Chicken Goo

I wrote a little the other day about the food industry-sponsored lies that small-scale, local agriculture was 'ruining' food and was just plain dangerous. A ridiculous hypothesis.

Though it isn't enough just to scoff, I'm sure. Which is why I'd like to share with you this story of Foster Farms' chicken goo being dumped into the Columbia River in Oregon, courtesy of Bryan Denson at The Oregonian:

The case stunk from the very beginning. A pair of law students had stood watch at the Foster Farms plant in Kelso, Wash., then followed a truckload of chicken carcasses to a fish processing plant near the mouth of the Columbia River.

There they observed the phantom pipeline, which spewed chicken parts into the air and belched chemically rendered goo into the water.

That would be highly illegal. That was almost five years ago.

This week, the students' gumshoe work helped lead to the criminal sentencing of California Shellfish Co., which was ordered to pay a $75,000 fine for a felony violation of the Clean Water Act. ...

Would this story be any better if they'd had a permit to discharge the chicken goo into the river? Because that's what the case hung on - a company that had a permit to discharge fish goo didn't get a permit to also discharge chicken goo. Charming.

From a soil perspective, animal remains are nutritious food for below-ground microfauna, and it would seem far more sensible to turn the leftover remains into biochar, seeing as there's no other use for them.

Though one of the big problems with industrial agriculture is that often the volume of waste produced by a high concentration of animals is simply too large to economically recycle as soil amendments, even if a business were so inclined. This is often the case with manure, which is an exceptionally good soil additive in reasonable quantities.

We pay as a society to dispose of waste, usually in ways that render the disposal areas less fit, or downright unfit, to support life. It seems far more sensible to pay instead to have it be cycled back into the environment in a productive way where appropriate, even if that cost has to be more broadly shared.

We're just wasting good food for the soil, which is to say that we're wasting good food for ourselves and our livestock. That just seems ridiculous.