Slurry Tales: Newspaper Coverage of Livestock Slurry Reproduces Public Discourse on Agriculture in Germany

Abstract

The rapid transition of livestock husbandry in the 20th century involved a broad adoption of slurry-based livestock housing systems that resulted in farm economic benefits, but also in societal debate related to the environment and animal welfare. In this article, we apply the method of topic modeling to four major German newspapers to identify thematic emphases and changes in coverage around “slurry”. We considered more than 2300 articles published between 1971 and 2020. Our results show that reporting encompasses economic, environmental, and social topics in which slurry is represented mostly critically (“poisonous substance”), occasionally neutrally (“scent of countryside”), or rarely positively (“input for the bioeconomy”). Three meta-themes overarch the majority of issues and reflect public discourse on agriculture: (i) the dichotomy of agricultural industrialization and family farming; (ii) contrasting actualities of factory farming and animal welfare; and (iii) the responsibility of policy for the emergence, existence and solution of livestock and slurry-related problems. A more balanced recognition of mutual values and constraints by the media could contribute to a discursive reconciliation of public and private interests.

Modeling the environmental impacts of Asparagopsis as feed, a cow toilet and slurry acidification in two synthetic dairy farms

“…Our study focused on two synthetic conventional specialized dairy farms averaged on the basis of data from two German federated states, Lower Saxony (district Diepholz, DH) and Brandenburg (district Oder-Spree, OS), to account for the differences in the reduction potentials caused by the abatement measures. The farms differed in farm characteristics as a result of different political developments in East and West Germany before Germany's reunification in 1990 [ 59 ]. Compared with farms in Lower Saxony in Western Germany, farms in Brandenburg (Eastern Germany) are larger on average and have a greater livestock number, a larger field size, and larger machinery but also lower crop yields due to poorer soils [ 5 ].…”