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LOS ANGELES (AP) - Green Acres is a farm where corn stalks grow twice as tall as men and wheat sprouts lush and green. It's also, in a sense, an outhouse for about 3.7 million people.
Every year, Los Angeles trucks about 65 million gallons of sludgy processed human waste to be spread as fertilizer on several thousand acres it owns to the north in agricultural Kern County. That's enough to fill a toilet about the size of an Olympic swimming pool every four days.
Kern County residents voted in June to stop accepting all but a fraction of the treated waste, but Los Angeles responded this month with a federal lawsuit. The initiative should be thrown out, the metropolis claims, because it discriminates against the city's "nutrient-rich organic materials."
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