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Consequences of factory farms
Consequences of factory farms
Negative impacts on factory farming research paper
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Thousands of people die each year due to the way our meat products are being handled. Animals are being forced to live in poor conditions and they are given drugs and food that are unnatural. The cow herd size has increase 8 times more than it was 16 years ago and two percent of livestock farms now raise 40% of the animals in the United States (Weaver). These statistics are painting a picture of the industry that the beef market has created. The way that these industries are running is having a negative impact on both the animals and society.
Living in Idaho, it is normal to see a few cows. For the most part, I will see cows in open fields just eating the vegetation around them. The owner of Polyface Farms, Joel Salatin, talks about how a cow’s life should be logically lived. They are raised in fields where they have plenty of grass, cloves, and herbs to eat. While in these fields they are fertilizing the land and they are harvesting their own food source. No one needs to plant corn, harvest corn, ship the corn, and find a place for all of the manure. Logically, Salatin’s notion makes perfect sense. We don’t have to ship the food across the county and it isn’t a struggle to figure out where to put all of the manure. Cows don’t naturally eat corn and by eating corn they are gaining more problems than they had before. If cows were to eat grass for just 5 days, the amount of E. Coli was be decreased by 80% (Kenner, Pearce and Schlosser). AFO stands for Animal Feeding Operations. These are defined when animals are raised and confined situations. These places congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area (What is a CAFO?). Many CAFOs are extremely unsanitary and occasionally co...
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.... Prod. CA] : Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2009. [Los Angeles. 2008.
Hoffman, Mathew. Safer Food for a Healthier You. n.d. 11 December 2013. .
Smith, Tara C. Growth Hormones in Milk: Myth/Fact. 19 June 2012. 11 December 2013. .
Staff, CNN. FDA hopes to curb antibiotic use on farms. 11 December 2013. 2013 December 2013. .
Weaver, Scott. Cow Country: The Rise of the CAFO in Idaho. 1 September 2010. 11 December 2013. .
What is a CAFO? 10 September 2012. 10 December 2013. .
The movie takes a strong stance on sustainable farming, so much that one might be able to say that is the agenda of the movie. They mostly speak of a specific farm called Polyface Farms in Virginia. What they do there is they use the same plot of land for multiple animals. Each of them use it at a different time. They have a process called the Pigerator. It is not a huge big, scary process; it is simple. Cows are in the barn during the winter, and they make waste. When they take the cows out, they mix corn into the manure to ferment it. Later, when the pigs come in, the pigs dig looking for the fermented corn, thereby mixing the manure into usable “fertilizer”.(American Meat) They also
Carleton, Don, comp. Dolph Briscoe My Life in Texas Ranching and Politics. Austin: UTT, 2008. Print.
Joel Salatin is a 57 year old farmer who has been farming full time since 1982 on his farm “Polyface” which is located in Swoope, VA, where he is somewhat of a local legend in farming. “The farm services more than 5,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing” (Salatin, Polyface.com). Mr. Salatin utilizes a unique method of farming, a fact which makes him so profoundly interesting. The style in which he farms his land is termed “mob grazing”. Mob grazing is the process in which different animals are rotated at different times throughout the farms’ fields. He is an advocate not just for the human well being but for the world’s ecological sustainability and the continuance of growth.
...in the market. Diversified mid-sized family farms used to produce most of our meat, but now, only a few companies control the livestock industry. This has resulted in driving family farmers out of the market and replacing them with massive confined feeding operations that subject the animals to terrible living conditions that subject our food to contamination. Major food corporations are only concerned with minimizing overhead in order to deliver the consumer cheap food, regardless of the health implications.
Fast food consumption is taking America by a storm and it is for the sake of our lives. Fast food relies heavily on industrialized corn because of how cheap and easy to grow it is. With that being said, animals are being fed with corn rather than being fed with grass. In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Rich Blair who runs a “cow-calf” operation s...
Laliberte, Richard. "Growth Hormones in Beef and Milk." WeightWatchers.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2013. .
...the extra use of arsenal drugs due since these cattle are unable to process corn. Raising cattle evidently conflicts with the logic of nature because these cattle are equipped with a very highly complex system that has evolved to transform the nutrients of the plants from photosynthesis to transferring these nutrients to the meat that Americans eat. Growing livestock animals on grass act in mutual relationship because each organism has its own natural way of contributing to the food chain, essentially bettering the health of their own cyclic complex system but also the health of the consumers. Nonetheless, the organic method is far too time and money consuming that farmers are now using a cheap commodity that is used in almost everything, Americans are in fact “walking corn.”
Visser, Nick. "After Fears Of Antibiotic Resistance, 25 Drug Companies To Phase Out Use In Livestock." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 20 May 2014. .
As a result, individuals in America have extra income to spend on desired items and help the economy to maintain its economic advantage. An increase in food prices would affect everyone’s level of disposable income and would reduce consumer spending in other industries. Therefore, decreased consumer spending would cause companies to downsize and unemployment would increase. After evaluating the consequences of these regulations it is evident that the success of our economy in America is far more important than ethical treatment of meat.
The meat packing industry in the U.S is one of the top industries that make an example of bringing corruption to new heights. According to the article “Corrupt American Food Industry is too powerful”, the meat packing industry obtains far more power than what should be acquired. The people of America have the right to know what process the meat they are consuming goes through in order for it to sit in their refrigerators. The American people should have the right to know what kind of cruel difficulties come into play when it comes down to the meat industry. The largest meat packing industries make their money by slaughtering animals, and harming living beings behind closed doors. “Welcome to the land of the free, where we consider prioritizing money over clean resources and human and animal welfare” (Ray1) is used to demonstrate the way the meat packing industry within the Unites States operates (1).
as pastoral farmers are faced with declining amounts of land and water for their cattle,
Wagner, C. L., Anderson, D. M., & Pittard III, W. B. (June 1996). Special properties of human milk. Clinical Pediatrics , p 283.
Swan, S.H., F. Liu, J.W. Overstreet, C. Brazil, and N.E. Skakkebaek. "Growth Hormones Fed to
It is estimated that over one-half of the antibiotics in the U.S. are used in food animal production. The overuse of antimicrobials in food animal production is an under-appreciated problem. In both human and veterinary medicine, the risk of developing resistance rises each time bacteria are exposed to antimicrobials. Resistance opens the door to treatment failure for even the most common pathogens and leads to an increasing number of infections. The mounting evidence of the relationship between antimicrobial use in animal husbandry and the increase in bacterial resistance in humans has prompted several reviews of agricultural practices by scientific authorities in a number of countries, including the US.
When these agricultural resources are given to the animals involved in meat production, these resources are lost. Besides the loss of land, the process of animal production is contributing to pollution and other greenhouse gases that are doing irreplaceable damage to the environment and contribute to untold negative health