Balancing All Nutrients for Optimum Economic,
Environmental, and Societal Benefits

Jim Braun
Farmer, Latimer, Iowa

My name is Jim Braun. I am from Latimer, Iowa, which is in the converted wetland of north central Iowa. For three generations my family has farmed ground and raised hogs in this area. In 1970 my father moved our sow herd from pasture farrowing to a newly constructed 104 sow slatted confinement farrowing house, and by 1974 all of our hogs were on slatted floors over concrete pits and under aluminum roofs. Today, my wife, 3 children and I market 9,500-10,000 head of finishing hogs per year from this 550-sow confinement farrow to finish operation. For 27 years I have been land disposing of large volumes of liquid hog manure from deep pits. I am vice-president of Franklin County Pork Producers and am President of a new statewide organization we named Friends of Rural America. We promote fair and open markets for all livestock producers and socially and environmentally responsible pork production systems.

In 1995 Iowa passed a law which, because of the number of hogs I raise, required me to file a manure management plan with the state of Iowa. Nitrogen is the plant uptake nutrient in hog manure which the state required the plan to be based upon. I worked with Soil and Water Conservation to develop my plan. We based my plan on the plant uptake of Phosphorus rather than Nitrogen. I chose Phosphorus because Phosphorus is the nutrient in hog manure, which will eventually cause nutrient overloading in most soils. If Phosphorus is the nutrient used in the plan, Nitrogen will normally not cause an environmental problem through over-application.

Managing manure in harmony with the environment and society is not a complicated or elusive task if harmony is our goal. The interaction between manure from animals and the environment have existed long before man entered the scene. God, Mother Nature, or the chance order of the universe, which ever you have chosen to believe in, designed a system that will allow the environment to cleanse itself from certain amounts of manure contamination. I have yet to see a deer step from the creek before it decides to relieve itself. I think we could all agree with the impossibility of any fish ever removing itself from the water before relieving itself so as not to pollute the water it lives in. 20 million head of buffalo, millions of head of elk, deer, antelope, and other land species were roaming the great plains when we Europeans arrived. The waters were filled with beaver, otter, mink, and fish in abundance. Passenger pigeons, geese, and ducks would blacken the sky when they rose from their resting-places. What were the principles that allowed all of these animals, birds, and fish to peacefully co-exist in harmony with their environment for thousands of years without environmental degradation? I do not pretend to understand all of the principles, but I would like to present some thoughts that I believe are common sense.

In the past there seems to have been a natural order in the universe which has protected the environment from over pollution. Though I am going to use the buffalo as an example, in my opinion that natural order worked in a similar manner for all species. When the massive buffalo herds roamed the plains, they could have decided to stay at the river and not move. This decision would have resulted in water pollution and over application of manure in that area. If, however, they chose to stay in that spot, herd reduction would have resulted from three possibilities, or from any combination of the three working in conjunction. The first is that the herd would have over-grazed the prairies in that spot and destroyed their food supply. This would have resulted in the herd being destroyed from starvation. The second is that they would have muddied and defecated in the water till the water would have been contaminated and unfit for drinking. This would have resulted in the herd dying from drinking contaminated water or from dehydration. The third scenario would have been herd reduction through disease. The concentration of bodies—dead bodies—manure and dirty water would have created an ideal environment for the growth of destructive organisms in the herd.

Herd size reduction because of disease would have resulted. The survival of the herd was dependent upon their continual movement. The larger the herd became, the farther and faster they would be required to move. If grass was growing abundantly, the herd would not have to move as far or as fast, but the abundant growth of grass would have required increased amounts of manure for grass production. Herd size, herd movement, and proper manure management were inter-twined and balanced. The need for life forms to keep moving for survival kept manure in harmony with the environment and the social order. This natural order continued to protect and cleanse the environment until man began to over-ride the natural systems.

When man turned from being a hunter-gatherer to a farmer, he began to develop technologies that disrupted this natural order. He began to plant, harvest, store, and domesticate his food supply. No longer did he need to find new wheat or rice fields, he planted his own, and stored enough for himself and his livestock. No longer did he need to follow wild herds, he kept animals fenced and ready for butchering. Now people and animals could be concentrated in small spaces with the food being grown locally or transported in. Managing manure in harmony with the environment should have become an important part of life at that time. Land, however, was so abundant that when some was defiled, he simply moved on to a new spot that wasn't yet contaminated. For centuries man has followed this procedure and has disposed of waste in the easiest possible manner. Excess waste was taken out of the city and dumped into holes in the ground where it would set and seep. Rivers were viewed as waste disposal systems. If the water became polluted, rather than change his behavior, he would dig deeper wells or transport in clean water as well as food. Technology has allowed man, his livestock, and his business ventures to foul his and his neighbors nest without the natural effects of his foolishness producing swift repercussions.

This ability to escape the swift consequences of the natural order, however, does not mean that we—as man—can escape the final result. It simply means that the longer we continue to foolishly mismanage waste, the greater the long term cost to society and the environment. As the human population has grown, we no longer have as many new lands that can be exploited. The volumes of waste are increasing. The time has passed in the U.S. that a man can with a clear social conscience continue to mismanage manure. What we put into a hole in the ground quickly affects someone's drinking water. What we improperly put on the land runs into a river from which someone drinks downstream. The concentration of livestock into confinement feeding operations creates volumes of manure in small areas. This concentration of manure requires management procedures and resources that less concentrated feeding operations did not require.

