| Big12cc, you didn’t offend me., but thanks for the thought.
North Carolina State U spent $30 million dollars investigating solutions to the manure problem in that state and then shut the program down. They found a lot of things that didn’t work and a couple that could. They shut the program down because nothing was cost effective in today's environment so unless everyone had to meet the same rules, no progress could be made. I would like to tell you to put in a digester and utilize the methane. Unfortunatly, the heat required to keep the system running in the cold months is greater than the heat gain in the warm months. From Missouri & south, you have a chance but not in Iowa - even with substantial incentives. Air quality in rural areas is totally dependent upon what you are looking at and when. Depending upon what you define as good/bad, it can be very good or very bad.
When a lagoon is turning over in the Spring and you are downwind, I don’t know of anyone that will call it “good” air quality. Many air quality issues such as micro-particulates cannot be physically seen. And other known problems, such as microbes encapsulated into micro-droplets and wafted into the air by wave action on a lagoon’s surface, are ignored because scientists are afraid of what they might find. EPA scientists know what you will find. Sneeringer (a female by the way) is in the Economics Department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. One of her interests is childhood health and the economics of healthcare. You should not expect her to know anything about raising livestock. She looked for statistical relationships and then tried to show that the found relationship was an artifact of other confounding issues. This study doesn't prove anything, but it should be a wake-up call for someone. If farmers are not willing to tell their “leaders” to acknowledge the problems and find ways to fix them, the livestock industry is in for some traumatic times. To the outside world, farming is viewed as a corporate endeavor – no different than a chemical plant.
Farmers have attacked their farming neighbors who had the audacity to complain about odors from confinement operation , strong-armed legislators into protecting them because the operators of the confinement operations were “family farmers”, strong-armed legislators into allowing vertical integration because it brought stability, and more. We now know that chemical plumes can travel for miles without mixing. Gee whiz, the trench warfare people knew that in World War I. Vertical integration has clearly benefitted a few – and few large animal feeding operations can be called family farms.
The REC’s are “owned” and “controlled” by members who (in Iowa anyway) claim that they are above the law when it comes to net metering. Farmers could change through changing the Board, but won't. And the existing Board members have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And woe be the farmer that asks that Board members know a smidgen about the industry per se. That also holds for the supply coop, the telephone coop, the water district, etc.
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Emissions Harm?
