Shit Milk

You could call it chocolate milk...

The idea was take raw sewage and industrial pollution from rivers and lakes and convert it all into a free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. But last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from the waste treatment plant, whose cows had died by the hundreds. Worse, some of the same contaminants showed up in milk that regulators allowed a neighboring dairy farmer to market, even after some officials said they were warned about it.

According to test results, the level of thallium — an element once used as rat poison — found in the milk was 120 times the concentration allowed in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The contaminated milk and the recent ruling in U.S. District court raise new doubts about a 30 year government policy (that is still in effect) that encourages farmers to spread millions of tons of sewage sludge over thousands of acres each year as an alternative to commercial fertilizers.

About 7 million tons of biosolids — the term that waste producers came up with for sludge in 1991 — are produced each year as a byproduct from 1,650 waste water treatment plants around the nation. Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is cheaper than burning or burying it, and the government's policy has been to encourage the former. Dairy farmer Andy McElmurray's sludge contained levels of arsenic, toxic heavy metals and PCBs two to 2,500 times federal health standards.

"This farm never would have looked like this if we hadn't used the city's sludge," he said angrily.

The city of Augusta recently settled a lawsuit with him over the dead cows for $1.5 million. Another nearby dairy farmer, Bill Boyce, won a $550,000 court judgment against the city on his claim that sludge was responsible for the deaths of more than 300 of his cows. A top state official alerted the FDA, but Boyce said no one ever told him to stop selling his milk or mentioned a possible threat to public health.

Currently, there are no records that anyone became ill because of milk tainted with heavy metals or other contaminants that could have come from sludge. Still, maybe you ought to get accustomed to the taste of soy milk...