Clark Wolf is the host and organizer. The panel—on food and politics—includes me, talking about my memoir, Slow Cooked, An Unexpected Life in Food Politics; Chloe Sorvino, author of Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat; Alex Prud’homme, author of Dinner With The President: Food, Politics and the History of Breaking Bread at the White House; and Tanya Holland, author of Tanya Holland’s California Soul. Free, but register here. It starts at 5:00 p.m. and lasts one hour.
by Marion Nestle
Jul
21
2009
Use manure as a biofuel?
Here’s another USDA report well worth a look. This one looks at the use of manure in the United States. Interesting statistics: about 5% of cropland is fertilized with manure, and about half of that goes on cornfields. So the obvious question seems to be that if there’s all that manure around, why not use it to produce biofuels?
Why does this seem like a bad idea to me? It makes about as much sense to use manure as corn for biofuel. Wouldn’t it be better to use all that CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) effluent to fertilize the other 95% of cropland? Wouldn’t composting animal waste and using it on crops instead of chemical fertilizers be more sustainable and solve a lot of problems? Or am I missing something here?