First Shipments of Sewage Sludge Arrive : Antelope Valley: Los Angeles begins trucking the material to a farm near Lancaster, where a city-hired contractor will use it to fertilize alfalfa and sod.

A tractor pulling a 3,600-gallon tank rumbled onto remote farmland in the Antelope Valley Monday to pump into the earth Los Angeles’ newest and smelliest export--gooey, black municipal sewage sludge.

The tractor slowly drove up and down the rows of an abandoned field, plunging metal prongs about a foot into the ground to inject the fecal-smelling, mudlike byproduct of human waste.

This use of treated sewage as fertilizer is the first local attempt by Los Angeles to prove that something good can grow from efforts to get rid of a foul problem.

Under a program nearly two years in development, the city began trucking up to 100 tons a day of its sewage sludge to a farm about 10 miles west of Lancaster, where a city-hired contractor plans to use the waste as fertilizer for alfalfa and sod.

The thick sludge is the remnant of human waste and other sewage that has undergone a complex treatment process. Health officials will not allow it to be used as fertilizer on crops grown for human consumption.

The program marks the first time Los Angeles has applied its sludge to land within the county. Although the city’s main goal is to dispose of its waste, officials said that sludge can benefit agriculture and help farms cut their water use by serving as a kind of mulch.

Also, the city, which has been trucking sludge to farms in Arizona, hopes to cut its costs by not shipping it so far. Officials hope that keeping the sludge within the county, rather than hauling it far away, will show residents that the waste can be safely reused.

The first three 25-ton truckloads made the 90-mile trip without incident from the city’s main Hyperion sewage treatment plant in El Segundo to Antelope Valley. Once there, the sludge in the trucks is mixed with water to flow more easily and is pumped into a spreading tank.

“We’re trying to be good neighbors,” said Don Price, regional manager for Bio Gro Systems Inc., the waste management company hired by the city to manage the sludge program. The city is paying Bio Gro about $60,000 a month to truck the sludge to Bio Gro’s 640-acre farm in the Antelope Valley.

City residents produce about 1,350 tons of sludge a day. The city dumped the waste into Santa Monica Bay for about 30 years until a federal lawsuit halted the practice in late 1987. Now, in addition to the farms, the city uses its remaining sludge as cover at the BKK landfill in West Covina.

The sludge proposal caused a furor in March when surprised Antelope Valley officials learned that Los Angeles was planning to export up to 300 tons a day to five sites. In May, the state water board approved a scaled-down request for one site and 100 tons per day.

In an attempt to avoid complaints even in the remote farm area, Bio Gro abandoned its earlier plan to spread the sludge on the surface of the soil, where it has a stronger fecal smell and could be blown in high winds. The firm opted to use a tank truck to inject it underground.

Bio Gro plans up to four truck trips every weekday from Hyperion to the Antelope Valley, Price said. Although the program started using dump trucks covered with tarps, Price said Bio Gro soon plans to shift to tanker trucks to minimize the possibility of sludge spills.