Friends of Rural New York

This reporter has covered polluted Cayuga County waters in the past. It is amazing that he still does not get it. Notice the weasel from the Dept of Health dodging what is essentially her work. Underlying this article is a depth of corruption on the part of county and state employees.
Notice that Tobin never mentions the 29 CAFOs in Southern Cayuga County.

Overseer urged for Owasco watershed

High levels of phosphorus make the lake’s water quality abnormally bad.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
By Dave Tobin
Staff writer
The contrast between Owasco and Skaneateles lakes could not be more stark.

Of all the Finger Lakes, one has arguably the worst water quality, while the other has the best. One has no watershed inspection program. The other has “the Cadillac of watershed inspection programs,” a state health official said, with two inspectors, a supervisor and a 100-year track record.

It’s the watershed inspector, stupid.

The words weren’t spoken, but the point was driven home, at a special meeting of the Cayuga County Water Quality Management Agency Wednesday night at the county legislative chambers. About 45 people attended.

Hard science backed up what Owasco Lake observers have been saying for years: The lake’s water quality is bad and getting worse. Phosphorus levels are high, especially around stream inlets, especially at the lake’s southern end, said John Halfman, lead scientist for the Finger Lakes Institute in Geneva.

Halfman showed phosphorus levels from tests he took last summer. The levels were literally off the chart.

“If this building had an eighth floor, the phosphorus levels on this graph would reach to it,” he said. “We aren’t as bad as Onondaga Lake. But of the seven (Finger Lakes) I’ve looked at, it’s the worst.”

High concentrations of phosphorus are found in human and animal waste, fertilizers and some detergents. Lots of phosphorus in Owasco Lake promotes algae and aquatic weed growth. In summer the lake is weed-clogged and murky and smells funny.

Owasco Lake also has registered high levels of total coliform bacteria, E. coli bacteria, chlorophyll and nitrates, which has forced Emerson Park’s beach to close in recent years.

Paul Kaczmarczyk, a water supply scientist with the state Department of Health, said state rules and regulations are in place to protect lakes, but that communities need a person to monitor what happens in the watershed.

“No one’s keeping an eye on anything,” he said. “You really need someone to keep an eye on things.”

Rich Abbott, who oversees the city of Syracuse’s monitoring of the Skaneateles Lake watershed, said he has two inspectors in the field five days a week, monitoring a 54-square-mile watershed. That is a quarter the size of Owasco Lake’s 208-square-mile watershed.

Having watershed inspectors

helps get better, quicker responses from other state and federal agencies when their input is needed, he said. Skaneateles Watershed inspectors also review highway construction and ditching everywhere in the watershed.

Eileen O’Connor, Cayuga County environmental health director, said Cayuga County officials “don’t have a handle” on development in the Tompkins or Onondaga county portions of the Owasco Lake watershed.

Bruce Natale, chairman of the Water Quality Management Agency, proposed a watershed inspector’s position, supervised by the Cayuga County Soil and Water Conservation District, budgeted at $56,000 a year. He proposed funding it with a $4-a-year water bill surcharge.

“Who they hire will be the most critical component of (starting) this program,” Abbott said. “That person would be starting from scratch.”

Dave Tobin can be reached at or 253-7316.

Check out this slide show that shows the conversion of an open lagoon into a bioreactor.

We don’t think CAFOs should be allowed to operate regardless of the technology fixes. However, considering the global warming crisis, CAFO operators should be required to reduce their emissions immediately. Maybe the bioreactor can help to do that.
http://www.agcert.com/process.html

Jenna Calabrese and Gerald Brach are both former Wegmans employees who have spoken out about the unnecessarily cruel way Wegmans produces eggs. They admire their former employer, and think that the people who run Wegmans are good people, but feel that battery cage eggs are not compatible with the Wegmans company motto, “Every Day You Get Our Best.”