At the same time that we are facing the massive concentration of manure into small areas through concentrated confinement feeding operations, we are facing an equally dangerous environmental problem through the concentration of the ownership of the animals. The new breed of livestock owners does not live in the communities where the livestock is being fed. These owners do not have the same concern for the environment that farmers have had. Pride for communities and concern for the environment has taken second place to increasing the bottom line at any cost. Managing neighborhood fights and managing manure in harmony with the environment and society will become center stage if the trend toward concentration of livestock feeding and their outside ownership continues.

A little common sense would avoid most of the problems. We all understand the relationship between plants and animals. The animals eat plants for food and the plants eat the waste from animals for food. It is a perfect system when it is kept in balance. The nutrients in manure are essential for plant growth. The nutrients in manure, however, are only nutrients so long as plants are able to utilize them. Anytime more manure is produced than the livestock owner has plants to utilize the nutrients, the manure no longer contains nutrients, it now contains by-products. Just as a good plant growing in the wrong place is a weed, over-production of manure changes the elements in the manure from nutrients to by-products, toxic waste, an environmental hazard, and a public nuisance. When manure is stored in holes in the ground, its' odors cause neighborhood anger, it threatens groundwater supplies, and it becomes a potential taxpayer liability through clean-up costs. If manure is over-applied to the land, it threatens surface waters, it can reduce the yields of the crops grown on the land, and the accumulation of trace elements can eventually sterilize the ground. If the owners of that manure by-product only care for the bottom line of their check ledgers, the society and the environment where that manure by-product is produced will bear the consequences of this mismanagement.

Managing manure in harmony with the environment and society is not difficult or complicated. If the people who are producing the livestock realize that they will be held responsible for any by-products that they produce, they will be socially and environmentally responsible. If potential livestock producers understand these responsibilities, they wi11 build their operations in ways that are socially and environmentally acceptable, or they will not build at all. If greedy, socially deviant livestock producers are given governmental sanction to pollute, contaminate, and dump the high cost of proper manure management on the taxpayers, these will be the livestock producers of the future. Proper manure management costs money, and responsible producers wi11 not be able to compete economically with producers who decrease their cost of production through government sanctioned permits to contaminate our communities, our land, and our water.

Proper manure management involves two aspects. The first aspect is manure storage. Today's preference is to store the manure in holes in the ground. This is indeed the least cost method of handling manure for both the construction and the disposal from the producers' perspective. From the perspective of society and the environment, this is the high cost method. In my opinion this is part of the reason for the new public outcry against livestock production today. Earthen lagoons and storage basins for animal waste should be outlawed and the existing lagoons and basins phased out over the next few years. Manure should be stored only in coded formed concrete structures or glass lined structures. This would help to ensure the safety of our ground water and help to decrease the social outcry against odors. These structures should be emptied yearly so that a large volume of manure does not accumulate and create a problem for taxpayers to dispose of in the future.

The second aspect of proper manure management is proper manure disposal. Proper disposal of manure on the land is simple yet costly and time consuming. Science has shown how much of each nutrient a plant growing in a field utilizes per year. By calculating what kind and approximately how many plants per acre are going to grow in a field, we can find how much of each nutrient per acre the field needs. By next finding how much of each nutrient is in the manure being applied, we can very closely approximate the amount of manure to apply to the land per acre per year according to the nutrient utilization of the plants grown that year. Manure Management Plans (MMP), which producers should compile and file, should show maps of the fields, soil types, and crops to be grown on each field each year (These maps and soil types are already on record at county Soil Conservation offices). A record of yearly livestock production, including types of livestock and weights produced, will give us a calculation of the nutrients produced by these animals yearly (This information ran be found at Ag Universities). Simple calculations now connect total nutrients produced in the manure with the nutrients needed on each field for plant uptake. This will let us determine how many acres with specified crops will be needed each year to properly utilize the nutrients produced by the livestock. Yearly soil tests will tell us if we are close to the proper amount of manure application compared to plant utilization in each field. The MMPs should be kept in the County Court House and open to the public in the county where the manure is applied and in the county where the operation creating the manure is located. In this way the people who will be effected first by mismanagement will monitor the application of the manure of any questionable operator. Law must provide standards for punishable acts of over-application and, because all society will suffer from over-application, penalties must be swift and costly.

If the livestock operation chooses to process the manure, it must be stores in coded formed concrete or glass prior to processing. It must also be disposed of in ways that do not merely shift the problem from one type of manure to another, or shift the problem from one community to another.

As farmers, we are being told that we must be careful of "radical environmentalists" who threaten to shut down production agriculture. I do not believe that an "us and them attitude" is a productive attitude for farmers. As the majority of the American population becomes non-agricultural, our non-farm neighbors will write the future laws which will govern us. If we as farmers are doing things correctly, we will not need to fear what our non-farm neighbors will say. If we as farmers, however, are not sensitive to the fact that we are part of an integrated society and that what we do affects our neighbors, we will incur our neighbors wrath. If this occurs, we farmers will be responsible for the problems that we have brought upon ourselves. We live in a universe whose order and consequences were established long before any of us were born. We as livestock producers are only one part of this larger social system. Producers who are already doing what is right should have no fear of laws which merely legalize what they are already doing, Good laws which require livestock producers to manage their manure properly are only ensuring that our children and grandchildren will inherit clean water and productive soil. Good laws will only ensure that socially responsible producers are not put at an economic disadvantage with irresponsible producers. Good laws will only help to create harmony between livestock producers, the environment, and society.

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