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<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n(Sherburne, NY \u2013 Feb. 2013) Late last November, The Nation published an article by Elizabeth Royte, in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an investigative reporting nonprofit focusing on food, agriculture and environmental health.\u00a0 Highlights from that article include:<\/p>\n
The story of Jacki Schilke and her 60 Black Angus cattle in North Dakota, and what has happened to them since fracking began on 32 oil and gas wells within three miles of her 160-acre ranch. \u00a0Five of her cows dropped dead.<\/p>\n
Schilke limps, has chronic pain in her lungs, rashes that have lingered for a year, back pain linked to overworked kidneys, and on some mornings she urinates a stream of blood.\u00a0 Her blood tested positive for acetone, arsenic, and germanium. She and her husband have recently lost crowns and fillings from their teeth; tooth loss is associated with radiation poisoning and high selenium levels, also found in the Schilkes\u2019 water.\u00a0 State health and agriculture officials told her she had nothing to worry about, but her doctors have diagnosed her with neurotoxic damage and constricted airways.<\/p>\n
A 2012 peer-reviewed report by Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell\u2019s College of Veterinary Medicine, suggesting a link between fracking and illness in food animals.\u00a0 The authors compiled case studies of 24 farmers in six shale-gas states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive, and acute gastrointestinal problems.\u00a0 Scores of animals have died.\u00a0 Animals that live in contaminated areas enter into the food system, and \u2026 the contaminating chemicals could appear in meat and milk products made from these animals.<\/p>\n
In Louisiana, 17 cows died after an hour\u2019s exposure to spilled fracking fluid.<\/p>\n
In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater.\u00a0 Approximately 27 cows died; the remainder produced 11 calves, of which only three survived.<\/p>\n
In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed.\u00a0 Half their calves were born dead. The following year\u2019s animal births were sexually skewed, with 10 females and two males, instead of the usual 50-50 or 60-40 split.<\/p>\n
Hair testing of sick cattle that grazed around well pads in New Mexico found petroleum residues in 54 of 56 animals.<\/p>\n
Cattle that die on the farm don\u2019t make it into the nation\u2019s food system, but they\u2019re often rendered to make animal feed for chickens and pigs.\u00a0 Herd mates that appear healthy, despite being exposed to the same compounds, do, and farmers aren\u2019t required to prove their livestock are free of fracking contaminants before middlemen purchase them.\u00a0 Bamberger and Oswald consider these animals sentinels for human health, because they have more frequent reproductive cycles, making toxic effects visible much sooner than in humans.<\/p>\n
On Jan. 30, Mother Jones published a piece by Tom Philpott on the connection between food and fracking, specifically Big Ag\u2019s heavy reliance on nitrogen fertilizer, which is synthesized in a process that uses natural gas.<\/p>\n
According to Philpott, when conventional US natural gas sources were drying up in the early 2000s and prices were spiking, the US fertilizer industry took their operations to places like Trinidad and Tobago, where conventional natural gas was still relatively plentiful, but that supply is now waning.\u00a0 Natural gas produced from fracking, at a time when U.S. prices are historically low, has the potential to create a huge supporter of the fracking industry in the form of Big Ag growers that need a cheap source of synthetic nitrogen.\u00a0 Companies that produce nitrogen fertilizers are now investing billions in new plants, and receiving millions in tax incentives.<\/p>\n
Philpott cites an Associated Press article that states it takes about $82 worth of natural gas to make a ton of anhydrous ammonia, which sells for about $800 per ton.<\/p>\n
Last, but definitely not least, Shale Shock Media reported last week that the NYS DEC is not playing fair, further cementing suspicions that they have no real interest in or incentive to protect us.<\/p>\n
The DEC apparently claimed to have lost a 1997 draft of regulations governing the fracking industry.\u00a0 However, this set of regulations was just recently produced after a FOIL request, which the DEC initially denied, only to be overturned on appeal.\u00a0 Turns out the earlier regs were much more comprehensive and protective of both the environment and landowners\u2019 rights than are the current draft regulations being considered by Gov. Cuomo, after years of intensive lobbying by the gas industry.<\/p>\n