Paul asked some thought provoking questions about how farmers (not to mention pig and chicken farms) get slammed for polluting, but the suggestion is to put duck poo in a pond. Yes, the issue are many and varied, and most of them have a valid point to make if you can get past the rhetoric.

The farmers who are getting a finger pointed at them are the ones using anhydrous ammonia or other high nitrogen fertilizers that kill soil bacteria and cause algae bloom in surface water.

The pig and chicken farmers get hammered due to the smell and the risk of large amounts of fecal matter (and bacteria) getting into surface and ground water.

The problem on all of these is VOLUME. The ecology can handle small amounts of anything. Heck, bears poo in the woods, and it gets naturally composted, and no one complains.

In Norway, they use the semi-composted cow poo from their barns to fertilize their fields in the spring, and nobody seems to raise a ruckus about it.

In the United States, big industry wants control, big government wants control, big retail businesses want control, and I just want to be left alone to grow veggies, recycle my grey water, drill a water well on my own land and use the water from it as I see fit, compost, burn wood for heat in the winter (both days of it here in coastal Texas), and use water from the creek on my place to water my trees. I will leave you to speculate how many of those are illegal where I live or threatened by pending regulations.

The powers that be have lost touch with the spirit of freedom and enterprise that made this country great.

-- Rose in Texas (open_rose@hotmail.com), March 22, 2002

Answers

You said it sister!! If it isn't the federal government, it's the state. If the state can't get on the ation, it's the local government. Two gripes of the day:

1. Just paid the city water bill for our body shop in town. $9 a month charge for city garbage pickup just because there is an apartment on the property. City ordinance says so it must be so. Forget the fact that we have to pay for a dumpster because the city won't pick up other stuff. That's $108 a year for something we don't use. Grrrrr.....

2. Can't get a loan at the bank to build a shop on our land because the 'regulators' say we 'show no ability to be able to repay the loan'. My checkbook with a year and half of $1000 a month lease payments says we can certainly afford a $400 a month building payment. They take the lease payments out of net profit so we don't show as much income, but won't add it back in to show that we've already been paing it.

Ok, one more. The post office won't deliver mail to our shop but they deliver mail to the houses right across the street.

WHO MAKES THESE RULES!?!?!?!?!

-- Stacey (stacey@lakesideinternet.com), March 22, 2002.