grouchyfarmer

Agency approves $7.7 million for solar and other renewable projects at homes and businesses.

Source: State may expand funding for dairy farm digesters

I’m all for alternative energy sources, but putting any kind of tax funding or other subsidies into manure digesters in the belief that they will somehow help deal with the impact of manure on water pollution, well contamination, quality of life problems caused by manure from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) is utterly ridiculous.

CAFOs like the mega dairy farms here in Wisconsin and other parts of the country, large animal feedlot operations and pork operations that raise thousands upon thousands of animals, produce such large amounts of manure that it is mind boggling. One single dairy farm here in Wisconsin produces as much manure as a city of 180,000 people.

And, of course, that manure has to be disposed of somehow. One of these days I’m going to have to tell you horror of manure disposal here in Wisconsin. I don’t want to get into that now because if I could probably do a thousand words on just that. So let’s stick to digesters.

The idea behind digesters has been around for a long time. The manure is put into air tight holding tanks. Bacteria is added to the mix. The bacteria thrive in this environment, and as they grow and multiply, they produce, among other things, methane gas. Because the tank is sealed, the methane accumulates and is piped off and used to power engines which drive generators to produce electricity.

It sounds rather logical, I suppose. You can produce electricity from cow poo, or pig poo, or whatever kind of poo you shove into the tank. It sounds all ‘green’ and environmental and good for the planet, doesn’t it, producing electricity from manure. It solves a lot of problem, doesn’t it? Gets rid of the manure, makes electricity to keep all of our gadgets running…

Only doesn’t do any of that. Not really. Especially not the getting rid of the manure part.

These things are ridiculously expensive, first of all. We’re talking millions of dollars even for a relatively small one. Without heavy taxpayer subsidies, no farm could afford to put one of these in. Special holding tanks have to be built, first of all, because they have to be completely sealed to keep the gas in. Otherwise all that methane is going to go straight up into the atmosphere, and since methane is a green house gas that is much worse than CO2.

The gas that comes off these things  is highly corrosive. That means all of the pipes, tanks, even the engines used to run the generators, are extremely expensive to make because special materials have to be used to prevent them from just corroding away. Special filter systems have to be installed to remove unwanted elements from the gas, dryers to remove moisture… The list goes on and on.

The whole process is neither efficient, nor is it ‘clean’ by any stretch of the imagination.

Oh, and did I mention they explode sometimes? Like this one that happened at a digester here in Wisconsin. If you click the link to the jsonline article, you’ll note that the project has been plagued with problems from the beginning. And this isn’t the only one that’s had major difficulties. Plug ‘manure digester explosion’ into Google and you’ll see what I mean.

But they generate electricity, right? Well, sort of. Not much. Certainly no where near enough electricity to pay for building and maintaining one of these systems. And it isn’t “clean” energy by any stretch of the imagination because it still generates electricity the good old fashioned way, by burning stuff. Burning methane is cleaner than burning coal or oil, but it still produces waste material like CO2 and other gases.

They’re pushing these things by claiming that they somehow help to eliminate the manure disposal problems CAFOs have. So let’s look at that.

They don’t. I’m sorry, they just don’t. They do nearly nothing to eliminate manure disposal problems.

The digestion process does alter the chemical composition of the manure, I’ll grant you that. It will reduce the amount of phosphorus, and that’s important because it is a major problem around here. Phosphorus runoff causes toxic algae blooms in lakes, causing major fish die offs. We have huge dead zones in the Bay of Green Bay on Lake Michigan that seem to get bigger every year, due to phosphorus.

But that’s all these digesters do, remove some of the phosphorus. And only some of it. About half of it still remains. And the other pollutants in the manure remain virtually unscathed.

And then there’s the quantities involved. You put 100,000 gallons of manure into a digester and what you get out the other end when the process is done is, well, 100,000 gallons of manure. It does absolutely nothing to reduce the sheer quantity of manure.

The single biggest problem with manure is the sheer volume of it, and digesters do absolutely nothing about that. All the digesters seem to be is little more than a lame attempt at ‘greenwashing’, trying to cover up the real problem.

I would really, really like to take whoever designed this website out behind the shed and introduce them to my little friend, Mr. Smackupsidethehead.

Vertical columns that scroll up and down at different speeds from the main columns, inconsistently colored headlines, a refresh system that constantly updates the main page even as you’re viewing it so it abruptly drops you to a different part of the page while you’re still reading. Go off to read an article and click the back button and you have no idea where you’ll end up. Even more interesting, now the story blurbs on the main page are different, moved, some gone, others added. Auto-start videos that you have to manually click to turn off. Only to have them start up again as soon as you scroll. Headlines that needlessly move as you scroll.

Dear lord, my cats could design a better website than this.

I don’t really comment on politics here, and I don’t plan on starting (Aren’t you relieved? I am.). Unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, you already know what’s going on out there, what a bizarre circus our political system has become. I’m not going to talk about that. I’m more interested in the responses of the GOP faithful to what’s happening, what the politicians, the power brokers, the GOP leadership are doing and saying.

And it’s been interesting, to say the least. I don’t think I have ever seen such astonishing mental contortions, such grasping at straws, so many ridiculous attempts at rationalization in my entire life as these people attempt to defend the indefensible. For “the good of the party”.

