Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

ended in 1995 when the company agreed to plead guilty to using pesticide
for an unapproved purpose and pay a $10,000 fine. Now I don’t particularly
like to gamble, but even I’d take my savings to Vegas anytime with a
guaranteed 17 to 1 payout.
After the Cenex case, other farmers in the area began to wonder whether
bad fertilizer had been the cause of their failing crops. One told Martin’s
friend Dennis DeYoung about a fertilizer tank that Cenex delivered to his
farm and forgot about years earlier. Dennis scooped out some of the dried
residue from the abandoned tank and sent it off to a soil-testing lab in
Idaho. The lab found lots of arsenic, lead, titanium, and chromium—not
exactly premium plant food. The lab also reported high lead and arsenic
concentrations in peas, beans, and potatoes DeYoung sent in from crops fertilized
by Cenex products. Samples of potatoes another friend of DeYoung’s
sent in were found to have ten times the allowable concentration of lead.
Washington wasn’t the only place where toxic waste was being reclassified
as fertilizer. Between 1984 and 1992, an Oregon subsidiary of ALCOA
(the Aluminum Company of America) recycled more than two hundred
thousand tons of smelter waste into fertilizer. ALCOA saved two million
dollars a year turning waste into a product marketed as a road de-icer during
the winter and plant food in the summer. Companies all across America
were saving millions of dollars a year selling industrial waste instead of
paying to send it to toxic waste dumps. By the late 1990s, eight major U.S.
companies converted 120 million pounds of hazardous waste into fertilizer
each year.
Strangely, nobody involved seemed too anxious to talk about the toxic
waste-into-fertilizer industry. They didn’t have to worry. No rules prevented
mixing hazardous waste into fertilizer, and then into the soil. No
one appeared too concerned about such blatant disregard of the importance
of healthy soil. Never mind that, as seems obvious, farms are about
the last place we should use as a dumping ground for heavy metals.
The way we treat our agricultural soils, whether as locally adapted ecosystems,
chemical warehouses, or toxic dumps, will shape humanity’s options
in the next century. Europe broke free from the ancient struggle to provide
enough food to keep up with a growing population by coming to control
a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. The United States
escaped the same cycle by expanding westward. Now with a shrinking base
of arable land, and facing the end of cheap oil, the world needs new models
for how to feed everybody. Island societies provide one place to look;
dirty business 215