Citizens' BION Forum

Abstract:

Last week, the Courier-Observer published Pat McKeown’s editorial, “Just the Other Day,” about the proposed Bion project: a combination corn ethanol plant and 84,000 head cattle feedlot. She portrayed the project as a proven, what’s-not-to-like project. I have a lot of respect for Pat. She launched the news department at North Country Public Radio and in her reporting she left no stone unturned. Now she’s the Director of the County Chamber of Commerce and her job is different; it’s not about turning over the stones, it’s about painting the stones pretty colors. She painted Bion pretty colors because she honestly believes in the project, but why she painted those of us who are questioning the project the way she did, I don’t know. “They organize, they blog, they talk, they march.” Well, yes we do! How American is that? We think and question, too. Pat did a good job at drawing a thumbnail sketch of the project: Bring corn in, turn it into ethanol, feed the corn waste to the cattle, burn the dried manure to distill the ethanol. Sounds like a great idea! She concluded, “Seems to me that we have a marriage: all the safeguards are in place, the people’s questions have been answered, promises have been made…So what’s the problem?” The problem is that there are few safeguards in place, the promises are handshake agreements binding on no one and the people’s questions are just beginning.

Full Text:

Last week, the Courier-Observer published Pat McKeown’s editorial, “Just the Other Day,” about the proposed Bion project: a combination corn ethanol plant and 84,000 head cattle feedlot. She portrayed the project as a proven, what’s-not-to-like project. I have a lot of respect for Pat. She launched the news department at North Country Public Radio and in her reporting she left no stone unturned. Now she’s the Director of the County Chamber of Commerce and her job is different; it’s not about turning over the stones, it’s about painting the stones pretty colors. She painted Bion pretty colors because she honestly believes in the project, but why she painted those of us who are questioning the project the way she did, I don’t know. “They organize, they blog, they talk, they march.” Well, yes we do! How American is that? We think and question, too.

Pat did a good job at drawing a thumbnail sketch of the project: Bring corn in, turn it into ethanol, feed the corn waste to the cattle, burn the dried manure to distill the ethanol. Sounds like a great idea! She concluded, “Seems to me that we have a marriage: all the safeguards are in place, the people’s questions have been answered, promises have been made…So what’s the problem?” The problem is that there are few safeguards in place, the promises are handshake agreements binding on no one and the people’s questions are just beginning.

The Bion Working Group started in August as a group of 8 or 10 people who were alarmed at the prospect of one outside corporation doubling the number of cattle in the county and were interested in looking into the project. When we started to turn the stones over, we found a lot of unanswered questions.

How will the 14 million bushels of corn arrive here? Bion would like to use ships, but then there’s winter. Train would be the next best, but what happens if they have to bring it in by truck? How much of the ethanol’s potential energy will be used in this transportation?

Cattle do not live by wet distillers grains alone. They need hay and supplemental feed to keep them healthy. Where will that come from? How will the increased demand for feed and hay impact local farmers? Will it drive land prices up so that the expanding dairy farms, the backbone of the County’s agricultural economy, be adversely effected. How much of the ethanol produced will be used in its production and transportation? If the ethanol subsidies end, will the plant fold and leave us holding the bag?

At present, there are between 39,000 and 55,000 cattle in St. Lawrence County (depending on the estimate), living on thousands of acres. Bion’s 84,000 cattle will live on a total of 48 acres: 24 two acre barns. That gives them about a four by six foot space each (sort of like keeping a cow in your closet).

Conservatively, these cattle will consume about 10 gallons of water a day. That’s 840,000 gallons a day and the ethanol plant will require another 400-500,000 of gallons of water a day. Where will that come from? When concerns about the effect on local wells arose, Bion quickly said they would get it from the St. Lawrence River rather than wells that could significantly draw down the aquifer. Doesn’t that just transfer the burden from the aquifer to the already strapped Great Lakes? Even if they do use River water, how will they get that water to the farms? By truck? Failing that, maybe they can cut a deal with Evian…

That’s the supply, but where does the wastewater go? Well first it goes through Bion’s nutrient recovery system which recovers about 70% of the Phosphorous and Nitrogen. Then the water is dumped into “constructed wetlands” where the remaining nutrients are consumed by the wetlands flora and fauna. They are proposing 100 acres of constructed wetlands on each of the six facilities. What happens if we have an increase in rain and snow? Will this cause these wetlands to fail?

