Land Application of Municipal Sewerage Sludge
What’s in it for you?

For years dairy producers have allowed local municipalities to spread the sludge from waste treatment facilities on their land.   It was seen as a valuable and often free fertilizer, and it does contain many of the same fertilizing properties we find in commercial fertilizers.  But recent studies have shown that having this material spread on your land may cause more problems than it’s worth.

The contents of municipal sludge are different in many ways from the manure produced by your livestock.  Most processed sludge is organic enough to be fertilizer, but toxic enough to be regulated by the E.P.A.   Sludge does not just contain byproducts of human waste.  Waste treatment facilities are not just treating sewer waste.  They also run most of the storm water from their community through the treatment process.  The storm water carries with it many toxic chemicals and suspended metals that are spilled or poured down drains.  Urban storm water is very high in petroleum products and other liquids that leak from motor vehicles for instance.  The material flowing in sewer lines carries with it a lot more than just human waste.  Toilets are a favorite place for people to pour things they no longer want in their household, like pesticides, cleaning compounds and a host of other toxic substances.  The sewage treatment process removes many of these toxins by trapping them in the screening process which becomes sludge.   So in effect, while the sludge does contain fertilizing properties it also contains contaminants including metals, pathogens, and organic pollutants.  Current regulations require pathogen reduction and periodic monitoring for some metals prior to land application, but there is no requirement to test sewage sludge’s for the presence of organic chemicals in the U. S.  Sludge often contains toxins that you may not want on your land, in the crops you feed your livestock or grow for human consumption.   For many years large metropolitan area’s like New York put their sludge on barges and hauled it out to sea and dumped it.  The E.P.A outlawed that practice in 1991 because of the adverse impact it was having on the oceans and fish and seafood harvested for us to eat.   When that ban went into place municipalities started spreading on farm land.  Since then many have asked if it should not be in the oceans, why would it be any less toxic when spread on the land.

Cornell University’s Waste Management Institute website has a number of documents we feel are in the best interest of our producers to review.  This science based information on the use of sewage sludge’s, sludge products and septage on dairy farms can be found at:

http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/Sludge/Dairysludgesummary.pdf
and
http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/Sludge/Dairysludge.pdf

If you are not able to read them online, let us know and we will mail you a copy.