The EPA has gone mad cow disease

“But Gayle Miller, legislative director of Sierra Club Michigan Chapter, said agricultural pollution probably is the nation’s most severe chronic problem when it comes to water pollution.
“Milk is wholesome in a child’s body. It is devastating in a waterway,” Miller said. “The fact that it’s biodegradable is irrelevant if people die as a result of cryptosporidium, beaches close for E. coli and fish are killed.””
It is truly unfortunate to have little information, yet pretend that one has vast knowledge and expertise.
E-coli comes from remnants of bovine faeces found in meat that has not been properly handled. It is impossible to get E-coli from milk (unless, of course one pours it into a barn gutter, then attempts to retrieve it!

@Alec Rawls
Vegetarians sensu lato include all those who don’t eat meat. Vegetarians who consume dairy products are the largest sub-group within all vegetarians and generally just have moral reservations over killing animals to sate hedonic desires. Sensu stricto this group is called lacto-ovo vegetarians. Yet another subgroup only excludes warm blooded animals and are referred to as pescatarians, not true vegetarians, and don’t consider killing fish to carry any moral baggage. Yet another subgroup usually called vegans, which you mention, eat no animal products at all. These are usually for health and/or religious reasons as they believe that all animal products contain harmful things such as cellular waste products, highly saturated fats, and whatnot or they strictly follow God’s commandment to Adam in Genesis that he would have only seed bearing herbs as his meat while the rest of the animal kingdom got only the leafy parts. In Eden there was no killing of animals at all for any reason i.e. no death or destruction.
I recite this in the interest of precision and accuracy. I’m no kind of vegetarian but I do tend to avoid eating red meat because I don’t need it in my diet and mammals are a little too close to me on the evolutinary ladder to consider them a food source as opposed to fellow sentient travelers on this mortal coil.

This is no joke folks. Contamination of water tables and disease are serious issues on the farm. I grew up on cow farm, 30 miles west of Kansas City and witnessed a milk spill once. Everything on the farm was killed and most of the community was evacuated. Several neighboring pig/cow farms were not so lucky and entire herds were left for dead.

So if I leave milk in the fridge too long and it spoils – WTF am I supposed to do with it? Take it down to someone licensed to dispose of used motor oil like the local Jiffy Lube? At least it won’t cost anything. I’ll just leave it on the counter while they’re rolling on the floor laughing at me.
Oh wait… I only drink skim. Nevermind.

Milk can be a serious pollutant, especially if it finds its way into waterways. It is a particular problem at Dairy factories where infrequent breakdowns or stoppages can leave them with huge tanks of rotten milk and nowhere to put it. Imagine what thousands of gallons of rotten milk smells like. Imagine just opening the stopcocks and pouring it into the local stream. That is what they used to do. It contaminates all water downstream killing the fish, encouraging noxious growth and high bacteria counts, and making it unsafe for swimming.
People who handle large quantities of milk need to have treatment facilities, secondary containment, etc etc, to deal with these kinds of problems, none of which they are going to be willing to pay for unless someone stands over them with a stick and makes them do it.
A bigger problem for dairy farmers is dealing with effluent. Yes it does biodegrade and you can spread it on the land and use it for fertiliser. But there are constraints as to temperature and ground water table that limit the capacity of the land to cope. And it takes effort to transport the effluent around and spread it over a suitably large area. If you overload the land by (for example) spreading large amounts of effluent in the same small area in winter, and it then starts running off into streams, then you get all the usual problems that are caused when large amounts of shit are dumped in a stream. It doesn’t matter that you spread it on the land. If it runs off into a stream the effect is the same.
Dealing with effluent properly is one of the most difficult aspects of Dairy farming and can be very expensive and time consuming. Many farmers are unwilling to do it properly unless someone stands over them with a big stick to make sure it happens. And because farming happens away from the public eye it can be quite easy for farmers to cheat on this and get away with it unless those who police these matters actively moniter and investigate and get out on the farms to see what the farmers are getting up to.
You really do need someone like the EPA closely monitering dairy farmers because dairy farming can be very dirty and destructive of the environment. The libertarian approach just leads to filthy water and dirty dairying. Unsurprisingly dairy farmers are often not keen on being watched. Dairy farmers complaining about being forced to clean up their messes properly is nothing new and isn’t surprising. This story sounds to me like somebody is just creatively using the BP oil disaster as an excuse for more of the usual complaints.
So are the EPA rules reasonable? I don’t know. Where is the detail here? What exactly are the rules that the EPA imposes on the dumping of milk which are claimed to be so burdensome. Apart from the sound byte about oil there is a conspicuous lack of detail in this story. And that alone gives me cause for doubt.

