It’s no secret that the factory farming industry is an absolute environmental abomination, being one of the world's largest polluters and contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
First of all, farms categorized as animal feeding operations (CAFOs), are massively contributing to climate change. 37% of methane emissions from human activity are the direct result of livestock and agricultural practices. With methane emissions being one of the leading causes of global warming, it’s clear a decrease in production from CAFOs could make a substantial difference in earth's current warming rate.
If a theoretical rapid phaseout of animal agriculture were to occur, it is predicted that it would not only halt any increase in warming over the next 30 years, but it would allow half of the reduction in emissions necessary to meet Paris Agreement GHG targets, according to “Rapid Global Phaseout of Animal Agriculture Has the Potential to Stabilize Greenhouse Gas Levels for 30 Years and Offset 68 Percent of CO2 Emissions This Century.” If all current animal agriculture came to a complete halt today, 68% of current anthropogenic CO2 emissions could be offset.
Emissions released from factory farms do not only contribute to greenhouse gas and thus climate change as a whole, they also contribute to smaller scale air pollution in their surrounding areas. This obviously puts nearby residential areas at risk of health concerns. Many dangerous gasses are emitted from CAFO waste, including hazardous chemicals such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane. When these chemicals contaminate air near homes and workplaces, the people who are exposed to them suffer their effects. For example, hydrogen sulfide poisoning, resulting from CAFO air pollution, has proven to lead to brain damage and other illnesses.
Another massive environmental concern with our current factory farming reliant food system is its immense waste production. To acknowledge the waste issue of CAFOS, it's crucial to first conceptualize the amount of waste, in the form of manure, that they produce. CAFO waste has been compared to that of large cities, being that some large farms produce over 1.6 million tons of waste annually. This amount is over, actually about 1.5 times, the sanitary waste produced by the city of Philadelphia each year. Unfortunately, these farms are unable to use their loads of surplus manure as fertilizer, which leaves excessive amounts of toxic waste. This brings up yet another environmental issue, being that much of this excess toxic waste ends up contaminating groundwater and surface water.
Photo by: Jeff Vanugam
While this is by no means the full list, the final negative environmental impacts of factory farming I would like to address are deforestation and inefficient use of resources. The utter amount of land and resources cleared for farming is completely absurd, being that 41% of all U.S. land is used directly or indirectly for animal agriculture. Over 250 million acres of forest land have been destroyed and turned into cropland, in the US. alone. Of the crops produced on this land, more than two thirds are fed to livestock, while only about one third is grown for the consumption of humans. This intensive use of resources might feel slightly less crazy if animal agriculture products were responsible for providing the country with more than 36% of their total calories, but being that they are not, it feels more than fair to denounce this horribly inefficient system. In addition, the mass amounts of water used to raise factory farmed animals, not only in their drinking water but also to clean their facilities, can also be written off as waste in my book. The use of over 36 trillion gallons of water in the U.S. a year is attributed to animal agriculture, and the average cheeseburger takes nearly 700 of gallons of water to produce. Water and land are both precious resources that the factory farming industry is shamelessly depleting.
If the sheer amount of waste, pollution, destruction, and emissions the factory farming industry is responsible for doesn't call consumers to action, I don’t know what possibly could.
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