AUGUSTA, Ga. - It was a farm idea with a big payoff and supposedly no downside: ridding lakes and rivers of raw sewage and industrial pollution by converting it all into a free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. Then last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from the waste treatment plant here. His cows had died by the hundreds.

Granted, if you look at the contaminants that caused they damage, they were all industrial ones: Thallium, PCBs, arsenic and some other heavy metals. This means that if the waste treatment plant were doing what it was supposed to be doing, and the EPA was doing what it was supposed to be doing, this would have been okay. Who wants to bet that the city of Atlanta’s sludge is treated correctly? Not me.

Kristin: Go look at the “don’t put a bucket in your shower” thread. There’s a link to a pdf that shows how much inter-basin transfer there is. I calculated roughly 10% of the Atlanta metro area treated water doesn’t end up in the Chattahoochee again because of this.

Oh, so if everybody was vegetarian we wouldn’t need an acre of corn to feed every cow or pig. We could save all that water from irrigation and slacking the animals thirst while making available a limitless supply of fertilizer.

Bravo! Let’s make a law!