Sunday 20 May 2012

Who is Involved in the Problems of Factory Farming?

The consumers




Factory farm waste is stored in manure pits or lagoons, and ultimately it is applied to farm as fields as fertilizer. Small diversifeild farms that raise animals as well as crops have always used manure fertilizer without polluting water. The difference with factory fans is scale. The produce so much waste in one place that it must be applied to land in quantities that exceed the soils avidity to incorporate it. Manure makes it way into the local environment where they pollute the air and water. Manure contains nitrogen, phosphorus and often bacteria that can endanger the environment and human health. Farmers over apply manure to their fields which allows it to run into local streams and groundwater. It can be a health hazard. Noxious gas emissions from manure holding tanks and lagoons including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane can cause skin rashes, breathing problems and headaches, and long term exposure can lead to neurological problems. For children, seniors citizens and adults with other health problems, exposed to these fumes can cause problems. Factory farms can create public health concerns beyond food borne illness. Because over-crowded annuals are susceptible to infection and disease, most industrial livestock facilities treat the animals with low-levels of antibiotics to prevent illness and also promote weight gain. By creating a breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the sub-therapeutic dosages used on millions of factory farmed livestock can reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics for human patients. The feed used for livestock can also introduce public health threats. Broiler chickens often receive arsenic-based feed additives to promote pinker flesh and faster growth, and beef cattle continue to be fed with animal byproducts, which increases the rush of mad cow disease. Theses conditions and additives are not only pose threats to the environment and public health, they are also detrimental to the animal themselves.








The Farmers




Farmers that are mass producing can under cut and sell animal products for cheaper. There was a huge demand for animal products that farmers felt the need to over produce by factory farming. Factory farming resulted from public policy choices driven by big agribusinesses especially meatpackers and processors that dominate the critical steps in the food chain between livestock producers and consumers.Workers on industrial farms and in meat processing facilities work in hazardous conditions, and are underpaid and mistreated. Also the animals aren't given proper care or feed making it cheaper to produce and raise. 




























The Animals




As talked about earlier the animals live a very poor life in factory farms. Over 600 million chickens live and die in nightmarish conditions to supply Canadians with their meat and eggs. Thousands of broiler chickens at a time are crowded into dark and dirt warehouses where they have their beak tips amputated without anesthetic, suffer ammonia buns and respiratory disease from the vast amounts of urine and feces in the environment, are genetically bred to grow so large their skeletons become crippled under their own weight, and suffocate from intense overcrowding. Sick chickens are often totally neglected and left to be trampled to death or die of dehydration. Egg laying chickens are arguably the most abused animals in the world. They are packed four to six hens at a time into wire battery cages that have a floor the size of folded newspaper. They spend their lives never being able to spread their wings and barely able to move, standing on sloping wire floors and suffering feather loss and skin damage due to constant rubbing against the cage and cage mates. Up to 20% of the hens raised under these conditions die of stress and disease. Male chicks have no value to the egg industry, so every year in Canada, tens of millions of chicks are ground up alive or tossed into bags to suffocate within hours of having hatched. The natural life span of a chicken is 15-20 years, but in a factory farm production, egg laying hens are killed at just 1 and a half years old and broiler chickens at 42 days of age or less. Canada's 14 million beef and dairy cows are treated as no more the mechanized [parts of a food assembly line. Cows raised to become beef live their short lives on barren, manure-filled feedlots containing up to 40,000 cows. They endure branding, castration, and dehorning without anesthetic. The feedlot air is so saturated with ammonia, methane, and other noxious chemicals from the build-up of feces that many of these cows suffer from chronic respiratory problems. To keep them alive in these unhealthy conditions and to make them grow faster, the cows are pumped full of drugs. Despite this, every year there are thousands of crippled or sick "downed" cattle that, unable to stand, are dragged with ropes and chains in order to deliver them to the slaughterhouse. Dairy cows are subjected to terrible abuse in the Canadian agribusiness system. They are often chained in stalls for their entire lives where they are fed and milked by machines and where even laying down can be problematic. The dairy cow is forced into brutal repeated cycle of pregnancy and having her newborns taken away as young as a few hours old so the milk can be used for human consumption. This premature separation causes terrible stress an anxiety for both mother and calf. Both will often cry for days or even weeks after being torn apart. Dairy cows are genetically bred to produce 10 times the amount of milk they would naturally produce, commonly resulting in painful mastitis(a bacterial infection of the udder) and lameness. Though cows can live up top 25 years, most dairy cows are only able to endure the hardships of producing such unnaturally high volumes of milk for around 3 years. Veal is a nasty by product of the dairy industry as dairy farmers. Many calves of dairy cows are killed soon after birth or are severely confined in tiny stalls or hutches. Alone and barely able to move. Before becoming veal at 1-3 months of age. Almost 30 million pigs endure a life of misery before heading to the dinner plate in Canada. Most pigs spend their too short lives under the constant stress of living in cramped dark warehouse and never experiencing fresh air or the sun on their backs. Until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.Piglets have their tails cut off, teeth clipped, ears notched, and are castrated all without any anaesthetic. Mother pigs (sows) spend their lives kept constantly pregnant and confined in 2-foot wide, metal gestation crates so small that for most of their lives they are barely able to move or even lie down comfortably. In this one tiny barren space, the naturally fastidious pig must eat, sleep, urinate and defecate, with her waste falling through slatted concrete floors into a pool of raw sewage underneath her. Sows in these stalls experience crippling leg disorders and uffer greatly from their life-long deprived environment. s

5 comments:

  1. Hey Emily- I liked how you connected the living conditions on the farms, with the tasks of the stakeholders. Incorporating both aspects makes it easier to see who is doing more harm, and what kind of harm they are causing. I also liked how you described an occurring issue, and listed the possible solution.

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    1. Hi Selam, Thank you for your comment. I tried to make it very visible to people on the problems with factory farming.

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  2. Hey Emily- You did a very sufficient job.

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  3. Hi Emily,

    It's frightening to see how factory farming not only abuses the healthof animals, but of the environment and people as well. One thing thatstood out to me was your explanation on how milk is produced. I drinkmilk often and I never thought about what went into making it. What'sinteresting is that humans are the only species that continues todrink milk long after they are babies. Should a possible solution beto promote soy beverages, etc. to replace milk? Or can milk be ethically produced?

    As a society we really are not aware of what goes into our food. If we could stop this ignorance of the cruelty of factory farms as well the negative impact it has on the environment and on our health, perhaps this issue would be solved. I think of how on cigarette packages the health risks are stated, why can't the same be done on our meat and dairy products? If people read the abuse and risks surrounding factory farming they would think twice about purchasing its products.

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  4. Hi, I'm looking for a photo (in high resolution) of a baby chick falling of the belt in the egg industry and I wanted to ask if you have the 5th picture in this article in high resolution?
    If so, can I contact you via email?
    Thank you! you are doing a great job with this blog :)

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