screamer?
The whole gawddam Baltic Sea is being turned into another Dead Sea by such environmentalism while some folks hope to recycle the agriculture runoff and revive the Baltic. Seems like a good idea to me.
Before the Chesapeake Bay goes the way of the Baltic Sea, there are some who have ideas about remedying the problem.
Bion Environmental Technologies, Inc. announced today that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with a large dairy in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to retrofit its existing dairy operation with a Bion Nutrient Management System to reduce ammonia emissions and nutrients. The installation will initially treat the manure from the main 1,400 head dairy barn, with follow-on expansions designed to capture the remaining manure from the milk house, heifers, dry cows, calves, and potentially the manure from the co-located chicken facilities.
Ammonia is the main ingredient of the stinky smells that get to city folk, who use strange phrases like "factory farms" and "free range chickens." Lots of postings about ammonia here but it is unusual to want to capture and recycle the stuff. Academics have been contracted to monitor the air for escaping ammonia among other things.
Bion chose to undertake this project due in large part to Pennsylvania's nutrient credit trading program, which was established to provide cost-effective reductions in the excess nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (including its tributary the Susquehanna River).
Don't be fooled. The humanitarians at Bion mainly have plans to somehow make a buck though they have been about as successful as Wil E. Coyote to date. Initially their technology was meant to treat municipal waste streams. As the norm for these ventures, whatever moral victories were accomplished, the prize was denied.
According to a 2004 report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, there are approximately 185 million livestock animals (dairy cows, beef cattle, pigs, chickens, and turkeys) present in the Bay watershed at any given time. These animal operations produce 44 million tons of manure each year containing nearly 600 million pounds of nitrogen and 165 million pounds of phosphorus – representing a significant source of potential nutrient reductions and credits. According to data compiled by the Chesapeake Bay Program, animal manure accounted for 40% of the total nitrogen and 54% of the total phosphorus deposited in the watershed – much of this in soluble form that ultimately finds its way into the Bay.
A multi-media approach to managing the nutrients associated with large scale confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is vital to solving the critical problem of eutrophication, where excessive nutrients fuel the growth of algae, creating dense algae blooms that rob aquatic life of sunlight and dissolved oxygen. Eutrophication due to excess nutrients from livestock is not only challenging the health of the Chesapeake Bay, but also Lake Champlain (bordering Vermont, New York, and Quebec) and other waters. The Gulf of Mexico now has a 'dead zone' the size of New Jersey where low oxygen concentrations do not support life. The Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf, drains the watersheds throughout the nation's breadbasket, collecting nutrients from a 31-state swath that grows a much of the nation's crops and hosts the majority of our livestock. The Pew Oceans Commission reported in 2003 that runoff of excess nitrogen from animal feedlots is one of the greatest pollution threats to coastal marine life today.
When St. Louis got angry with National Lead for polluting the air and Mississippi River, National Lead proposed building taller smokestacks and lengthening the discharge pipe into the river. That way the pollution could be spread out further.
That is the Sierra Club solution for manure and nutrients fouling land, air and water. Not everyone thinks it best. As best I can read him, Steven Chu is one of those who is into recycling. From an interview:
Now, if you look in the gut of a termite, or the gut of a cow - or even in feedlot manure piles - there are bacteria that are similarly converting biomass into energy for them to live on. But termites don't get to eat fruits and vegetables; they eat mostly wood. If you ate wood, you'd pass it straight through your digestive system, as would an old-time cow that eats grass instead of what they get in the feedlots these days.
I swear, Mr. Chu, I have seen new-time cows in CAFO's eating hay. Hay seems a lot like grass to me but what do I know?
Best, Terry