I can see the EPA response plan. Something about air dropping thousands of hungry cats into the spill zone…

Ian H is right. As an ex-dairy farmer (now on the other side of the fence doing ecological consultancy work) I have to admit that if thousands of gallons of milk get spilled into a waterway due to a malfunction at a factory (or, as happened on our farm once, a strike by dairy workers) the end result can be very nasty indeed. The Biological Oxygen Demand of all the milk-eating bacteria that result very quickly renders waterways anoxic, which can kill all multicellular life for possibly miles downstream. It’s no joke.
Of course, the question of whether milk should be classified as oil is a different matter entirely. The environmental effects of the two are quite different.

The day they serve me with a citation for pouring spoilt milk down the drain is the day I come out shooting. I grew up on a dairy farm that went under. They really DO hate cows, don’t they? The whole US government has gone stark raving mad!

Vuk etc. says:
June 24, 2010 at 2:45 pm
> From hence forth Milky Way will be known only as Galaxy.
No, the Home Galaxy, and Homeland Security will take over the SETI project to look for pan-galactic terrorists.

R. de Haan –
murdoch’s Sun article is being picked up, including by murdoch’s fox news:
24 June: Fox: McCartney, in Interview, Compares Global Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers
“Sadly we need disasters like this to show people,” McCartney said in an exclusive interview with The Sun. “Some people don’t believe in climate warning — like those who don’t believe there was a Holocaust.”…
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of two books on environmental policy, blasted McCartney’s comments.
“Was Posh Spice unavailable? I’ve seen quite a few reasons to look elsewhere than actors and crooners for deep thoughts on weighty policy matters,” Horner wrote in an e-mail to FoxNews.com. “And this is certainly one of them.”
Horner’s message continued: “They’ve got computer model projections, Leonardo [DiCaprio] and the Cute Beatle. In the other corner are observations proving the models wrong, ClimateGate, NASA-Gate and the host of IPCC-Gates.
“I’m comfortable with the balance of authorities here.”
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/06/24/paul-mccartney-global-warming-holocaust-deniers/
March 2009: New York Mag: Paul McCartney Does Not Act Too Flamboyantly Rich
McCartney watches his energy consumption, too: Rather than a megayacht, for instance, he has a Sunfish. “All my friends have got the big yachts, and I sail up to them on my little tiny boat,” he laughed. “To tell you the truth, it’s because I’m not comfortable doing it the other way … I don’t live in a real big house; I get a bit uncomfortable, you know, when I’m rattling around.”
Of course, even Sir Paul admits to the occasional splurge, like hiring a private plane. “You’ve still got to live, you know — you’ve got to do what you need to do.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/03/paul_mccartney_does_not_act_to.html
this has pics of those not “really big” homes:
March 2008: London Evening Standard: Revealed: How divorce judgment laid bare details of Macca’s fabulous wealth
His properties include:
• His first purchase, a plush town house in upmarket St John’s Wood, London
• A mid-town Manhattan apartment he bought in 1984, as well as a house on the millionaire’s playground of Long Island, New York State, and a place in Beverley Hills
• Peasmarsh in East Sussex, a 1,500 acre estate where he spent much of his married life with Linda
• An extensive country retreat in the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland
• Other homes in East Sussex, Essex, Somerset and Merseyside.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-23459949-revealed-how-divorce-judgment-laid-bare-details-of-maccas-fabulous-wealth.do

Ian H says:
June 24, 2010 at 5:23 pm

Milk can be a serious pollutant, especially if it finds its way into waterways. It is a particular problem at Dairy factories where infrequent breakdowns or stoppages can leave them with huge tanks of rotten milk and nowhere to put it.

I’ll grant you that, though in the spirit that too much of a good thing becomes a disaster. Certainly fertilizer runoff falls under that umbrella too.
However, if this is accurate: “But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is classifying milk as oil because it contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil,” then that implies dumping bacteria, casein, and other non-fat components is not hazardous, or at least not regulated.
Random factoid I don’t know – How many pounds of manure are produced per pound of milk? Oh heck, I can Google with the best of ’em. 120 lbs manure, 70 lbs milk per cow-day.
If the EPA is going after accidental milk spills, that implies manure control is all set, right? Maybe not, see http://www.sec.nv.gov/cafo/tab_v.pdf
There’s a VT farm that is making methane from manure, and others, e.g. http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-05-14/bay-area/17426549_1_methane-metering-straus-farms – two to three year payback! And – energy when you need it – base load, peak load, night calm winds.