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Minority Journalists Learn How Dairy Turns Manure into Power
by Rob Taylor
Director of Science and Environmental Programs, ICFJ
ICFJ recently held a workshop for journalists from minority communities in Southern California. The goal: To better cover issues related to air pollution and how it affects their local communities.
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| A participant of ICFJ's air pollution training program interviews Anthony Samoes, general manager of Hilarides Dairy. The digester can be seen behind him. |
TULARE, CA—“This business smells good,” said Eduardo Stanley, editor of El Sol newspaper in Visalia, California.
That may seem like a strange comment, especially for a dairy feedlot. One in five cows in the United States lives here in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Mountains of manure on their feedlots smell bad and contribute to one of the nation’s worst regional air pollution problems.
Hilarides Dairy, home of some 8,000 cows, is combating the air quality problem by turning noxious waste into fuel.
The dairy washes cow manure into a huge lagoon covered with a green rubber tarp. This “anaerobic digester” not only traps odor and pollution, but also is expected to generate enough electricity from the digester’s methane gas to power almost 3,000 small homes.
To see for themselves, Stanley and ten other journalists toured the new dairy facility on June 21. Reporters and editors for California’s ethnic media came as part of a two-day training workshop administered in Fresno by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
The valley is struggling to find ways to reduce its pollution burdens. Largely due to its ring of mountains that trap contaminants, the valley registers some of the nation’s worst air quality for ground-level ozone and fine particles that are harmful to human health. Air quality has improved in the past decade, but continues to regularly violate federal air standards. Some people here say that the manure waste disposal system could make progress toward cleaning the air. Others say its impact would be minimal; they blame the San Francisco Bay area for causing the bulk of the valley’s
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Journalists snap pictures of the Hilarides Dairy's cows. An estimated 800 cows live here.
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air pollution.
Hilarides’ manure digester system captures smelly local pollutants in an enormous, 14-acre container capped with green rubber. Roy Sharp, a consultant who helped Hilarides Dairy set up its system, said that if it is operated correctly, the digester’s bacteria will completely convert manure to methane gas, eliminating the need to dispose of any remaining sludge. The dairy burns methane, a promoter of global warming 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, in noisy electric generators.
Sharp estimated that only about a dozen dairies in the valley use digesters, which are not required by the local air regulators.
Though farms face little regulation, the state of California is considering imposing tough new pollution control requirements on diesel trucks. Journalists rode to the dairy on a bus equipped with a trap oxidizer to eliminate most diesel pollution and they saw a similar advanced pollution trap on a Ganduglia Trucking Co. truck. Company owner Jim Ganduglia asserted that neither he nor the state of California can afford the costly new pollution-control technology that the state has proposed.
In the workshop, Journalists also heard from medical health experts, journalists, and regulators. Speakers focused on air pollution sources, health effects and how to cover them.
The San Joaquin Valley program was the third in a series of air pollution training programs for California’s ethnic media, many of them published or broadcast in languages other than English. The series has been sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. ICFJ administered the programs with assistance from New America Media and consultants Curtis Moore, editor of Health and Clean Air newsletter, and Talli Nauman, co-director of the Mexico-based not-for-profit group, Periodismo para Elevar la Conciencia Ecológica (Journalism to Raise Environmental Consciousness).
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Environment Program Participant Starts Impact Blog
Jesus Manuel Angulo began writing a blog about global-warming and other environmental issues after attending the Sustainable DeveloWorkshop in March 2007.
Jesus adds, "I should thank Rob Taylor, director of Environment programs at ICFJ; Talli Nauman, founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness and to Jim Detjen, director of Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. They were for my source of deep inspiration and interest in environment."
Immigration Participant Awarded NAHJ Journalism Award
Isabel C. Morales
was awarded the Print – Breaking News award in the 2007 NAHJ Journalism Awards for her entry “Immigration Protest”.
Isabel will be recognized on Thursday, October 4, 2007 at the 22nd Annual Noche de Triunfos Journalism Awards Gala at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, DC.
Congrats Isabel!
Former Scripps Fellow Awarded Fulbright
Former Scripps Ethics program participant Paúl Mena wins Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of South Florida, where he plans to do research on journalism ethics and training for journalists.
"As I said in the essay for the (Fulbright) application form, the ethics course I took at ICFJ in 2003 changed the way I was doing my profession," Paúl says.
Immigration Blog
Read about how immigration program participants are putting lessons learned during the April 15-24 to work at their home newsrooms on their blog at: icfj.typepad.com.
The Douglas Tweedale Memorial Fellowship
The six-week fellowship program will begin with a three-day orientation and professional program for the participant in Washington, D.C. The journalist then will depart for a two-week assignment in the newsroom of a Spanish-language media organization in the United States, followed by another assignment at a prestigious newspaper or TV station in Latin America. At the conclusion of the professional newsroom attachments, the fellow will attend a wrap-up and evaluation program which will include trainer-training techniques.
Scripps Howard Latin American Media Ethics Seminar
The overall goals of this proposed training course are to assist news media and journalists in Latin America to identify common threads of professional behavior, stimulate a dialogue about journalism independence, discuss country-specific principles of conduct, and encourage participants to reflect on their own personal code of ethics and to continue the discussion about ethics in their own newsrooms. This program is sponsored by the Scripps Howard Foundation.
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