Local Food Local Dispute

My da sent me a link to an article from my hometown newspaper The Times Argus. You can read the article here.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007710080343

In Montpelier there is a company called Vermont Compost Co. that composts manure and the food residuals from downtown businesses to produce 1500 dozen eggs a year. The business is run by Karl Hammer, and he employs ten people (who are all characters from the stories I've heard.) People complained about Hammer's operation even making legal inquiries to state officials. My initial reaction was that the complaints may be worthwhile and its a good idea to keep Hammer in check so he'll do as good a job as possible to be a good neighbor, but that his services are way too valuable to Montpelier for these people to lay any complaining rights to it.

There are some legitimate complaints and arguments against them and I'm not saying I know the right answers, but there is one comment in the article I'd like to address.

"Blow lives downstream from Hammer's site, and is one of the neighbors who brought his concerns to state officials.

Blow describes the brook as "a nice, clear mountain stream that is no longer a nice, clear mountain stream."

"That gentleman is allowed to put and store a pile of compost right on the brook," he said. "Every time it rains that compost is leeching into the stream. It is impossible for it not to."

"I don't care if he is a farmer. The things he is doing he can't do," Blow said. "To pollute the stream is against the law."" (Times Argus)

I am just so biased towards agriculture and composting that I find these complaints lacking in consideration for the service that Hammer is doing for the city. Also, I'm not exactly sure that I know which stream the guy was talking about, but it's total propaganda to call it "A clear mountain stream that isn't a clear mountain stream anymore." If I am thinking of the right stream, the one that runs along main street, then eventually down into Sabin's pasture, that part of the stream is a ditch that was engineered when they built the road, complete with oil dripping into it, salt from the plows, cigarette butts and everything else you can expect for a stream next to a road.

I don't want to sound transcendental about it, but there needs to be some realism here and someone who doesn't know the area will read the article and get the image of Hammer dumping toxic waste in an alpine stream that's fed by glaciers.

I think that the dangers of the runoff coming from a compost place (compostery?) are nutrient deposits. I would estimate a very low risk of heavy metal and other pollutants, but the main things are going to be Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium. These can be a problem in high concentrations, resulting in an excess of nutrients for algae to subsist on which causes harmful algal blooms, such as at the outlet of the Mississippi River into the Gulf. These nutrient overloads can upset ecosystems, but until there is evidence of something like this actually going wrong, I'd rather not have it in the newspaper.

Also no one drinks water from that stream, it just drains into the Winooski which runs along highway 2 thus subjecting the water to all the same impacts of any road: yearly construction pollutants, bank stability loss, weed invasion, litter, and so on and around. The Winooski goes to lake Champlain after pushing its way through a few hydro electric dams which further affect the stream with heat pollution.

Hey, I like the winooski as much as the next guy, but a bit of nutrient pollution from a well meaning composter might be the least of its problems. Especially since the landfill where the compost would have been dumped is in the same watershed as Hammer's Compostery and rain has a tendency to percolate through landfills and make a sort of Trash Tea. Also if the manure he uses was left at the farms where he collects it from, it would be leaching a lot more of these nutrients into the water at those locations than it does at Hammer's site.

That's my two cents. More on Montpelier's waste stream later.