They talk about their perspective on Wegmans in a video we released today on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfdSN7gb3Lg

Please watch it and send it to your friends. The 4-minute video features footage taken at Wegmans Egg Farm by both Compassionate Consumers and a video crew hired by Wegmans. You’ll also see Danny Wegman give comments about his egg farm to an RNEWS television crew. You’ll see footage of our demos shot last summer and this past weekend, and the honest opinions of two individuals who know Wegmans better than most people do.

And, be sure to tell Wegmans when you have a chance that they’re a great company, but as Gerald says, they’re “besmirching their image” by defending battery cage eggs.

Thank you,
Adam Durand
 

October 19, 2006

*Test Report: Salmon Creek-3*

*Monitoring Event on June 29, 2006*

_Monitoring Partnership_: Salmon Creek homeschool families and adult volunteers; Community Science Institute

Community Science Institute laboratory

_QC (Quality Control) Remarks_

_Laboratory: There were no holding time exceedances. _

_Field measurements by volunteers: Temperature, pH, alkalinity, and DO
were determined by volunteers in the field. Quality control was
improved from May 10, 2006, event and was generally excellent, with
few exceptions. QC remarks on May 10 event continue to apply. All
field measurements by volunteers are included in this report. _

*_Preliminary observations_*

_Salmon Creek and tributaries_: Sampling was performed two days after a heavy rain. Stream flow was still elevated though no longer high. At all ten sampling locations on Salmon Creek and tributaries, soluble reactive phosphorus, nitrate-nitrogen, and total coliform and E. coli bacteria were substantially elevated compared to samples collected under base flow conditions on April 5 and May 10, 2006. Such increases are consistent with runoff containing phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizer as well as liquid manure from cropland. The levels of nitrate are approximately five to ten times higher and the levels of dissolved phosphorus are approximately two to three times higher than those observed in Six Mile Creek, Fall Creek and Taughannock Creek under conditions of elevated flow.

_Delta_: Total coliform and E. coli counts were elevated at all locations by a factor of approximately 10 to 100 compared to base flow conditions on May 10, 2006. Elevated bacteria counts were generally correlated with elevated turbidity. Chloride was reduced from about 40 mg/L at most locations on May 10 to about 25-30 mg/L, possibly as a result of dilution by runoff.

_Lake plume_: An adult volunteer went out in a boat and collected three samples from a visible plume at the mouth of Salmon Creek

_Conclusion_

Runoff from cropland appears to impact water quality following rainfall. The observed increases in phosphorus, nitrogen and bacteria, though very substantial, were almost certainly small compared to the rainfall peak two days before the monitoring event.

_Recommendation_

It is recommended that monitoring be continued in Salmon Creek with an emphasis on monitoring under elevated flow conditions in order to better assess the relationship between flow and loadings of nutrients and bacteria to Cayuga Lake. The flow data that will be generated by the new USGS gauging station on Salmon Creek should be helpful in this regard.

Respectfully submitted,

Stephen M. Penningroth

Technical Director

In Arizona, humane treatment of farm animals won the day when
voters cast their ballot in favor of Proposition 204, which bans
gestation crates for breeding pigs and veal crates for young
calves. Agribusiness and other special interests spent $2.5
million to defeat Proposition 204. It is the second state in the
nation to ban gestation crates and the first state to ban veal
crates. The vote was 61 percent in favor and only 39 percent
opposed.

By James Goodman
November 7, 2006

Self reliance is not a bad thing. While Emerson’s thoughts on “Self Reliance” were controversial enough to get him banned from Harvard University, it seems that most Americans have willingly ceded their own self reliance and therefore their right of choice into the hands of corporate America. They have given up choice in media, health care and even food.

Granted, not everyone can or wants to raise their own food. I guess as a farmer, that’s good for my business, but I do want them to to care, to take part in the decision of what they eat and how it is grown. Just as it is wrong for the corporate media to only offer part of the news, it is also wrong for the corporate food industry to basically say “shut up
and eat”.

When nearly 75% of the U.S. market spinach crop is grown in one valley in California and repeated bacterial contaminations ensue, we need to question our reliance on the corporate food system.

