Pollution from factory farms is another huge issue, contaminating the air, land, and water around facilities. Hog waste is particularly dangerous since it is generally not treated before being released into the environment, leading to surface and groundwater contamination. Human health can be negatively affected by factory farms. Environmental pollution disproportionately affects lower-income, minority communities who live next to or near factory farms.
The Food and Water Watch report details air pollution from broiler farms, since chicken manure contains toxins such as ammonia, which causes respiratory irritation and is linked to lung disease. Environmental pollution from factory farms is what drives these businesses into lower-income communities in the first place.
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.
Pigs are subjected to horrific conditions on factory farms, but their suffering is unseen. Learn the truth about what happens behind closed doors. What is factory farming? What happens on factory farms? Inhumane treatment Inhumane treatment occurs on factory farms wherever animal cruelty is ignored, though definitions of cruelty vary widely between stakeholders. Cows and pigs are tail-docked Animals on factory farms, such as cows, pigs, and sheep, routinely have their tails removed—a process known as tail-docking.
Animal and manure management on confinement operations, animal transport conditions , and meat processing can also contribute to food contamination and food-borne illness like E. Inhumane Practices on Factory Farms. Four or more egg-laying hens are packed into a battery cage, a wire enclosure so small that none can spread her wings. Pregnant sows spend each of their pregnancies confined to a gestation crate—a metal enclosure that is scarcely wider and longer than the sow herself.
Unable to even turn around, sows develop abnormal behaviors, and suffer leg problems and skin lesions. Growing pigs are confined to slatted, bare, concrete floors. Fish are also kept in crowded conditions that encourage stress, injury and disease. Further, fish suffer from the misconception that they do not feel pain. They are killed without being stunned first — either by force, suffocation, freezing or being allowed to bleed out.
Workers process salmons on a production line at a salmon farm on Sept. In addition to harming the farm animals themselves, factory farming also takes a toll on the planet as a whole.
In fact, the practice contributes to many of our most pressing environmental crises including pollution, habitat and biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. The conditions animals face at factory farms extend to their surroundings. So many animals kept in close quarters generate lots of manure, and this manure is first stored in ponds and then spread on fields as fertilizer.
However, environmental advocates say that these farms generate more manure than the soil can actually handle, and the rest enters waterways as runoff. This can lead to nutrient pollution, which encourages the growth of harmful algae that deprives water of oxygen, causing dead zones where no life can flourish. In fact, factory farming was blamed for the largest-ever "dead zone" in U. Pollutants from animal waste such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia can also enter the air and threaten the health and well being of farmworkers and the surrounding community.
Animals raised for human consumption also need to eat. Usually, that food takes the form of either corn or soy, and growing it uses up a lot of land.
In the U. This is an issue that has major global ramifications. Without meat and dairy consumption, it would be possible to feed the world's population while reducing farmland by more than 75 percent. And the expansion of factory farming is a major cause of biodiversity loss. Clearing trees for cattle ranching is responsible for two-thirds of Amazon deforestation. The production of soy to feed livestock is also a major contributor to deforestation. Emissions and land use mean that factory farming is a major contributor to the climate crisis.
The livestock sector as a whole is responsible for Forty-five percent of those emissions come from feed production and processing and 39 percent from the release of methane by cows and other ruminants.
The world's five biggest meat and dairy companies have an equal carbon footprint to ExxonMobil, and the world's top 20 livestock companies emit more than the UK, France or Germany.
The coronavirus pandemic has shown a spotlight on how human exploitation of the environment puts human health at risk. Factory farming is a perfect example of this as it threatens human health in many ways, from encouraging the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria to spreading pandemics. The overcrowding in factory farms has led to an overuse of antibiotics in order to prevent disease from spreading among animals.
In fact, 73 percent of antibiotics worldwide are used on animals. In , almost 11 million kilograms of antibiotics and 5. Bacteria can develop resistance to these drugs and then spread from animals to humans both through consumption and through run-off pollution from manure.
Drug resistant bacteria currently kill , people a year. Factory farming can encourage the spread of pandemics in two ways. First of all, the destruction of wild areas for agriculture increases the chance that humans will come into contact with new pathogens. Further, crowded conditions on farms cultivate diseases that may develop and spread. The H1N1 swine flu that killed , to , people in has been linked to a strain that emerged on U.
The conditions on factory farms can harm human health in other ways. Pathogens like E. In fact, the grain beef cattle are fed before slaughter increases their risk of E.
Further, there is debate over whether the use of hormones to stimulate growth and milk production in cows increases the risk of breast, prostate and colon cancer in humans. The factory farm system doesn't just exploit animals and the planet — it also exploits the humans that work in the industry and the communities that surround it. Factory farming is often an example of environmental racism , in which low-income communities of color are targeted for exposure to unsafe conditions and pollutants.
Many slaughterhouse workers are low-income people of color who do not have many other employment options. Often they are undocumented and face deportation if they speak out about working conditions. The work can be stressful and dangerous. Workers can repeat the same motion 40, to , times per shift, and there are an average of two amputations per month in the industry. The vulnerability of these workers was made apparent during the coronavirus pandemic, when infections broke out at several meat packing plants in the U.
The rise of factory farming has diminished rural communities in the U. Smaller family farms cannot compete with the larger operations, and mechanized agriculture means that they offer fewer jobs.
Further, the smaller businesses that supported family farms, like equipment sellers or local restaurants, have also closed down. For those who remain, conditions are often unhealthy.
Pollution from lagoons storing animal waste can cause health impacts like headaches, respiratory problems, skin infections, birth defects and premature death. For example, people in North Carolina who live near hog farms have higher death rates than people who live further away. Hog farming is concentrated in the U. South and Midwest, particularly North Carolina and Iowa. Broiler chicken farming is heavily concentrated on Maryland's Eastern Shore, while the top states for cattle feedlots are Nebraska, Texas, Kansas, Iowa and Colorado.
Worldwide China is the world's leading meat producer, followed by the U. China has rapidly expanded its pork production in particular, and this includes pork factory farms.
In the last 30 years, the country has undergone a similar process of consolidation as the U. S did during the second half of the 21st century: Between and , the total number of hog farms in China decreased by 70 percent , while the number of pigs living on those farms increased exponentially.
There is a growing movement to shift away from the factory farming model and towards more humane and sustainable forms of agriculture.
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