The Cost of Industrialized Animal Farming For Humanity
Factory style meat production is the primary source of animal protein in the western world. As the demand for cheap meat and dairy has increased, so has the severity of the means in which we attain it. Globally, approximately fifty-billion animals, not including those of the aquatic variety, are slaughtered for food. A number that staggering will invariably have environmental, economic, health, and ethical consequences, arguably ones that far exceed what is within the realm of manageable for living organisms and Earth. Even without considering how factory farming is directly detrimental to humans and animals, the damage that is done to our Earth is immense and undeniable. Between deforestation, the harmful amounts of methane gas emitted from animal waste, and resources used to sustain the animals causing drinkable water shortages, factory farming is on track to occupy half of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
Regardless of our president believing in it or not, the most recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports display stark warnings and urgency for environmental reform on a global scale. There are a select few massive and monopolizing companies that would like us as consumers to believe that climate change is a result of our use of straws and not recycling our plastic bags, but the reality is that only one-hundred companies are responsible for seventy-one percent of climate change. Of that seventy-one percent, forty-five percent is exclusively from factory farming, making it one of the world’s biggest polluters, neck in neck with the oil companies. What is within our power as consumers is drastically decreasing the demand for cheap animal products sequentially causing factory farms, and their methods obsolete. According to comprehensive research done on the effects of our current food system, to avoid dangerous climate change, the western world would need to cut its meat intake by whopping ninety percent. Professor Tim Benton at the university of Leeds says, “the environmental burden of the current food system undermines the ability of future generations to live on a stable and ecologically rich planet”. However you slice it, the Earth, our only habitable home, is finite and will reach her limits exceedingly and increasingly soon if factory farming continues to exist.
Irony is an understatement when the true price of so-called cheap meat costs us more as a society than the food that it produces. The final product may be cheaper but big-time meat companies cheap out on almost every step of the process, and our economy suffers. For starters, they cut back the prices they pay for the livestock that they receive from small farmers, driving small farms out of the industry, thus, completely monopolizing the sale of meat and destroying the economic foundation of rural communities. Under the guise of providing new and plentiful job opportunities, agribusiness is often welcomed by smaller poor communities, only to find that factory farms pay such low wages that it ends up being a severe pay cut for residents and the jobs are outsourced. Factory farms do not even contribute to their local community’s economy by way of spending the way small farms do. Small farms buy feed from local sources while big factory farms use up so much land for the animals themselves, there is no room to grow the food, so the feed must be distantly sourced. Often feed is bought within the same company that owns the factory farms, which does not circulate money throughout, it hoards it. The sheer multitude of food necessary to feed the animals that will be slaughtered exceeds the amount of food produced by said animals. It would be much more economically efficient if, instead of growing food to feed animals and then slaughtering them for consumption, to cut out the middle man and directly eat the food that is grown. Contrary to popular belief, factory farming is draining on our economy. It is widely assumed that the tax property from the massive plots of land necessary for factory farming contributes positively to our economy, but big agribusiness receives colossal tax breaks, abatements, and exemptions, contributing nothing to the economy. Studies have shown that property value also decreases because of large-scale livestock production largely due to the extremely unpleasant odors coming from them. A University of Missouri study shows that houses located within one-tenth of a mile of a factory farming facility lost all the way up to eighty-eight percent of their value. Considering the blows our economy takes at the hands of factory farming, is the cheap meat worth it?
Humans inevitably pay for cheap meat with our health too. Excessive amounts of meat in general has been linked to the development of many diseases. According to NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), “the long-term consumption of increasing amounts of red meat and particularly of processed meat is associated with an increased risk of total mortality, cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer and type 2 diabetes, in both men and women. ” Furthermore, eating an abundance of the standard meat from factory farms proves to interfere with one of medicine’s formerly most reliable fix to many sicknesses and diseases, antibiotics. The use of antibiotics in animal agriculture is exploited to combat the illnesses that the soon to be slaughtered animals are prone to as a result of unsanitary living conditions and negligent treatment that is commonplace in industrialized meat farming. Keeping many animals in tightly confined spaces can promote the growth of infectious diseases and increase the risk of pathogens like E. coli and salmonella that cause food-borne illnesses. Efforts to thwart the growth of said diseases is most often done by administering low dose antibiotics, now resulting in a public health crisis because of the strengthening of our body’s resistance to antimicrobial drugs. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are becoming more prevalent every day which is more difficult and more expensive to treat. In addition to the logistics of why factory farming needs to cease to exist, billions of sentient animals, fully capable of feeling fear and pain, are treated quite inhumanely. The way a society treats its animals is ultimately a reflection of the way it will treat its people. As author and activist Michael Pollan puts it, “The American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. ” A majority of the cruelty stems from the sheer number of animals packed onto each farm. Overcrowding is responsible for the acute stress the animals are subjected to and lowers immunity allowing disease to spread like wildfire. Generally, these animals never get to experience the outdoors as they are kept in cramped stalls in sheds standing in their own feces and urine. It is very telling that six states in the United States have successfully passed laws that prohibit the filming, photographing, or any investigative journalism inside factory farms claiming it to be a violation of the first amendment. Agribusiness knows that if the general public were to be acutely aware of the treatment of the animals that they are eating, they would be appalled enough to stop. It is unnecessary to entirely stop the production and consumption of meat, but the industrialized animal cruelty of our current system is not ethically sound. Many argue that animals are simply lower on the food chain, so factory farming is only the natural order of things. Something occurring naturally does not make it inherently right. Nature may be cruel but to industrialize that cruelty is wrong. Consumers’ main concern about making the switch to local pasteurized farms is cost, but how does one define expensive? The most apparent opposition to factory farming is price per pound of meat. Industrialized farms can afford to price their meat much lower because of the cheap feed and poor living and working conditions, which severely compromises the quality of meat. Factory farmed meat, dairy, and eggs may be cheaper for the customer, but this price is not without its drawbacks. The air and water pollution, increased price of property because of monopolization of land used for industrialized farming, and antibiotic resistant bacteria living in the body all cause expensive problems for the human population. Either way we pay for it.
Industrialized animal farming costs the human population, animal population, and the Earth much more than its worth. Smaller pasteurized farming and in general less meat, egg, and dairy consumption, are the only way forward if we want to save the planet and ourselves.
