Rethinking Lifestyle

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was disturbed at the way today’s factory farms manage the manure generated on these farms. This friend has a cottage on Lake Winnipeg, so he is very aware of the algae blooms on that lake. “These farm managers are businessmen, not farmers, and have no understanding of the value of manure” was his opinion.

He reminded me of a time when we were both much younger. We would go for a ride in the countryside with our seniors. It would happen then, that the smell of manure would waft through the car, and our father or grandfather would comment, “that smells like money.”

I reminded my friend that whereas it was true than that some old timers were very conscious of the contribution manure could make to good yields, there were also farmers “in the good old days” who put their winter manure accumulation on the river ice so it would be carried away by the spring runoff. Others, somewhat more enlightened, applied their manure on fields, but in wintertime. Today science has established that that many of the plant nutrients in winter-applied manure are carried away in the spring runoff.

So, in a sense, nothing changes. In the good-old-days some farmers placed a high value on livestock manure. At the opposite extreme other farmers considered manure a liability and sought the cheapest way to dispose of it. Livestock farming has changed – it has moved away from the family farming model of yesteryear, to the factory farming model dominant today. What has not changed is that some farmers still place a high value on manure, and other farmers consider it a liability.

I expect that the general consensus in the farming sector is that manure has a value as a plant nutrient. Opinion diverges as to whether the extra effort needed to make the manure borne nutrients available to the plants is worth it. Technology, it seems, has changed the way the manure is handled, but it has not changed our way of thinking.

This is why we need regulations. Farmers placing a high value on manure will hardly be affected by such regulations. These farmers are already doing exactly what the regulations require – not in order to meet the regulations, but in order to reduce the need for [costly] chemical fertilizers. The regulations, however, are necessary to prevent livestock producers intent on “disposing” of their manure, from disposing of it in a way that harms the environment.

But regulations without enforcers are pointless, and enforcers out in the field need to be paid – with taxpayer money. Effective regulation costs the taxpayer.

There is another strategy that would encourage better manure management: increase the cost of chemical fertilizer. If the price of chemical fertilizers were higher, manure fertilizer, too, would have a higher value. This in turn would be an incentive to manage livestock manure better – to return nutrients in the manure back to the land where it will enhance plant growth. We need a tax on chemical fertilizer!

Such a tax is rational. Currently the price of fertilizer is determined by the cost of extracting the raw materials from the ground, processing it and delivering it. There is no allowance, in the price we pay for fertilizer, for the fact that extracting this raw material from the earth impoverishes future generations. The fertilizer we dig up and use up is gone. An economic policy which does not take this impoverishment into account is, to put it kindly, short sighted. A tax applied to the extraction of the raw fertilizer material would result in a more rational use of fertilizer. What is done with that revenue is a topic for another column.