While agriculture is a valuable industry, the management of waste and chemicals is causing serious problems in our nation’s water supplies.
Large farms that process animals for human consumption or who provide a commodity (like milk) from hundreds of cows, have no real way to adequately handle the huge amounts of waste produced by their animals. Most often it winds up in manure cesspools and is sprayed onto the land. This is a prime example of water pollution in action.
The runoff contaminates not only the groundwater, but any other bodies of water nearby such as streams and rivers. Eventually, all the contaminants wind up in our water supply. This is not a pretty picture – visions of cattle or pig waste floating in our cup of coffee. Just because we don’t “see” it does not mean it isn’t there. The only way to make sure we are drinking fresh and safe water is to invest in water distillers or have water distillation systems installed in our homes.
It isn’t just waste products that wind up in groundwater either, it’s the “other” things fed to the animals to make them grow faster and drive down production costs, like antibiotics. Antibiotics aren’t fed full strength to the cattle. They are fed at a lower dose than would actually be needed to treat an infection. This is sprinkled into their water and feed to prevent an outbreak of disease due to the conditions prevalent on large farms. For a really startling statistic, get this: over 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in the U.S. are fed to livestock.
If you do some quick math, that amounts to roughly 25 million pounds of drugs used annually to keep livestock healthy in questionable conditions. That is almost more than eight times the amount of drugs used for human diseases. All of the antibiotics fed to cattle, etc. has to go somewhere when it is eliminated from their bodies, and it does, onto the ground and gets washed into groundwater, etc.
The biggest problem inherent here is that when bacteria are continually exposed to low levels of antibiotics, it becomes resistant. Witness virtually all strains of Staph that are now penicillin resistant and won’t respond to newer drugs because the strains have mutated. Do you want that to wind up in your drinking water? Likely not and this is one of the major reasons to install water distillation systems in your home. For your peace of mind and security, water distillation systems will provide you with a safe source of fresh water.
Larry Wardell is with H2olabs.com, a provider of water distillers and water distillation systems. To learn more about Water distillers, water distillation systems, water purification systems, visit H2olabs.com.
