Over the last two decades, small- and medium-scale farms raising livestock have given way to factory farms that confine thousands of cows, hogs and chickens in tightly packed facilities. Farmers have adopted factory farming practices largely at the behest of the largest meatpackers, pork processors, poultry companies and dairy processors. The largest of these agribusinesses are practically monopolies, controlling what consumers get to eat, what they pay for groceries and what prices farmers receive for their livestock.
This unchecked agribusiness power, along with misguided farm policies, have pressed livestock producers to become significantly larger and to adopt more-intensive practices. Despite ballooning in size, many livestock producers are just squeezing by financially, because the real price of beef, cattle, hogs and milk has been falling for decades.
These intensive methods come with a host of environmental and public health impacts that are borne by consumers and communities. Factory farms produce millions of gallons of manure that can spill into waterways from leaking storage lagoons or fields where manure is over-applied to soil. Manure generates hazardous air pollutants and contains contaminants that can endanger human health. Neighbors of these animal factories, as well as the workers in them, often suffer intensely from overwhelming odors and related headaches, nausea and other long-term health effects.
Even people thousands of miles away from these facilities are not immune to their impacts. Thousands of animals crowded into facilities are vulnerable to disease. Consumers eating the dairy, egg and meat products from factory farms can be exposed inadvertently to foodborne bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella, as well as to the public health consequences of unchecked antibiotics use. And yet, despite all of the well-documented problems and health risks related to this type of industrialized production, the number and concentration of factory farms in the United States continues to increase.
Between 1997 and 2002, there was an economic and geographic shift in how and where food animals are raised in the United States. Even just a few decades ago, small- and medium-sized dairy, cattle and hog farms were dispersed across the country. Today, these operations are primarily large-scale factory farms that are concentrated in specific regions, states and even counties, where thousands of animals on each farm can produce more sewage than most large cities, overwhelming the capacity of rural communities to cope with the environmental and public health burdens.
Food & Water Watch analyzed U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Census of Agriculture data from 1997, 2002, 2007 and 2012 for beef cattle, hogs, dairy cattle, broiler meat chickens and egg-laying operations. In this report, and in our accompanying online map [1], we define factory farms as operations with more than 500 beef cattle (feedlots only), 1,000 hogs, 500 dairy cows, 100,000 egg-laying chickens and 500,000 broiler chickens (sold annually), the largest size categories that the USDA recognizes in its survey.
Key findings from Food & Water Watch’s analysis include:
The incredible growth of factory farming is due to three key factors. First, unchecked mergers and acquisitions between the largest meatpacking, poultry processing and dairy companies created an intensely consolidated landscape where a few giant agribusinesses exert tremendous pressure on livestock producers to become larger and more intensive. Second, lax environmental rules and lackluster enforcement allowed factory farms to grow to extraordinary sizes without having to properly manage the overwhelming amount of manure they create. And finally, for much of the past 15 years, misguided farm policy encouraged over-production of commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, which artificially depressed the price of livestock feed and created an indirect subsidy to factory farm operations. Although crop prices rose in recent years, in 2014 the USDA projected that prices would decline for several years, and the pace of factory farm construction has increased to take advantage of expected cheaper feed prices in coming years.
The combination of these trends has eroded rural economies, driven independent producers out of business and allowed the largest livestock operations to dominate animal agriculture in the United States. The manure from these factory farm operations pollutes the environment and endangers public health. Crowded conditions leave animals susceptible to disease, drive the overuse of antibiotics and can mean that food safety problems on even a few factory farms can end up in everyone’s refrigerator.
The stakes are high for the future of livestock production. Because government at all levels has made decisions that contributed to factory farms, all levels of government must be involved in changing policies and enforcing existing laws to rein in this industry.
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Links
[1] http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/