A Future Perspective in Agricultural Waste Management

This article was written by contributor Harry Tibbetts. Read about Harry here.

Next year will mark the latest agricultural census of the United States in a tradition going back to 1840. The census tells a familiar story to anyone keeping an eye on the state of global agriculture. For the first century of its history the census tracked the rise of the American agricultural giant. The midwest and great plains regions were flooded with family farms that multiplied and diversified; net yields and the number of farms grew together to feed the population as it multiplied sevenfold. Innovation in the field reduced labor but lack of a cold chain and other preservation tactics would not come around until the 1920’s and 1930’s. As it would happen, the 1930’s saw a paradigm shift that would result in the system of agriculture we have inherited today. The Great Depression and the dustbowl of the early 1930’s drove many small farms out of business and devalued prime agricultural real estate. Simultaneously, mechanized farm equipment and advancements in refrigeration made it easier for large organizations to buy up tracts of land and focus their efforts on a limited set of crops to ship around the country and world. The results of this shift speak for themselves. Between 1930 and the end of the century, the agriculture sector’s yield had quadrupled, the price of foodstuff quartered, and the number of farms fell from 7 million to 2 million. The most telling stat is certainly where the rise in production is concentrated. The top 10% of farms by yield increased their production faster than the bottom 10% by more than ten times over the same period. That means that despite already producing far more yields, the growth of these large farms vastly outpaced smaller american farms. By 1992, the apparent end of this mad consolidation period, the top 10% of farms produced 70% of all sales and the bottom 50% all farms accounted for only 2% of sales. So many farms dividing up such a small market share results in nearly 60% of all farms in the U.S. netting less than $20,000 in sales — forcing these owners to seek the majority of their income from off-farm sources or face poverty.
Statistics in this section come from Bruce Gardener, at the University of Maryland. 

This vast market shift is important to understand the problems facing agriculture today. As a supporter of small, sustainable food systems it may be hard to see these trends in a positive light, yet many do. Yield growth from this industrialization has helped to fight global hunger, with US exports staving off several famines in India during the latter half of the 20th century. Agro-business has openly pronounced this change as an unparalleled success of rapid labor saving and cost-cutting innovation. The boons of growth, however, overshadow festering consequences in the agriculture industry. In order to produce these incredible yields, it takes incredible energy and results in an incredible amount of waste. The energy comes from three sources: gasoline, rich topsoil and fertilizer. Gasoline’s consequences on our environment hardly need to be proven here, and their impact on greenhouse gas emissions is understood by all. We also are beginning to all further understand the vital importance of soil health, and this report is just the latest in a chorus of alarms over topsoil loss going back decades. Scholars debate just how much phosphate for fertilizer remains to be mined, but certainly none of these inputs come without their own costs. Before the 1930s, these inputs were minimized by the recycling of farm waste to preserve nutrient levels and soil health, but these methods are unsuited to the scale of the new system. While the challenge of finding mined or synthetic inputs to replace these natural techniques was overcome quickly with big fertilizer production, the growing quantities of annual farm waste has been stubbornly ignored for as long as possible. While chemical fertilizers were produced, the fertilizer produced by animals on the farm has been ignored. Today it is increasingly clear that ignoring the problem of waste is no longer feasible, and we must decide what 21st century agriculture looks like. 

The United States produces more than half of a billion tons of animal waste every year — yes, half a billion tons of shit. Corn stover and other plant wastes also contribute to the waste crisis with 100 million tons of dry crop waste produced per year as well. All together, the U.S. industrial agricultural system produces twice the weight of all the humans on the planet annually! Processing this staggering amount of waste using traditional methods is completely infeasible. When a farm was diverse and small, a farmer could process animal and plant wastes into pathogenetically inert peat and apply that to bolster the health of their fields. On a small scale, this model is fantastic. As plant and animal production moved into specialized sectors, this form of recycling became logistically impossible. Heavy manure is not worth the cost of transporting it far from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and often plant wastes are piled and burned to reduce their volume, sending plumes of carbon into the atmosphere and out of the soil — where it is desperately needed. Animal wastes are most often pumped into open air seepage lagoons, where they ferment anaerobically and produce dangerous airborne pollutants and greenhouse gases before finding their way into groundwater and rivers. If allowed to decompose in a different environment, these wastes would produce less harmful gas and instead add productive carbon and nutrients to the soil. The ultimate fate of this waste is a staggering flow of nutrients that flows downstream to lakes and the ocean, feeding blooms of microorganisms that consume all the available oxygen, killing all macroscopic life. This condition is known as euxinia, and such water in these “dead zones” is not safe to drink. At the mouth of the Mississippi there is a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

Often the waste crisis is just one of a list of objections to modern agriculture, alongside moralistic outrage over animal rights and esoteric complaints about the look and feel of the industrialization of what should be a more intimate relationship between human and land. To that end, many resources that highlight this challenge focus on a need to support local farms and pasture raised animals. The benefits of small scale agriculture are numerous, however reversing a century of consolidation presents logistical challenges that are beyond the purchasing power of a well intentioned minority. To achieve a more sustainable system of agriculture and circular economy, requires making alterations to the current system, rather than reinventing a new one from whole cloth. 

The agricultural system that achieves the mutual goods of food security for all and generational sustainability must take the raw material of wet animal waste and dry plant wastes and process it such that clean potable water is separated to be released into the environment with minimal atmospheric pollution. The good news is that the byproducts of this process are valuable, in fact so valuable that a flurry of scientific debate has begun to best extract that value. The facility that houses these operations has been dubbed a biorefinery, however biorefining  was not established to deal with waste. Early experiments in biorefining used stable inputs of corn or other high energy crops to attempt to create ethanol to power the “car of the future.” These first disastrous attempts were exposed by life cycle analysis to have disproportionately heavy costs in land use and were less sustainable than the gasoline they sought to replace. Waste provides an opportunity to process a resource too abundant to comprehend (remember that half a billion tons of animal waste per year?!) into such fuels, and many different industries may have a claim to the latent potential. 

The energy sector is considered the most interesting application of these systems by world governments. With the climate crisis looming and pressure mounting to make changes, governments around the globe are seeking energy sources to meet future carbon targets and clamour for any innovation in the sector. Germany and India have already begun biogas production at large scale from their agricultural waste. Other countries  have engineered pilot scale projects producing gas, oil, hydrogen, plastics, pharmaceutical agents and fertilizer. So economically valuable are some of these options that the elegance of simply creating a stable, organic, long lasting fertilizing soil amendment as an end state product of the industrial agricultural system has gone underrepresented. With governments focusing on their carbon bottom line and the agro-giants that produce this waste looking forward to a healthy subsidy to make it another industry’s problem, there is little institutional support for this route in the U.S. That is not to say that no one believes in this as a tool towards sustainable industrial agriculture. There are many lab and pilot scale proof-of-concepts for this technology. They have demonstrated the simultaneous extraction of stable sources of phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon magnesium and potassium in a light weight form, yet large scale plants are slow to develop. Still, nations in northern Europe like Denmark and Sweden have begun to implement biorefining technology due to close relationships between government and agriculture. For change to happen in the U.S., large and powerful agriculture companies will need to see the opportunity to further their control over the food supply chain in one of the most markedly positive ways innovation has provided for a century.

This article was written by a guest contributor, Harry Tibbetts. Read about Harry here.

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