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California Über Alles / May 12, 2011
By Yasha Levine

Do you know where your turds go after you flush them down the toilet?

Well, if you are one of the 3.9 million people who live and relieve yourself in Los Angeles, you might be interested to learn that your turds are given special treatment: they’re loaded onto trucks, taken on a scenic 2.5-hour drive to a different county, and dumped on a poor hick town.

You can’t make this up, folks: Every day, Los Angeles takes 500 tons of moist, highly toxic fecal matter produced by its Obama-worshipping coastal elite and ships it 125 miles up north to GOP-dominated Kern County, where it is spread around on a small chunk of land near the town of Taft, population 6,400. It does this every single day, day after day, piling on somewhere around 200,000 tons of excrement in one year. There’s nothing covert about the practice. Everyone knows LA is doing this. In fact, the city bought the land in 2000 for about $10 million just for this reason: so that it could have somewhere to dump its feces.

Just another daily commute for 500 tons of LA shit

Los Angeles likes to think of this little chunk of Kern County real estate not as an open air septic tank, but as a seven-square-mile slice of agricultural heaven called “Green Acres Farm.” According to the official description, which you can find on a happy, bright green website run by LA Sanitation, Green Acres is a commercial farm owned by the city that engages in the “beneficial reuse” of “biosolids” as a “soil conditioner and fertilizer to help promote growth on sites where chemical fertilizers would otherwise have to be used to produce crops.”

Yes, Green Acres is a farm that fertilizes its crops exclusively with concentrated human feces—not for human consumption, mind you! Oh no, that would be disgusting and uncivilized! The crops grown on Green Acres are used as feedstock for farm animals, primarily dairy cows. Everything’s legit:

In August 2000, the City purchased a 4,688-acre farm named Green Acres in Kern County to ensure a reliable place to manage the City’s biosolids produced at the wastewater treatment plants. The farm is located approximately 16- miles southwest of Bakersfield and one mile northeast of Lake Buena Vista. The Farm has been a beneficial reuse site for biosolids generated by the City since 1994. The biosolids are used as a soil conditioner and fertilizer to help promote growth on sites where chemical fertilizers would otherwise have to be used to produce crops. Farm activities produce non-food chain crops such as wheat, corn, alfalfa, oats, Milo, and Sudan grass. After crops are harvested, they are sold as feedstock to local dairies.

Ummmm…Milk: It does a body good

If you’re not familiar with the terminology, “biosolids” is Luntzian for “concentrated sewage sludge, made up primarily of human shit and anything else solid that gets flushed down the toilet.” Aside from various toxic chemicals and carcinogenic metals, the sludge is home to all sorts of exotic bacteria that can surf on tiny fecal particles picked up by gusts of wind and spread to establish colonies for miles and miles around the dump site.

Here’s how one anti-sludge organization describes its use as fertilizer:

Land applied municipal sewage sludge is NOT humanure. Humanure is material generated in a composting toilet. Typical sludges generated in urban industrial centers contain tens of thousands of man-made chemical compounds from hospitals, industry, institutions, businesses, landfills and households who discharge into sewers. Most of these chemicals, including radioactive material, are neither monitored nor regulated. Many of them are highly toxic and persistent pollutants.

And here’s a potential side-effect:

On February 25, 2008, the McElmurrays, dairy farmers from Georgia, received an order and judgment issued by Judge Anthony Alaimo of the 11th Circuit Court. The order addresses and confirms that there have been decades of deceit by the EPA and finds against the USDA and the EPA. It acknowledges that the sludge applications on the McElmurrays’ farm were responsible for killing hundreds of diary cattle and contaminating the milk supplies in several states. In the ruling, Judge Alaimo said, “senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent and any questioning of EPA’s biosolids program.”

From 1979 until 1990, the City of Augusta spread its sewage sludge on Andy McElmurray’s diary farm. Judge Alaimo ordered the government to compensate McElmurray because 1,730 acres of his Hephzibah, Georgia, farm was ruined by the sludge. The order acknowledges that the sludge applications on the McElmurrays’ farm were responsible for killing hundreds of diary cattle and contaminating the milk supplies in several states with high levels of thallium (the primary toxin in rat poison), which had been present in the sewage sludge spread on crops fed to the dairy cows.

Los Angeles, of course, assures everyone that its operation is 100 percent safe. It’s even EPA approved! But Kern County residents still passed a law that forbids the application of sewer sludge on farmland as fertilizer anyway.  LA, which called the anti-shit law alarmist and misinformed, has been fighting Kern County in court ever since.

Yep, those rural yokels clearly don’t know what they’re talking about:

Sludge from Southern California is still being trucked to Kern County, and Los Angeles city officials say they plan to fight to continue spreading it here.

