Why factory farming

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Please do bear with us if this is the case. Factory farming Why does factory farming still exist? Ending factory farming Why does factory farming still exist? Read more. Sign up for our newsletter. Keep informed about urgent actions and other ways to help. Sign Up. Our Christmas cards featuring beautiful artworks by Rachel McNaughton are available now.

Lamb, beef, and pork do the most damage to the planet through their production, manufacturing, and transport. The most environmentally-friendly choice of meat is poultry, with chicken being the most sustainable option of them all. You can make other eco-friendly choices that aren't even related to eating meat.

Taking up practices like recycling and composting can make a positive difference, and you should use reusable products whenever you can. You can also try carpooling or public transportation to reduce your own carbon emissions. Pasiakos, Stefan et al. Gerber, P. J et al. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile.

Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Factory farms operate off of the assumption that people in these places will put up less of a fight than more affluent, white-dominated areas. This is an example of environmental racism. Human health is further affected by factory farms through the bacterial contamination of meat, such as salmonella and E.

Antibiotic resistance is another looming health threat. Animals are often given antibiotics throughout their lives as a preventative measure against illness. Trace amounts of these bacteria may be eaten directly by consumers of factory-farmed products, causing severe, sometimes incurable illness. The United Nations estimates antibiotic resistance could kill 10 million people and force 24 million people into extreme poverty by Many rural communities in the United States trace their origins to small farms, composed of an interdependent economic ecosystem of small farms and businesses that support them.

But small farms have difficulty competing with CAFOs, since smaller operations generally cannot deliver products to match the low prices and high volumes that factory farms are able to achieve—especially when CAFOs produce a surplus of product, resulting in artificially lowered prices and driving small farms out of business.

As a result, across America the number of farms has dramatically decreased since the onset of factory farming in the early s, while the number of animals at remaining farms has increased steadily.

The closing of small farms often affects other businesses that provide farm equipment, feed, or services such as restaurants and movie theaters to rural communities. Factory farms also provide fewer jobs than smaller farms, given the high degree of mechanization that allows fewer people to manage more animals. These compounding factors can lead communities to become hollowed out and all but collapsed because of factory farms. Workers in factory farms tend to live in rural, lower-income communities composed of people of color who often come from immigrant backgrounds and can be undocumented.

Farmworkers also tend to be among the least unionized in the country. As a result, thousands of people lost their lives and likely brought the infection home to their families and communities. Factory farms do little to mitigate these and other health risks for workers, or for the communities they call home. The federal Humane Slaughter Act is supposed to ensure that animals are rendered unconscious before they are bled out or dismembered. However, these regulations are not readily enforced by USDA.

The agency often defers to the factory farming industry to regulate itself. Even at the best of times, a trip to the slaughterhouse can mean more than a quick and painless death. Some chickens are forced to endure live-shackle slaughter , where their legs are jammed into metal clamps and hung upside down, often resulting in broken bones. A conveyor belt carries them toward an electrified bath of water, where their heads are dunked. The bath is supposed to stun them; however, many birds avoid this bath or are not properly stunned and remain conscious for the slaughter, when their throats are slit and their abused bodies thrown into scalding hot water meant to de-feather them.

This is perhaps the single greatest cause of animal suffering in slaughterhouses. Cattle are commonly killed using a stun-gun or stunner , which is essentially a gun with a retractable bolt instead of a bullet.

This bolt is fired into the brain between the eyes of a cow, rendering them braindead. There is a lot to learn about factory farming, and given the sheer size of this growing industry, the numbers are often difficult to fathom. Below are a few facts and statistics that form a brief snapshot of intensive animal agriculture.

There are many actions you can take to help put a stop to factory farming. Here are a few ways you can connect with The Humane League to end the abuse of animals raised for food:. No matter where you live or what skills you bring to the table, everyone is welcome to join the fight for a more just food system.