Speaking of failure, what’s the failure rate of the nutrient recovery system? If it fails, what’s the backup? What are the consequences of a failure? Cattle aren’t like an industrial system where you can shut the system down and fix it, they continue to eat, drink, pee, and poop.

Bion commissioned Clarkson professor Dr. Phil Hopke to conduct an odor study on the project. His conclusion was that “it appears that a facility can be constructed with a less than 3% probability of nuisance odors, but only with the addition of a combination of odor control technologies and/or greater setback distances than are currently in the generic plan for the facility.” The report continues, “There is a considerable uncertainty in the specific values of the setback distances as we do not have a specific site to evaluate or more details on odors emissions from the Bion Waste Management System process. It appears that application of odor control technology to the ventilation air from the animal feeding barns and/or the waste processing system will reduce potential odor problems substantially.”

Odor standards are also hard to pin down. Unlike other air emissions that we can measure analytically, odors are measured subjectively on a scale of 0 to 5 with 0 being no smell, 2 being “a mild odor not likely to be annoying.” These standards are determined by a panel of expert sniffers, the wine tasters of odor control field. Dr. Hopke has used a 3% probability of producing nuisance odors (those with a score greater than 2) as acceptable. Like the overview of the Bion project, it looks pretty good, but the devil is in the details. Filtering the smell from 84,000 cattle seems like a very expensive proposition. Huge concentrated animal feeding operations like this are covered by the State’s “Right to Farm” law that exempts them from nuisance odor suits, so it is difficult to hold them to any standard, particularly one so subjective.

There is also the issue of antibiotics. When animals are kept in such close quarters, any disease spreads like wildfire. To prevent this, operators treat the animals with preventative doses of antibiotics. Where do these go? If they break down, what do they break down into? DDT actually broke down relatively quickly, but it broke down into DDE which was also problematic and is still with us. Today, there is a rash of antibiotic resistant bacteria, much of it blamed on the over use of antibiotics.

The ethanol plant isn’t a teddy bear factory, either. The Sierra Club is suing several ethanol plants for violation of the Clean Air Act for excessive emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The EPA has also found unlawful amounts of carbon monoxide at other ethanol plants.

Interestingly, Bion does not operate feedlots or ethanol plants, it developed the nutrient recovery system that processes the manure. Their interest in this project is to have a platform to showcase their technology. Currently, the largest project utilizing their nutrient recovery technology is a 1,200 cow dairy farm in Texas. If this project flies, it will help them generate the business they desperately need.

Many of us are excited about the possibilities of this technology. If it had been in use at the Marks Farm south of Lowville, it’s unlikely that the massive spill there would have happened and if it had, the damage would have been considerably less. The possibility of retrofitting some of the large local dairy farms with Bion’s system is much more appealing than trucking 150,000 cattle a year in and out of the county.

Perhaps the most pressing question, though, is “Why here?” Why would Bion want to locate a corn ethanol plant and feedlot a thousand miles from the corn and the slaughterhouses? Our land is cheaper, but that savings would be lost in cost of shipping the first boat load of corn. Is it the water? Maybe, but the corn is coming from a port on the Great Lakes, the source of the water they are proposing to use here. So what does that leave? Somehow I don’t think it’s the taxes. Maybe it’s because fewer and fewer places are willing to have a feedlot. We think we know farms but I’m not sure we know feedlots.

In her editorial, Pat implied many of us question this project because we “like the old ways, the tried and true ways, days that end with dirt under their nails and hair bleached by the sun.” It’s not some vague romantic notion that brings 150 people out on a stormy night to ask questions. Pat has been a champion of economic growth in St. Lawrence County. I have been a champion of environmental quality in the county. Over the years there have been changes in both. When our interests coincide, the county wins. We get the jobs that allow our children to stay here if they choose and we preserve the environmental quality that is our hallmark.

A year and a half ago at the North Country Symposium Karen St. Hilaire said that if each employer in the County were to hire one more person, we would have full employment. So, Pat, next time you pick up your Omaha Steak catalog, think about buying a steak from Kilcoyne’s or Raquette River Bison. Your doctor will smile and you’ll keep that money right here in the county.

Robin McClellan lives in Stockholm and is a member of the Bion Working Group.

This editorial is reprinted from the Courier Observer.