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Jealous Farmers

J

john in la

Well-known Member
Location
What part of in La do you not understand
Was making a delivery to a urban sewerage treatment plant today.
Jokingly I asked what's a guy need to do to get a load of that sludge.
Guy says if it was up to me you could have all you want but the boss will not let us give away or sell it.
I ask if it was due to EPA.
NO
Years back a sugar cane farmer that was a good business man; saw a opportunity to make a little extra money came in and started taking all the sludge to put on his cane fields.
Since these plantations measure in the thousands of acres I can imagine he was saving a pretty penny on fertilizer cost.

Then his neighbors went to complaining.
First they complained about the smell.
That did not work so the accused the parish for creating unfair business practices as they were giving all the sludge to one guy while others had to buy fertilizer.

The parish did not want to get in the middle of this so they stopped giving the sludge away.
It all goes to the land fill now.
 
I spent a summer, 1998 I think working for a company that hauled the sludge from waste treatment plants and it got knifed into the wheat stubble. This was in the Detroit area. Don't know how the money changed hands, but a dozen guys and equipment got paid from somewhere.
 
We have applied it here, you are limited on how often you can do it because there can be heavy metals in the waste.

Works great, smells like sh!t
 
(quoted from post at 02:27:36 08/26/14) We have applied it here, you are limited on how often you can do it because there can be heavy metals in the waste.

Works great, smells like sh!t
Click to expand...

Amen, neighbor applied it to a bean field across the road from me, smelled for a long time, even after being tilled in.
 
I worked with a guy who got sewage (sludge) hauled out and dumped in piles on his farm from a small town sewage plant. He'd load it on his spreader and sling it on the fields. It was a nasty situation, and he only did it once. I can stand animal waste, but human waste makes my skin crawl. I remember that he had a healthy crop of tomato plants growing where the sludge was dumped.
 
In wisc you need permits to spread on land alot of farmers are shy of it because some of it has factory waste and you dont know whats in that
 
My brother worked for a fellow that pumped the sewage treatment lagoons out and then they would haul the sludge out. HE fell in the one lagoon when it was just about empty of water but still had about 6 feet of sludge in it. HE stank for weeks. He showered and washed in about anything you could think of. Still when he would sweat it would smell like the sludge. That has been 30 yeas ago or more. We still tease him about it.
 
Typically gets sold here, knifed in, they hose it to close farms, tankers to far ones.

Every other or every 3rd year on a field I think?

That's nutz to put it in a landfill, not being sustainable.

Paul
 
i own land next to housing development and the neighbor across the highway spreads city sludge on his property for years. i think i got blamed for the smell this spring. he had it spread, worked in and planted to corn. i could really smell it as i planted my corn. sludge definatly has a different smell
 
Welllll, you might ought stop talking to a 'guy' and go talk to the manager of the treatment plant. Here in Missouri, the MoDNR regulates land application, based on continual soil testing for heavy metals, for one thing, and rates and timing of applications. It cannot be placed but so close to neighbors, to roads, to existing wells, etc. I have it placed on some of my land, and it momentarily smells, for a day, but dissipates. Works good, you can really see the difference.
 
When small children make too much of a fuss over a certain toy, the parent takes the toy away from all of them.

Seems like these farmers were acting like small children. Odds are nothing has changed.

If I were in charge of the parish I would tell y'all to get bent unless you can get together of your own accord and come up with some sort of sludge-sharing agreement that's fair to everyone.
 
I used to know a man that farmed the river bottom ground of the Missouri river down by Jefferson City Mo. The city would routinely haul sludge onto his farm because his land was close. He would have the most beautiful tomatoes each year in his beans! He absolutely REFUSED to eat any of those tomatoes! I asked him "why"? He said, "did you ever stop and think where that seed came from"?
 
(quoted from post at 09:09:53 08/26/14) He absolutely REFUSED to eat any of those tomatoes! I asked him "why"? He said, "did you ever stop and think where that seed came from"?
Click to expand...

I guess that same farmer doesn't eat eggs either. :lol:
 
If there was that much competition for the byproduct, a sharp manager would have raised price or auctioning it off to the highest bidders in well advertised public auctions. That would have created the most return for the parish and its taxpayers. Was the original deal an "under-the table" deal?

I'm surprised a local government didn't want to get involved in something generating money for the city. A local town here collects yard and household waste from surrounding communities, composts it, and packages it in pallets of 40 pound plastic bags. They sell it wholesale to landscapers and retailers, shipping 2 or 3 semitrailer loads a day.
 
35 years ago I lived in Hawk Point, Mo. which is on the edge of the prairie that runs through the NW part of the state and is really good farm ground. there was a chicken farm near town that liquified the manure, then it was pumped into tankers and injected into the soil of farms in the area. Injector trucks were injecting the sludge about 2 feet deep, and doing a strip 6 feet wide at about 15 to 20mph in the bigger fields. After they went over the ground you only needed to disk and plant. Sure did [b:44108e09ba]NOT[/b:44108e09ba] want to be downwind from them though.
 
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