I think that’s the key, here, that phrase, ‘the good of the party’. I think that the GOP and the Democrats both,  the politicians on both sides,  have forgotten one little fact. They weren’t elected ‘for the good of the party’, were they? They were elected for the good of the country as a whole, the good of the people who elected them.

They all seem to have forgotten that, though. They’ve forgotten that they were elected to protect the welfare of all of us. They were elected to protect the entire country. They were elected to safeguard all of the people in the United States, not just those who support a particular political party.

It looks like The Great Mayonnaise War is finally over as the USDA issues rulings on the antics the egg board was engaged in that started the war.

If you don’t remember the Mayonnaise War, I don’t blame you. As such things go, it made barely a blip on the media’s radar. But for some it was a very big deal indeed.

The war began when a company called Hampton Creek released a vegan mayonnaise that they called Just Mayo. Unlike ‘real’ mayonnaise, Just Mayo was made without the use of eggs.

Just Mayo was the kind of product that would probably not have made much of dent in the marketplace, to be honest. It might have gotten exposure in places like Whole Foods and other speciality retailers, but it’s unlikely that it would have been all that popular in most mass market grocery store chains. Vegan foods intended to replace more traditional non-vegan options generally don’t do all that well in the mass market.

The egg producers, and especially the American Egg Board, the egg industry’s marketing organization, didn’t see it that way, though. They looked at Just Mayo and went full Chicken Little, running around in circles like a chicken with it’s head cut off, clucking that the sky was falling, and that they had to do something, right now, to shut this down, before they were left with (Oh, no, he’s not really going to say it, is he? Yeah, he is) egg on their faces.

Now, have I gotten all of the chicken references out of the way in this little item? Lord, I hope so. I hate it when I start doing that. Are there no depths to which I will not stoop in order to grab for a cheap laugh? Uh, well, no, not really. Ahem, let’s get on with this.

The egg board went a bit loony, to be honest. It launched attacks against Just Mayo, claiming it wasn’t ‘real’ mayonnaise because it didn’t have eggs, filing complaints with the FDA, USDA and any other agency that had blank complaint forms laying around in the lobby.

But the board’s efforts to derail Hampton Creek and it’s vegan mayonnaise weren’t limited to just legal objections.

An alleged industry consultant, someone named Zolezzi, got in touch with the board and during a strategy session in 2013 claimed he could make a phone call and get Whole Foods to pull the product line from it’s shelves. An offer that was, for a time at least, taken seriously. In a note written to the president of the board, the head of United Egg Producers offered to get in touch with Zolezzi and actually try to do it.

Internal memos and emails showed one instance where it was suggested egg board members pool their money and hire a hit man to take out the founder of Hampton Creek.

This was, they say, a joke.

And it was also a ‘joke’ when another member offered to have his old buddies in Brooklyn to pay a visit to the founder of Hampton Creek with the apparent intent to, I’m sure, have a nice, pleasant chat with him and not at all do him bodily injury.

Investigators from the USDA said that the actions and comments of the egg board were “inappropriate discussions about an action which, if acted upon, would have significantly exceeded the provisions of the Egg Research and Consumer Information Act” that was responsible for setting up the board and defining its duties.

(Good heavens, really? How can an egg board operate if can’t take out a hit on the competition? What’s the world coming to?)

The board did take some action, including trying to rig internet advertising services so searches for Hampton Creek’s products would bring up the board’s own ads. It discussed spending money for “research and coordination with key influential bloggers in food and health/nutrition space, drafting key messaging and coordinating posts”, according to the reports I’ve read. In other words, trying to hire or otherwise influence food bloggers to present a message that was pro-egg and anti Just Mayo.

I should point out that Hampton Creek allegedly wasn’t behaving in exactly an ethical fashion either. An investigative reporter for Bloomberg news filed a report that claimed Hampton was running a covert operation to buy up large amounts of its own products in order to inflate sales figures and make it more attractive to investors.

According the the Bloomberg report (click the link to jump to the story) executives at the company launched a large scale undercover operation to buy back its own products in order to make it seem the company was selling far more than it really was. Five former workers came forward to talk about it, hundreds of receipts, expense reports, cash advance records and emails were discovered by Bloomberg describing how the scheme worked. In addition, Bloomberg claims that the company had contractors calling store managers asking about Just Mayo, requesting they stock it.

Bloomberg’s report also shows contractors and employees bought large quantities of product from Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Walmart, Target and Whole foods around the country. Employees were assigned specific stores, instructed in techniques for making the buys so they wouldn’t be seen buying mass quantities of the product.

The CEO claims the purpose of the purchases was to check quality of product, not to inflate sales. But internal memos and emails from company executives don’t back that up. Emails from from a Hampton Creek vice president actually outlined how contractors should use self checkout lanes or make several transactions at different lanes to avoid appearing to be buying large amounts of product and to avoid wearing Hampton Creek logoed clothing. One email specifically said “this is an undercover project.” according to Bloomberg.

The company was being investigated by the SEC and the Justice Department, but I haven’t heard of any results from those investigations as yet.

But let’s get back to the marketing board, which is what I started out talking about.

The whole thing was just silly, and it points out just how out of control these product marketing boards have become, and how cutthroat product marketing can be.

The whole kerfuffle ended up with the egg board getting a slap on the wrist from the government, and a promise that the board would ‘retrain’ its employees on just what it could and could not legally do.