When millions of pounds of beef are recalled due to bacterial contamination and when, by the count of the Centers for Disease Control 73,000 cases of e-coli infection and 63 deaths occur in the U.S. each year, we need to question our reliance on the corporate food system.

When the World Health Organization tells us that in the U.S. some 60% of the adults and nearly 13% of the children are obese, we need to question our reliance on the corporate food system.

When scientists from around the world tell us the vitamin and mineral content of our food has fallen significantly over the past 60 years, we need to question our reliance on the corporate food system.

When groundwater nitrate levels climb year after year because industrial size farms raise too many animals producing too much manure on too little land, we must, question the industrial concentration of our food system.

When the World Health Organization blames the increase of infectious diseases in part on the “industrialization of the animal production sector” and the emergence of H5N1 (Avian Flu) on “intensive poultry production”, again we need to question our reliance on the corporate food system.

We are told this is the safest food system in the world, but is it? Is high tech, high production, industrialized agriculture the way to feed he world? It seems not, millions still starve, the U.S. is obese and we still have tainted food.

We are comforted by a virtually unlimited choice in how to spend our food dollars, but is it really a choice when, of the nearly 40,000 food items found in the average supermarket 50% of them are produced by ten companies? Do we have choice when three companies control over 75% of the beef produced in the U.S.?

Sadly, we as consumers have allowed this to happen. We have become complacent and dependent on this industrial food system. We must remember that the vast majority of contaminated food has come directly out of the industrial food system, not local markets.

We can seek out local alternatives and safer alternatives. While the cost for local or organic food may be slightly higher, we need to remember the highest cost food items are the most highly processed foods, foods that are the least nutritious and those that account for the highest use of chemicals, preservatives and artificial ingredients.
Since they are the big cash cows of the corporate food industry, they also return less income to local farmers and communities.

Several years ago Wangari Maathai winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Green Belt Movement in Africa shared with author Anna Lappe’ an analogy she used to help Kenyan women reclaim their power to choose. She asked them what they would do if they got on the wrong bus, going in the wrong direction? Well of course they would get off.

So why would anyone stay on the wrong bus? Perhaps you had the wrong information, you didn’t think you had enough money to get on the right one, or you didn’t even know there was another bus. All valid reasons, the same basic reasons farmers continue to follow the industrial production system and the same reasons consumers continue to eat the food it produces.

Well it’s time to get off the bus, it’s taking us down the wrong road.

JAMES GOODMAN is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc, Wisconsin.

Remember that chicken farm issue in Tioga County? One of the neighbors emailed us with the information that:
“We did flood badly..and the portion of the farm where the chicken barns were supposed to go was a LAKE!”

Now what do you suppose would have happened to all those drowned birds and all the chickenshit? (antibiotics, herbicides, fungicides etc. etc)
Yup. Right into the river!
The guys at the New York Farm Bureau were jumping up and down to get the Drost chicken CAFO built. Of course, the New York Farm Bureau has never seen a corporate operation they didn’t like.
And our ever-vigilant guardians at the Department of Conservation were certainly going to approve this travesty.
Duh.......this is a FLOOD PLAIN!!!
Thank you to the stalwart neighbors and the courageous local legislators that kept the Drost livestock factory out.

Agri-food Industry’s Deadly Cycle Feeds Immigration
By Eric Holt-Gimenez

Just weeks before the elections, Congress is unable to agree on legislation regarding the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. Remarkably, not one single U.S. lawmaker has addressed why an estimated 1.1 million people cross the border every year looking for work. This omission allows our politicians to divert public attention away from the way U.S. policies cause massive migrations.

The agri-food industry has created a vicious cycle of dispossession, appropriation, and substitution. With help from the Green Revolution, U.S. economic policies, and subsidies from the U.S. taxpayer, the agri-food industry is reaping windfall profits. Meanwhile, the impact on the health and economy of immigrant families is devastating.

Eric Holt-Gimenez () is the Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland, California http://www.foodfirst.org. He is author of Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture and an analyst for the IRC Americas Program (http://www.americaspolicy.org).

See new IRC article online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3614