Jo Manhart, I appreciate your cheerleader approach to concentrated animal feeding operations in Missouri (Globe, April 13). But since you work for the companies that need CAFOs and are paid by them, you really should register yourself as a lobbyist.
While I applaud you for not taking on the argument of karst geology and how fragile it is in the Ozarks, I wish you would study further the oversight of manure management. The Department of Natural Resources, the agency in charge of oversight, is so short-staffed that inspection of CAFOs is rarely done but once every two or three years if at all. Following the trail of manure application on land is not even attempted and at worse is compounded by the fact that other states are bringing their litter into Missouri with no oversight.
While it is true that we have a great agricultural system and they are very efficient, I would like to ask a few questions of you. Why do we continually overproduce livestock and ship them overseas when we cause a food-price inflation to our own people? This overproduction does generate revenue, but at what cost? We are depleting our groundwater (all CAFOs use wells) at the rate of 7.7 gallons per 100 chickens per day. In the Elk River and Spring River Watershed, there are around 190 million chickens and turkeys. To produce more and more feed requires that grasslands, forests and marginal land be converted to cropland and sometimes irrigated at a cost to groundwater. Doing this depletes soil fertility, aids the erosion of our precious soil and places further strain on our streams to absorb the chemicals used for high production quotas. We use fuels imported from foreign governments to farm this additional land and worse yet to fly these products to foreign countries. I suggest you and the economists do the math and decide what is the real net, not gross, profit from these industrial agribusiness operations. I have not the space to go into pesticide use, pharmaceuticals used in production, genetically engineered disasters or other related topics.
We cannot afford to continually use up our precious resources and then find down the line that we are out of water or have insufficient soil fertility to feed the citizens. I ask you what is enough, or is there ever enough, and when do we clean up our streams from the residue of bad business? How do we compensate for the loss of the true family farm that is being run out of existence by agribusiness trying to control a global market?
Dwayne Miller
Goodman
Opinion
Voices: CAFO is a bad word?
- Opinion
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Our View: Spying on us
Distrust of government secrecy has been elevated to an exceptional level with the disclosure the Justice Department covertly examined two months of Associated Press phone records to determine who leaked details to the AP about a foiled terrorist plot.
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Our View: Pass on the legacy
Forty hungry members of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry began gathering corn at the Rader farm near the village of Sherwood when they were ambushed by a guerrilla band of about 70 Southern sympathizers.
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Our View: Big Brother looms large
The federal government, working under the cloak of secrecy, has been having a heyday at the expense of all Americans.
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Our View: Disgraceful military assault
We want to make one thing clear: A sexual assault is not a sex scandal. Nor can the rise in sexual assaults in the military be justified in any way.
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Elliott Denniston, guest columnist: Right-to-work laws only hurt workers
Middle-class workers have been fighting an uphill battle for the past 30 years.
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Your View: Food drive efforts
Branch No. 366 of the National Association of Letter Carriers along with the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, the American Postal Workers Union and the U.S. Postal Service would like to thank all the area communities that participated in the 2013 Stamp Out Hunger food drive.
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Your View: More about tax credit
The Globe’s editorial in “Our View” (May 10) may have left readers with a few inaccurate impressions.
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Other Views: Sickening disparity
Don’t feel bad if you don’t understand the wide, sometimes huge, discrepancies in fees hospitals charge for the same procedure. Or if you don’t understand the arithmetical magic the hospitals use to arrive at those fees.
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Carol Stark: America in need of more 'momisms'
Several years ago, I attended a writing workshop where one of the sessions was called “Tell it to Mom.”
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Our View: Keep learning
Donna Maus, a biology teacher from St. Mary’s Colgan High School in Pittsburg, Kan., told a group of top students, their parents and their teachers something we think everyone needs to hear.
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