After years of legal battles and a voter-approved ban, local residents worry about the smelly goo that is still coming here by the ton.

Charles Blackwood drives north on Interstate 5 every morning, and he’s spotted the trucks hauling biosolids up from the Los Angeles area. He followed three of the big rigs Thursday morning and was so outraged that he took video.

Blackwood said the trucks were smelly, and brown material was flying out the top.

“I’m worried about ground water,” Blackwood told Eyewitness News. “And (Lake) Buena Vista is over here, kids play there.”

Blackwood can’t understand why it still happens. Kern County voters passed Measure E by 83 percent, which bans application of treated human and industrial waste on any land in the unincorporated areas of Kern County. That vote was back in 2006, and LA and some others immediately sued to stop it from being implemented.

Los Angeles is not the only coastal city dumping its excrement on the town of Taft. Orange County does, too. And true to its Republican roots, the county even contracts the job out to a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group… Didn’t the Bin Laden family have a stake in the Carlyle Group once?

PS: This is just a little sneak preview of the crazy below-the-radar shit wars that are currently being waged all across the state. Stay tuned for more…

Yasha Levine is a founding editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Want to know more? Check out some of his other stories…

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21 Comments

Add your own

  • 1. robotslave  |  May 12th, 2011 at 10:05 pm

    Citizens need to start dishing out cash money donations.

  • 2. Parl  |  May 12th, 2011 at 10:16 pm

    What do you care? Hicks are Republican.

  • 3. Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden  |  May 12th, 2011 at 11:15 pm

    Quit whining, Levine! Did you see those pics of the crops outside my execuhooch in Abbottabad? The lush maze? The delicious cantaloupe? The heavenly ganja (beats sensamilla!)? How you think we got it that good, bro? That’s right – we shit our brains out every day of the year, except during Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Lent, and August 16, when The Kang went into the shitter at Graceland. And we did it all according to the Quran (abridged) and OSHA guidelines –

    >>==> Wash after all instances of defecation. If water is scarce, use stones, papers,sharp sticks, or #2 pencils. Immature saguaro cacti will work, as will the random woodpecker and spare GBU-28. Animal bones or skins are a no-no, as are 8-track tapes.

    >>==> Make sure the fecal matter is dropped from the third floor of the holy place of shitting. Assign 72 licensed virgins to catch the shit with large nets, then to mix the shit in the crop soil.

    >>==> When harvesting, separate the crops from the holy shit. Discard the crops and eat the holy shit. Then kick back, light up, and dream of going totally shaheed in Fargo.

    Look, bro. If we could do it, SoCal can do it. What L.A. is doing to Kern County is enhancing the life of the downtrodden braceros and proles of the entire Central Valley. If anything, they should demand more of the same, if but to equal the Victor Valley in grandeur. I’ll talk to that during my world tour kickoff, slated for 12 Rajab at the Rose Bowl.

    That, in fact, is today’s Fatwah, and you can take it from me to you to the fuckin’ bank.

  • 4. JohnFigler  |  May 12th, 2011 at 11:17 pm

    Shit’s bad for the crops?… Never would have thought… Oh, wait you mean all that shit that’s not shit that goes with the shit… Talking about decadence, even the shit.

  • 5. Duarte Guerreiro  |  May 13th, 2011 at 1:43 am

    The good people at Soylent, creators of Soylent Yellow, Red and Green are proud to bring you their newest creation, Soylent Brown.

    “Soylent Brown: Homemade, because we care”

  • 6. rosie  |  May 13th, 2011 at 2:19 am

    farms in the middle ages were fertilized with human shit, but even they knew the crops weren’t safe. That’s why they boiled the shit out of everything and made “pottage”.

    Now, if medieval peasants knew this it’s pretty shocking to me that people today aren’t more worried about using our own poo on our crops. As if putting it through a cow first makes it alright. Wow

  • 7. robotslave  |  May 13th, 2011 at 3:04 am

    Citizens will not be shelling out any aw-gosh-I-luv-you-guys cash.

    Citizens will perhaps pony up a couple bucks once there’s a humiliating, groveling, front-page article begging for money, and also admitting that Exiled is holding What Citizens Want hostage, and also making a firm commitment to produce X quantity of What-Citizens-Want for Y number of Citizens’ food-service-earnings dollars.

  • 8. Ferdinand  |  May 13th, 2011 at 3:21 am

    Fuck em. American hicks deserve no better.

  • 9. Omri  |  May 13th, 2011 at 5:46 am

    “Aside from various toxic chemicals and carcinogenic metals, the sludge is home to all sorts of exotic bacteria that can surf on tiny fecal particles picked up by gusts of wind and spread to establish colonies for miles and miles around the dump site.”

