explain the impact of factory farms on food supplies
Answers
Factory farming is an unsustainable method of raising food animals that concentrates large numbers of animals into confined spaces. Factory farms are not compatible with a safe and wholesome food supply. It’s time to ban factory farms.
How did we get here?
Over the past three decades there has been an economic and geographic shift in how and where food animals are raised in the United States. Large scale factory farms have raising one type of animal have replaced small or medium scale farms that raised dairy and beef cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys. The rise of factory farming has been driven by three factors: unchecked corporate power, misguided farm policy, and weak environmental and public health regulations.
Factory Farming Increases Corporate Control of our Food
As the number of companies that farmers sell livestock, eggs or milk to has decreased due to mergers and increasing consolidation of the food industry, the number of dairy, hog and beef cattle producers in the United States has also declined sharply over the last 20 years. The meatpacking, milk and egg processing industries have become more controlled by just a handful of big players and the remaining farms raising food animals have grown bigger. In the chicken industry, contract farming is now the norm-- meaning farmers sign up with a corporate integrator that provides the animals and the feed and micromanages the day-to-day operations on the farm-- often through the use of unfair one-sided contracts. The real price farmers receive for livestock has trended steadily downward for the last two decades. Most farmers barely break even. Learn more about corporate control in our food system.
Bad Public Policy Facilitates Factory Farming
Misguided farm policy has artificially reduced the cost of feed. Since the passage of the 1996 farm bill, farm policy has encouraged overproduction of crops such as corn and soybeans. This overproduction harms family farms by reducing the value of these crops and forcing farmers to plant additional acreage in order to make a living. While this overproduction is bad for family farmers, it’s a boon to the corporate agribusinesses that purchase these crops for use in animal feed and creates an indirect subsidy to the meat industry.
Waste From Factory Farms: An Environmental and Public Health Crisis
For several decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state governments have failed to regulate the environmental impacts of factory farms. When factory farms operate virtually unregulated the environment and nearby rural communities pay the price. The vast quantities of manure from factory farms can — and do — make their way into the local environment where they pollute air and water. Several municipal water systems in the midwest where many factory farms are located must regularly implement costly clean up techniques to remove factory farm pollution from the water supply in order to avoid public health disasters. Likewise, pollution from factory farms runs off into streams that feed into our major waterways like the Chesapeake Bay, Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico—contributing to algal blooms and dead zones that impact water supplies and destroy aquatic ecosystems, recreation and livelihoods.
Small, diversified farms that raise animals alongside other crops have always used manure as fertilizer without polluting water. The difference with factory farms is scale. They produce so much waste in one place that it must be applied to land in quantities that exceed the soil’s ability to absorb it as fertilizer.
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