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Which is to say almost anything with too much in the wrong place and time can be toxic. Milk spills are acutely toxic to water ways, for that matter. If you put 50,000 steers together and have the wallow in their waste, and make dry "islands" for them by bulldozing up mounds of manure for them to stand on...I'm going to the think the nitrogren and other nutrient overloading is going to be a tad excessive. Did some googling, best I can tell, there hasn't been a court decision yet but there are cases in the pipeline trying to put some of these very large confined animal operations under Superfund jurisdiction. If you look north of the border, Ontario farmers have formal Nutrient Management Plans they have to follow for environmental reasons. Is it a bad thing if you shut down large confinement feedlots putting on weight to profit the beefpacking corporations and put the steers back out on the range putting on weight to profit ranchers? Is it a bad thing a bunch of farmers who already practiced good manure management so their fertilizer ended up in plants and not streams are going to have fill out more paperwork because of farmers who didn't care, or corporations which polluted trying to save a buck?
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