ALEC Wins Award!!!! Celebrates in DC

American Legislative Exchange Council 
Wins Prestigious Agriculture Award
Celebrates at the ALEC Policy Summit being held in Washington DC

Congratulations are in order for the award announced October 2012

The winners of last year’s “Land of 10,000 Lagoons” awards presented at the World Dairy Expo were the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology (AFACT).  Both AFACT and ALEC had major roles in orchestrating state legislation and manipulating public opinion to the benefit of corporate agribusiness and factory farming in Wisconsin.

For you city kids:

Some of the first lagoons for farm wastes were put into service in North Dakota in 1960. A few of these lagoons are still in operation. They can be used to indicate how such disposal systems can be expected to perform in the kind of climate found in North Dakota.

The first lagoons installed were designed to receive all solid and liquid wastes from livestock buildings. Most systems were used in hog production facilities. In many of the systems the building floors were cleaned with water so the wastes were diluted before they entered the lagoon. In other systems wastes were collected under slatted floors before they were drained into the lagoons. In SOlne barns the wastes were conveyed through gutters by mechanical gutter cleaners. In the latter two systems wastes in the lagoons were undiluted. Some lagoons received wastes on alternate days. In other cases intervals between loadings ranged up to several weeks.

(It’s a pit where you put manure – and let it liquefy.)

Hundreds of gases are emitted bylagoons and the irrigation pivots associated with sprayfields, including ammonia (a toxic form of nitrogen), hydrogen sulfide, and methane. The accumulation of gases formed in the process of breaking down animal waste is toxic, oxygen consuming, and potentially explosive, and farm workers' exposure to lagoon gases has even caused deaths.

Oh – yeh – THAT’s ALEC