Activists Attack Modern Ag With Misinformation

Friday, Apr. 23, 2010
The Problem With Factory Farms
By Claire Suddath

If you eat meat, the odds are high that you've enjoyed a meal made from an animal raised on a factory farm (also known as a CAFO). According to the USDA, two percent of U.S. livestock facilities raise an estimated 40 percent of all farm animals. This means that pigs, chickens and cows are concentrated in a small number of very large farms. But even if you're vegetarian, the health and environmental repercussions of these facilities may affect you. In his book Animal Factory, journalist David Kirby explores the problem of factory farms, from untreated animal waste to polluted waterways. Kirby talks to TIME about large-scale industrial farming, the lack of government oversight, and the terrible fate of a North Carolina river.

What exactly is a factory farm?

The industrial model for animal food production first started with the poultry industry. In the 1930s and 40s, large companies got into the farming business. The companies hire farmers to grow the animals for them. The farmers typically don't own the animals, the companies do. It's almost like a sharecropping system. The company tells them exactly how to build the farm, what to grow and what to feed. They manage everything right down to what temperature the barn should be and what day the animals are going to be picked up for slaughter. The farmer can't even eat his or her own animals. People who grow chickens for Purdue in Maryland have to go down to the market and buy Purdue at the store.

We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that's not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Basically it's any farm that has 1,000 "animal units" or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They're never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.

And the fact that there are thousands of animals packed into one farm is also a problem.

Oh, definitely. There are simply too many animals in too small of a place. In a traditional farm, a sustainable farm, you grow both crops and animals. There is a pasture and you have a certain number of animals per acre. But when you have 2,000 cows per acre instead of two, you have a problem. You can't fit them in a pasture, you fit them in a building. You can't grow enough crops to feed them; you have to ship in their feed. You don't have enough land to absorb their waste. It has nowhere to go. Read More

I would think that true journalists would have a hard time calling this an interview. Usually in an interview, the journalist would ask questions to be answered. In this case, there was an activist that actually made several statements of her own belief and then let the author of the book comment on them. In fact, it’s obvious that the person who posed as a journalist for this article didn’t do any research at all because she didn’t challenge the false claims made by Kirby. His description of a CAFO isn’t right, nor are his statements about how the animals are fed or handled. A journalist would have uncovered that, an activist helps spread the misinformation.

Well-Fed Ag Critics Continue Attacks

Critics of American Agriculture Intensify Efforts

Written by Stewart Truelsen　
Thursday, 08 October 2009 11:04

This has been a good year for the critics of mainstream farming and ranching. Time magazine ran a cover story at the end of August sharply critical of modern farm production methods and the nation’s food supply. It said "food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous" and blamed obesity on American agriculture.

The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation was once on the cover of Time when that was considered a huge honor. Now, the magazine is a shadow of its former self in readership, editorial content and influence, but the recent story was a slap in the face to farmers and ranchers nevertheless.

The University of Wisconsin chose Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, to be given to all incoming freshmen this fall and incorporated into more than 60 courses from engineering to art. Pollan is a journalism professor from the University of California at Berkeley. His writing is critical of modern agriculture, food science and technology and the Western diet, including meat products.　　　

Wisconsin Farm Bureau President Bill Bruins, a dairy farmer, called Pollan’s book "a direct attack on the way we farm today." The university claimed it was not endorsing Pollan’s views in choosing the controversial book.　

A woman in the audience told a reporter, "Unfortunately, if we don’t show up and show our side, many of his claims will become truth." She is right about that. Mainstream farming and ranching are under an intensifying attack by critics who believe they can find a gullible audience. Read More

If you don’t think that agriculture is under constant attack in this country, then this article does a nice job of showing the play by play from just the last few weeks. When you reflect back over all of these events, you have to ask yourself what the end goal is. The only logical conclusion that you can come up with is that there is a segment of our society that wants production agriculture eliminated. Of course along with that plan, they also expect food to continue magically appearing in the grocery store. Good luck with that.