Right on Richard!! I never cease to be amazed at the illogical leap so may folks make. They site the fact that so and so did such and such and nothing bad was noticed so it must be a great idea to do it. If you saw three guys each play Russian Roulette and all survived then I guess Russian Roulette must be a smart idea. You can walk across the street without looking, especially in a rural area, but if you keep it up, eventually a quiet vehicle is gonna make you into freeway pizza.
In the original problem statement there was concern for fines getting into the gravel. Gravel (or tire chunks or whatever) should always be covered with geotextile prior to backfiling to prevent that. Some folks even put a few inches of sand on top of the geotextile before backfilling (belt and suspenders or a double bagger if you are familiar with THAT term)
Stock, in a confined area, can really pack the soil so tight that it will lose porosity and inhibit the transevaporation (??) combination of transpiration of moisture by plants on the surface and evaporation. I was cautioned that if I drove my tractor across the leach field to do so across the ditches not along them to reduce compaction.
Raw sewage is not a good idea for fertilizer. Properly composted waste (human or otherwise) is great stuff. With a properly functioning septic system where the effluent does not reach the surface without proper filtration through ample soil, the grass grown thereon should not cause a problem for man or beast. Where you get into problems is with systems like grey water in sprinklers or septic effluent on the surface either by accident or some darned fool irrigating with it because, after all, the Japanese carry "honey buckets" of human waste to their fields.
Viri that infect people do not live in/infect plants. A plant can have its roots in virus tainted water but its upper growth will not contain any viri. Grass, OK. Carrots, radishes, and other root crops, NOT OK! If you sprinkle the surface with virus contaminated water such as from the laundry, shower, septic tank, or whatever you physically contaminate the vegetable matter and washing well enough to remove the contamination is hard to impossible to accomplish (even with the soaps being sold for washing vegies) without ruining the food.
A local town (Wanette, OK) has just had a new waste water treatment plant constructed and no longer has raw sewage overflows into a creek feeding the South Canadian river. They treat the effluent in the new "Plant" and store it in a tank till time to irrigate a cooperating farmer's 80 acre hay field. They spray his field when it is growing and "hold off" when he is cutting and making hay. After he gets the bales out of his field they start spraying again. This system is fully certified and safe. The water being sprayed is not biologically active (nothing alive in it). In theory you could drink some with no harmfull effects except aesthetic concerns (in my case throwing up, I have a psychological problem with drinking waste, others might feel differently???).
Patrick