Factory farming has many downsides for humans, animals, and the environment. The practice is perpetuated by multinational corporations and backed in large part by world governments and the political establishment. A food system without factory farms—which would be far more equitable and just, and far less damaging to people, animals, and the environment—is long overdue.

Perhaps more problematically, repeatedly planting the same crop invites pests that prey on a certain plant to wait around the same spot for their favorite food to return. What are conventional farmers left to do to avoid pests? Apply pesticides. Planting pesticide-tolerant GMO crops enables farmers to blanket the landscape with chemicals without damaging their corn or soy. Speaking of corn and soy, many U. The environmental impacts of industrial crop farming and CAFOs are significant. There is soil depletion and soil infertility related to monoculture, soil erosion, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, increased greenhouse gas emissions particularly methane and nitrous oxide from cow digestion and manure as well as nitrogen-based fertilizers , and pesticide overuse leading to potential pesticide toxicity especially in farmworkers.

Studies show that employees of CAFOs are at risk from potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria ; workers can also bring these bacteria home.

Farmworkers and local communities can also be exposed to hazardous fumes wafting from unlined, uncovered pits of animal waste and other sources.

And despite the fact that CAFOs often must meet permitting requirements and are regulated by both state and federal agencies, NRDC has discovered a worrying lack of transparency. Discrepancies between data collected by states and the EPA suggest the EPA is unaware of the size, number, and location of CAFOs across the country and what those operations are doing to control pollution.

Here are some areas of particular concern. All that waste has to go somewhere. Many hog and dairy farms maintain huge pools of liquid manure and urine and often dispose of waste simply by spreading it over the fields. As a result, farmers often apply too much, the soil fails to absorb all of the phosphorus and nitrogen, and the excess nutrients seep into groundwater or run off into waterways, which empty into the sea.

The feces is higher in phosphorus than other animal waste and pollutes waterways with runoff. The nutrients in the sea then trigger an overgrowth of algae. In a harmful algal bloom , algae and algaelike bacteria can release toxins harmful to people, pets, and the ecosystem as a whole. As the algae toxic and nontoxic eventually die off, aerobic bacteria use oxygen to decompose them.

The result is aquatic dead zones , which have been getting larger and more frequent in recent decades, and. Additionally, manure lagoons are vulnerable to spilling over during extreme weather. If the manure line rises too high, a heavy rain will overtop the lagoon, flooding the surrounding area with dangerous animal waste. Overtopping events happen with alarming frequency. In Hurricane Floyd caused severe flooding and compromised more than 50 manure lagoons in North Carolina. It also killed many tens of thousands of hogs.

The waste-laden floodwaters exposed communities to bacteria, a microbial threat that persisted even after the waters receded. In Hurricane Matthew hit the state and caused damage visible from space, partially submerging 10 industrial pig farms that included 14 open-air pits holding millions of gallons of liquid hog manure.

In September , Hurricane Florence compromised or put at risk hog lagoons. When combined with sewage, the disaster dumped more than 39 million gallons of waste into the Cape Fear River Basin, a source of drinking water to large North Carolina communities like Fayetteville and Wilmington.

Industrial farms overuse antibiotics, feeding large amounts of the drugs—often the same ones used to treat human illnesses—to healthy animals to help them survive in crowded, dirty CAFOs. In some cases, pathogens have developed resistance to all available antibiotics. Resistant bacteria can then spread to human populations such as the communities neighboring these farms.

They contaminate the soil. Despite the growing awareness of these risks, many big companies that dictate practices at CAFOs continue to require operators to use antibiotics that are important to human medicine. Studies in the United States and around the world have shown that industrial farming has become the leading source of particulate matter air pollution , which can penetrate human lungs and enter the circulatory system.

CAFOs also emit industrial-level amounts of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia released by the massive amounts of animal waste , yet they are exempt from the laws that require other industries to disclose these emissions and reduce outdoor air pollution.