Just as there is no free lunch, perhaps there is no such thing as free, safe fertilizer, unless it comes from the compost in your backyard or your own cow’s manure. Last week, US District Judge Anthony Alaimo ordered the US Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer who lost hundreds of cows, as well as 1,730 acres of arable land in the 1990s, from supposedly safe fertilizer created and given away through a federally subsidized program to convert waste water into fertilizer. The 30 year old program was lauded as a great way to remove raw sewage from lakes and rivers and convert it into free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. They even renamed the sludge biosolids in 1991, ostensibly to increase its marketability. Apparently, they forgot to mention that the fertilizer was also rich in toxins.

According to the Associated Press, a neighboring farm that also participated in the program was allowed to market milk which later showed by the farmer’s own tests to have some of the same contaminants in it, including thallium levels 120 times higher than that allowed by the EPA in drinking water. The sludge that was being used on these farms also contained arsenic, heavy metals, cadmium, molybdenum, chlordane and PCBs up to 2,500 times the federal health standard. What’s worse, the Agriculture Department had apparently not only been warned by its own scientists that this fertilizer might be unsafe, but the Food and Drug Administration, after being alerted about the contaminated milk, never told the farmer, Bill Boyce, to stop marketing it. So the contaminated milk continued to be sold on the market. The excuse? Neither the EPA nor the Department of Agriculture have standards regarding the presence of thallium, once used as a rat poison, in milk.

The EPA and Georgia officials also ran tests on the milk, but did not disclose those findings to Boyce or the farmer that lost the cows, Andy McElmurray. Boyce and McElmurray took it upon themselves to run tests on milk being sold in South Carolina that came from farms that were part of the sludge program and found similar contaminants. They insist they shared that data with officials, including at the EPA, but no action was taken. In fact, it was Boyce himself that took the story to the Associated Press to raise questions about the sludge program.

Judge Alaimo’s ruling found the Department of Agriculture’s and EPA’s data on the toxins in the fertilizer from the sewage treatment plant providing the free fertilizer in the area to be “unreliable, incomplete and in some cases, fudged.” He also accused EPA officials of ignoring, and silencing, any dissent on the program. This may have included the 2003 firing of David Lewis, a 32-year veteran agency scientist who had publicly raised questions about the safety of the practice in a Nature article published in 1999.

The Associated Press reports that 7 million tons of sludge are produced annually from 1,650 waste water treatment plants with more than half given away to farmers to use as fertilizer, rather than incinerated or buried in land fill, a more costly process than giving the stuff away. After the death of cows on the farms in Augusta, Georgia, and settlements by the city with those farmers who blamed the sludge they were given, the EPA commissioned a study of Augusta’s biosolids program. The findings showed the program to be safe. Yet, the AP reports that a draft of the paper also included a hand written note by one of its co-authors saying that the authors should “fess up” that they didn’t really know the amount of sludge or composition of it on the farms in question. Could this be one more in a series of incidents at the EPA that put business interests over the public health?

And so, the sludge continues to be dispersed to farms despite the apparent health risks and 2004 declaration by the EPA that they would more closely regulate fifteen chemicals found in the sewage sludge fertilizer, possibly in reaction to the 2002 criticism by the National Research Council that the science around sewage sludge was outdated. The AP was careful to point out that no illnesses have been linked to the contaminated milk. That does not mean, however, that there haven’t been any, only that they have not been linked to the milk. With downed cows in the meat supply and rBGH in milk, this is just one more reason to stick to organic and avoid meat and dairy altogether.