Modern farming practices are efficient, but they aren’t good for the planet.
There’s no doubt about it – food production has become a lot more efficient.
In the 1970s, the use of concentrated animal feeding operations – or CAFOs – became widespread in the meat industry. It now takes much less food, water, and land to produce beef, milk, and eggs. In fact, the carbon footprint of beef production has decreased by 16 percent since the rise in CAFOs.
But these numbers don’t tell the full story.
The key message here is: Modern farming practices are efficient, but they aren’t good for the planet.
For CAFOs to hit these numbers, farmers have to use chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics. The aim is to make animals grow faster and keep infections at bay. But these chemicals often end up on our dinner tables. They can also seep into our drinking water. Ultimately, we humans are indirectly consuming antibiotics intended for farm animals.
The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has determined that the use of antibiotics in the food industry is directly related to the growing rate of antibiotic resistance in humans. But the harm caused by CAFOs can also be much more explicit: in 2015 alone, there were nearly five thousand fatalities among American farmers, ranchers, and agricultural managers. The only job to claim more lives was professional driving.
Along with dangerous machinery and often unsafe working conditions, workers must contend with terrible air pollution. If you’ve ever been near an industrial farming complex, you’ll know the stench is unbearable. It’s created by a mix of gases – some produced by cattle and some appearing as byproducts of other specialized processes. These gases include methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, nitrous oxide, and many more.
Routinely breathing these can cause asthma and chronic bronchitis, among other respiratory illnesses. And when these substances enter the atmosphere, they also contribute to climate change.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that CAFOs come with health concerns, and the US beef industry has responded. People who run industrial farms are in the process of, as they put it, “reassessing their operations.” For its part, the European Union has banned the use of hormones in cattle.
Given the problems behind CAFOs, you may be wondering why we put so much importance on meat, dairy, and eggs. What’s their nutritional value anyway? Let’s take a look in the next blink. - source: Blinklist Book Summary
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