Harming The Environment: Factory Farming In The United States

When discussing global climate change and the factors that contribute to it, most people like to point to the easy factors to blame such as fossil fuels which include oil, coal, natural gas, etc. but what usually flies under the radar is how bad livestock contributes to global climate change and how bad it is for the environment. According to the article “Factory Farming Is an Environmental Hazard” the author Wenonah Hauter states that factory farming as a whole is an environmental hazard due to the way it is harming small rural communities in most states such as Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Carolina to name off a few, where they are host to some of the biggest factory farms in the country. Factory Farming is where companies such as the Tyson Chicken company, where they will practice breeding and raising vast numbers of animals in horrible, tight, and unnatural conditions while also subjecting them to objectionable conditions in order to harvest the most out of their meat, milk, and eggs. This system is currently under the microscope and is easily criticized because more and more people are becoming informed as to how these massive farms actually operate and their impact on the environment. This leads to the author Wenonah Hauter, saying whether if we as Americans should demand more meaningful laws and regulations from our own government to enforce so that they can potentially prevent these health hazards coming from all these animals and large factories that are making it happen from potentially being even worse and harming our ecosystem way more than we can afford. Throughout this essay, I will explain the reasons why this system of farming, while incredibly efficient, is actually harming both the environment and ourselves.

For instance, there are actually some people who don’t know about some of the nutrients and food that livestock owners or companies feed their animals that they actually end up releasing very harmful toxins that some of these animals release such as methane, which is released by cows, which is a gas that is found around the Earth’s atmosphere in very small qualities but is actually a very harmful gas that can also be found in the guts of ruminant livestock as well because of methanogen microorganisms which belong to the archaea. Also adding to this, in the article “Livestock Contributes to Global Warming” the authors mention that the side-effects of large-scale livestock can be even more harmful in terms of pollution instead of other more known effects such as the likes of coal, oil, natural gas, etc. Which gives you more of an idea of how livestock as a whole is contributing to the situation.

The current system of farming has been horrible for the environment with it being polluted, depleted of aquifers, destroying topsoil, and releasing so many Greenhouse Gases. The production of meat is such a huge factor because of how the grain that the companies use to feed the animals and how much land it takes up to get this while also having a large loss of energy production as well. It has also come to endangering a whole epidemic of obesity, heart disease, and cancer as well as reproductive and hormone disorders not forgetting to mention that there are about 86 million cases of food poisoning year-round. Which can cause us to look at what exactly these factories are putting into the animals, in the article, “Industrial Farming Is Harming Farmers, the Environment, and Public Health” the author Ronnie Cummins, who is the founder and also director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a non-profit, US-based network that focuses on healthy lifestyles while also promoting a regenerative system of farming, states some eye opening statistics by saying that the annual impact in the U.S. of 12 billion pounds of chemical nitrate fertilizers; a billion pounds of toxic pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; thousands of tons of antibiotic residues and hormones in dairy products and meat(80% of all antibiotics produced in the country are injected into our animals so that we can get the most out of them causing them to grow faster while also trying to survive the horrible style of these factory farms and its intense confinement); causing massive loads of industrial waste and the sewage sludge on our own nations farmlands, and literally billions of pounds of leftover slaughterhouse waste, blood, fat and raw manure fed to animals on these non-organic farms, leaving me to question how are we still alive if we’re actually eating this.

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There is actually some researchers that say Factory Farming could actually be a benefit but of course with some modifications in the system of how it raises and feeds their animals. For instance in the article, “Don't Believe the Lie: Organic Farming CAN Feed the World”, the author Ethan A. Huff, who is the main staff writer for an online environmental news website called Natural News. Huff uses the argument that Organic Farming by itself has the potential and is fully capable of feeding the world. While also mentioning that,” …Organic farming systems actually produce higher yields than GM and non-GM conventional farming systems. Organic farming is also fully self-renewing and sustainable, as compost, manure, and other organic fertilizing methods naturally enrich the soil and eliminate the need for toxic pesticides and herbicides” (Par. 4 Huff). So while Huff has the right idea and could potentially build off of what he says, that big idea of organic farming seems like such a big project that needs time to develop and also time to get rid of the huge factories that are producing almost all of the United States food.

Most Americans like to look at the positives of a hugely controversial subject such as Factory Farming and just as in every other controversy there are definitely positives in this topic. The article, “21 Advantages and Disadvantages of Factory Farming “mentions plenty of truths, such as the obvious main fact that factory-produced meat is largely affordable by everyone but that is because of the way that they get their meat from the animals and the methods behind it. While also helping to create jobs for people all across America due to how many Factory Farming companies support their local economies while also purchasing crops and feed supplies from mom-and-pop operations, pay property taxes that fund the schools, and provide other financial benefits for the communities these companies are based in as well. But as there are positives to say about this, there are also many negatives that I personally believe outweigh the positives. Such as the huge fact that greenhouse gas emissions are largely significant from factory farms because on yearly average it is roughly about 13% of GHG emissions that occur each year worldwide and that’s actually a fair estimate because in reality, most farms don’t have their production levels so we’re looking at that percentage to potentially be significantly higher than what was estimated. But one thing that’s certain is that there are over 6 billion tons of problematic gases that reportedly come from these farms, with methane and nitrous oxide being the primary contributor to all these gases that are released. The biggest disadvantages would obviously be the hurting of the animals in all this and how badly they’re treated in this tight breathing, no spaced farms that don’t allow them to get movement while they’re getting fed to get enchantingly bigger which causes them to change how they’re supposed to be raised and fed naturally.

Leading to the conclusion of the whole essay, Factory Farming is very bad for the environment no matter how much cheaper and easier it is for the economy to produce and sell it to consumers all over the world, that does not make up for the horrible after-effects that it causes to our own planet and especially the animals being used to make all this productivity so we as humans need to find a way to end this horrible system that is harming our ecosystem more than it is helping it.