Having been a number of times to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I can say without reserve that it’s one of the most diverse – and because of that diversity, interesting – places to farm in the U.S.  It’s the one of the 10 largest milk-producing counties in the entire U.S., and the only one east of the Mississippi.  But what really makes it interesting is the contrast between the Amish and Mennonite farmers who dairy there, right next to their modern brethren.  You have the 21^st century colliding, sometimes literally, with farming practices that mostly are from the pre-industrial 18^th century.

The New York Times made note of this too, earlier in the month, when it wrote a story about how the Environmental Protection Agency is essentially pushing the Amish to clean up their act, where manure handling is concerned.  Because the Amish milk a lot of cows in Lancaster, and because they tend not to employ state of the art manure handling systems, they are now being singled out as one of the reasons why the Chesapeake Bay has water quality issues.  As the story notes:

According to E.P.A. data from 2007, the most recent available, the county generates more than 61 million pounds of manure a year. That is 20 million pounds more than the next highest county on the list of bay polluters, and more than six times that of most other counties.

The real rub in the story is that state and federal officials want the Amish and Mennonites to utilize grant money to help improve land and water quality practices, but because they are resistant to government interference, the Old Order people don’t want that involvement.  That’s understandable, but the government is going to work on cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay one way or the other, and that manure from Lancaster is a visible target.

Although the story didn’t mention it, it indirectly raises another issue, which is that it’s not fair to automatically assume that small farms are good for the environment, while larger farms – say, CAFO-size operators with lagoons – are bad.  Larger operators usually have to have a nutrient management permit, while smaller farms, whether they are Amish-owned or not, usually don’t have to deal with the issue.  That means the adverse environmental impact of 20 50-cow dairies that are unregulated may be greater than one 1,000 cow farm that does have regular monitoring and a nutrient management plan in place.

Diversity in farming, as in other businesses, is a good and welcome thing, but the expectation is that everyone has to be held to account for their impact on society, environmentally and otherwise.  That’s a modern fact of life that we all have to live with.

So it’s been about six weeks now since the BP Deepwater Horizon well blew its top and began the still ceaseless process of spewing out crude oil.  The big question now, apart from when British Petroleum will finally get the well plugged or otherwise under control, is this:  Will the political fallout from this event last longer than the environmental fallout?  And who really will be stuck cleaning up the mess, environmentally, politically and otherwise?

None of those questions is answerable now.  While the similarities with Hurricane Katrina are rather facile and forced, there are some valid comparisons in the Gulf of Mexico:  damage that will take years to amend (even as some things may never be “normal” again); the similar vulnerability of a rig drilling a well in 5,000 ft. of water, with a city that lies under sea level, both incredibly vulnerable to the forces of nature; and the fact that federal authorities have appeared inept in preparing for, and now responding to, the dimensions of the crisis.

There is another similarity at work right now with the BP disaster, and that is with the Conklin dairy farm in Ohio.  Last week, an animal rights group released disturbing film of a worker sadistically abusing cattle at the farm.  The authorities have thrown the book at him, sending him off to jail with a $100,000 bond and a trial likely in the future. 

What that incarcerated individual, Billy Joe Gregg, and the individual well in the Gulf of Mexico have in common is that they serve as cautionary tales for what can happen if you don’t make good choices about the practices you use.  While drilling deep ocean wells and working on a farm are quite different, both are ultimately systematic activities where workers follow a prescribed series of behaviors to achieve an optimal outcome.  Clearly, the person in the Ohio video was out of control and apparently was committing crimes, while the jury is still out on the whether the BP rig was operated according to law and regulation. 

But in both cases, the outcome of an isolated incident smears the entire industry in which they operate.  And both raise an important question that every business owner, small or large, needs to ask more frequently:  Who’s in charge? (The Wall St. Journal wrote an extensive story last week indicating that during the explosion and collapse of the Horizon, no one appeared to be.)  Hindsight is 20/20, but in both cases, something went terribly wrong because the system failed.

Bad apples, be they farms or derricks, are painful learning experiences.  People will forgive the appearance of one in the barrel, but not the same mistakes being repeated time and again.  And meanwhile, the fallout spews out.