Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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It is no secret that if agriculture doesn’t become sustainable nothing else
will; even so, some still treat our soil like dirt—and sometimes worse. The
eastern Washington town of Quincy is an unlikely place to uncover one of
our nation’s dirtiest secrets. But in the early 1990s the town’s mayor clued
Seattle Times reporter Duff Wilson in to how toxic waste was being recycled
into fertilizer and sprayed on croplands. Patty Martin was an unusual
candidate for a whistle blower, a conservative housewife and former pro
basketball player who won a virtually uncontested race for mayor of her
small farming community. When Martin’s constituents began complaining
about mysteriously withered crops and crop dusters spraying fertilizer
out on the open prairie for no apparent reason, she learned that Cenex, a
fertilizer-specialty division of the Land O’Lakes Company (yes, the butter
people), was shipping toxic waste to her town, mixing it with other chemicals
in a big concrete pond near the train station, and then selling the concoction
as cheap, low-grade fertilizer.
It was a great scheme. Industrial polluters needing to dispose of toxic
waste avoided the high cost of legitimate dumps. (Anyone who puts something
into a registered toxic waste dump owns it forever.) But mixing the
same stuff into cheap fertilizer and spreading it on vacant land—or selling
it to farmers—makes the problem, and the liability, disappear. So trains
pulled in and out of Quincy in the middle of the night and the pond went
up and down with no records of what went in or out of it. Sometimes
Cenex sold the new-fangled fertilizer to unsuspecting farmers. Sometimes
the company paid farmers to use it just to get rid of the stuff.
Martin discovered that state officials allowed recycling waste rich in
heavy metals into fertilizer without telling farmers about all those extra
“nutrients.” Whether or not something was considered hazardous
depended not so much on what the stuff was as on what one intended to
do with it. Approached about the practice of selling toxic waste as fertilizer,
staff at the state department of agriculture admitted they thought it
was a good idea, kind of like recycling.
Curiously enough, the toxic fertilizer began killing crops. Unless they
are eroded away, heavy metals stick around in the soil for thousands of
years. And if they build up enough in the soil, they are taken up by
plants—like crops.
Why would a company like Cenex be mixing up a toxic brew and selling
it as low-grade fertilizer? Try the oldest reason around—money. Company
memos reveal that they saved $170,000 a year by calling their rinse
pond waste a product and spraying it on farmer’s fields. The legal case
dirty business