    Actually, the household chemicals are a bigger problem than the shit itself. The bacteria you find in human waste finds it harder to live in anything besides human waste: the air and sun kill it. Can’t say the same about the Windex and bleach mixture, as it winds its way through the crops, and the cows, and the milk, into your child’s stomach.

  • 10. Danny Boy  |  May 13th, 2011 at 9:19 am

    “What do you care? Hicks are Republican.”

    The enemy of your enemy should be your friend. That contaminated produce is being sold back to the liberals in the city.

    A city as large and wealthy as LA should be using an Advanced Wastewater Treatment system. California could buy a peak-capacity facility for every city with a tenth of the cash it spends on prisons.

  • 11. peter  |  May 13th, 2011 at 9:42 am

    I dont care about this kind of shit. Bring the WAR NERD back!!!!!!

  • 12. wengler  |  May 13th, 2011 at 10:08 am

    No water and lots of shit? I’m California Dreamin’!

  • 13. Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden  |  May 13th, 2011 at 12:32 pm

    SHIT! Wait til I get my hands on Amal, that Yemeni bitch! Just when you tell your dumbass hammer to hustle her ass out for some fried pork rinds, an Utz pork rind barrel, BBQ pork rinds, Fat Back pork rinds, Old Time Chicharron pork rinds, and a quart of goddamned Everclear, what does the bitch do? Shows up with last month’s TV Guide and 80 uparmored Crusader dicks she thinks will be her tricks for the night. Thought I wouldn’t notice. Figured I’d never hear the bed springs. It just pisses me off.

    Today’s NYC book signing is hosed. The 12 Rajab world tour kickoff is hereby postponed. I’m heading out to Yermo to take a shit.

    SHIT!

  • 14. abc123  |  May 13th, 2011 at 2:43 pm

    “not for human consumption, mind you! Oh no, that would be disgusting and uncivilized!”

    The reason people don’t eat plants grown on human feces is in order to not spread disease. If you do that then disease from a sick person can circle around back into someone else. They do this a lot in some parts of Africa and it’s the cause of much disease. It has nothing to do with disgusting.

  • 15. Bore  |  May 13th, 2011 at 3:11 pm

    “The enemy of your enemy should be your friend. That contaminated produce is being sold back to the liberals in the city.”

    Fucking lies, you daft bastard. The liberal elite shop at Whole Foods or anywhere else expensive enough to sell “organic”.

    This article was good, but it needed more class focus. Check this shit out:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-israel-is-suppressing-a-secret-it-must-face-816661.html

    So the Israelis get rid of their shit by pumping it all over the Palestinians. As a better established, more advanced, capitalist country, though, America’s wiped out most of the original inhabitants. What to do?

    Feed it to the poor! With no natives left, they’re the new scum. Add shit-milk to the pesticides, the dubiously edible chemicals and the galleon after gloopy, endless galleon of corn syrup. No risk of collateral damage for the wealthy: they can afford the unpolluted. They’re the true humans, who don’t deserve misery.

    Or fucking quasi-Boer parasites, take your pick.

  • 16. ilovetopoop  |  May 13th, 2011 at 4:01 pm

    Another reason I’m glad I am a vegan, oh and by the way if everyone was our shit WOULD be safe to compost.

  • 17. DrunktankDan  |  May 13th, 2011 at 8:13 pm

    Everyone bitching about the WAR NERD being AWOL: fucking DONATE you useless fucks. I am broker than a broke dick dog, so I just subscribed. 7 bucks a month? What is that. . .a quarter a day? We can afford that shit. If enough people throw down than maybe they can actually count on a steady paycheck from the site. Donate here:

    http://exiledonline.com/donate.php

  • 18. DrunktankDan  |  May 13th, 2011 at 8:17 pm

    Also, I don’t know why but this story made me laugh my ass off

  • 19. Derp  |  May 13th, 2011 at 10:19 pm

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhOMFatbBaY (3:27)

    Derp derp! This reminds me of when my monarch in Fable 3 was forced to dump all the shit into Mourningwood to make 100,000 coins. But I ain’t evil or nothing, I needed the gold to fight the evil shadow monsters that were trying to kill all my citizens, derp derp!

  • 20. rossiya  |  May 16th, 2011 at 12:06 am

    This article misses the entire point. The bible itself says:

    Ezekiel 4:12
    And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

    Isaiah 36:12
    Hath my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

    Eating shit put believers into a trance-like state, so they could pen the holy bye-bull. Every dump you take is sacred material that brings Repubs are closer to god.

  • 21. jon  |  June 11th, 2015 at 5:41 pm

    simple soulution: Tell L.A. to stop shitting.


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