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Executive Summary and Overview
Mark Ritchie, Executive Director
The industrialization of hog farming has been attributed in great part to
inexorable advances in science and technology and the freedom afforded
economic development by an unfettered marketplace. Indeed, some experts see
current industry structure as simply "what has evolved out of the
marketplace,"1 the inevitable result of impersonal, irresistible economic
forces triggering a kind of "natural selection" process over which we are
powerless to do anything but go with the flow.
Writing about mega-hog factory Seaboard Corporation's move to Guymon,
Oklahoma, however, authors from the North Central Regional Center for Rural
Development note that the move was hardly due to market forces at work.
Describing the over $60 million in publicly supported incentives that drew
Seaboard to Guymon and helped it build its facilities and train its
workers, they note: "Guymon is a case of state-directed, rather than market-driven introduction
of new economic activity."
The chink in the armor of the natural selection theory is that the
industrialization process is not impersonal or natural or necessary. It,
too, has been engineered. Says rural sociologist Doug Constance:"It is very important that we do not accept the industrialization process,
the industrialization of agriculture, as something natural, as something
inevitable, as something determined. It is no such thing. It is a plan. It
is a plan for certain people to benefit and others to pay."
The industrialization of hog farming has taken place in a
political-economic environment or context in which the quality of natural
resources, the quality of human and animal life, the safety and quality of
our food, and the quality of life for future generations are valued lower
than short-term economic gain.
The choice as to whether or not to change the political-economic context in
which American agriculture operates that is, the set of laws, regulations,
penalties, incentives, and community expectations influencing agricultural
development is a political choice. We can change the political-economic
context, within which structural change in agriculture occurs, and thereby
change its direction. For the good of the planet, our response to the
changes the industrialization process in agriculture is invoking must not
be hands-off.
The Need for An Historical Perspective
What people tend to think of as modern problems associated with a modern
industry have been in the making for decades, as long as the
industrialization of agriculture has been taking place. Consider the
problem of antibiotic resistance, which medical scientists contend stems in
significant part from the use of antibiotics at subtherapeutic levels in
animal feeds to control disease and make animals grow faster.
Thirty-six
years ago, in Great Britain, Ruth Harrison wrote a book entitled Animal
Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry in which she described the
cruelty of animal factories. The story she told could have been written
today:"[F]eeding firms are entitled to incorporate up to 100 grammes of antibiotic
in each ton of animal feeding stuffs as a regular supplement for
intensively kept animals, and the farmer may buy and incorporate
antibiotics at any level he thinks fit. This, when the merest trace can
mean the difference between life and death to a consumer."
Since 1964, Great Britain and other parts of Europe have taken effective
steps to reduce at least some antibiotic use in agriculture. In the United
States, to date we have not. For the past 40 years, the profits of a few
have repeatedly trumped the benefits to the many who depend on the
continued effectiveness of precious antibiotics.
It is important to know that the question of antibiotic use in animal feeds
has been debated for four decades and that the evidence for agricultural
origins of antibiotic resistance has been building for many years. We need
this awareness to resist agribusiness' and the animal health industry's
continued calls for more study, more time, more proof before acting to
restrict the use of how antibiotics are used in agriculture. We need it to
know for certain that it is time to stop listening to agribusiness and take
action.
Hence, this paper places some animal factory issues in a historical
context, in consideration of George Santayana's observation that "those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It also describes, in
more detail than is usually seen, the experiences of people who have tried
to channel industry change in more socially beneficial directions, because
we can learn from each other's experiences.
The report is organized in seven parts. Each provides a detailed
description of its issue and closes with a list of strategies and action
alternatives for constructive reform. This Executive Summary and Overview
closes with a list of ways foundations can help empower citizens and their
organizations in their efforts to preserve family farms and protect the
public, farm animals, wildlife, and the environment from the ravages of
animal factories.
Summary of Parts 1 through 7
I. Are Independent Farmers an Endangered Species?
Part One of this report asks "are independent farmers an endangered
species?" The statistics indicate that is the case. Between 1950 and 1999,
the number of U.S. farms selling hogs declined from 2.1 million to 98,460.
In 1950, average sales per farm were around 31 hogs. By 1999, average sales
had grown to around 1,100 market hogs per farm. One hundred five farms
having over 50,000 pigs each accounted for 40% of the U.S. hog inventory.
The largest four operations Smithfield Foods, Inc., ContiGroup (Continental
Grain and Premium Standard Farms), Seaboard Corporation, and Prestage Farms
accounted for nearly 20% of production, and economists estimate 50% of hogs
slaughtered in 1999 were produced or sold under some form of contract.
Using several examples, Part One explores the reasons behind the drive
toward the industrialization of animal agriculture and the impending demise
of the independent family farm. It concludes with reasons for preserving
independent family farms and a warning from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's National Commission on Small Farms: "If we do not act now, we
will no longer have a choice about the kind of agriculture we desire as a
Nation."
II.Putting Lives in Peril
Part Two: Putting Lives in Peril, describes two major health hazards
associated with factory farming: workplace dangers and antibiotic resistance.
Workplace dangers: Manure from animal factories is liquefied when massive
quantities of groundwater are used to flush the buildings where the animals
are housed. The resulting "slurry" may be stored temporarily in cement pits
under the slatted floors of the barns or in outdoor structures, and emptied
once or twice a year by being spread or sprayed onto land. The problems
result from the anaerobic (absence of free oxygen) nature of manure that
has been liquefied by the addition of water. Decomposition of liquid manure
by anaerobic bacteria during storage and treatment produces and emits
nearly 400 volatile organic compounds. Gaseous emissions from the anaerobic
decomposition of liquefied manure have led to human and animal fatalities.
Dusts inside intensive confinement facilities have led to respiratory
illnesses among farmers and farmworkers. These problems, too, have been
known at least since 1964. Yet, waste handling technologies remain
essentially the same and still no Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) standard exists for work in intensive confinement
buildings or around manure pits. Instead, the industry and land grant
university focus has been on ways to control liquid manure odors. Little
research or technology development effort has focused on the readily
available alternative forms of animal waste management that do not produce
deadly manure gasses in the first place, such as raising hogs and cattle on
pasture or using solid floors and ample bedding in indoor environments.
Antibiotic resistance: The continuous stress of intensive confinement
lowers farm animals' immunity to diseases. Alleviating the stress of
intensive confinement would raise animal factories' costs of production. To
avoid these costs, animal factories rely on continuous, subtherapeutic
administration of antibiotics in the feed or drinking water to promote
growth and control bacterial illnesses.
The subtherapeutic use of antibiotics creates selective pressure on
bacteria that favors resistance, placing in jeopardy the effectiveness of
precious antibiotics for treating animal and human bacterial diseases.
Stressed animals excrete more pathogens in their feces than do unstressed
animals. When antibiotics are used subtherapeutically in the feed of farm
animals, the pathogens that survive the gut and are excreted are the
resistant ones. Yet, the industry resists controls.
According to the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council
(NAS/NRC), if the use of antibiotic feed additives were to be curtailed in
the United States, it "is questionable whether production in confinement
swine operations could be maintained at an intensive level" and "a
reversion to extensive or pasture production could take place[that] would
be disruptive for today's packing industry."
From the experiences of farmers in Sweden, however, who have produced pigs
without subtherapeutic antibiotic feed additives since 1986, we know it is
still possible to raise healthy pigs year round, efficiently, and without
disrupting supplies, if the environments in which the animals are raised
are hygienic, spacious, enriched with clean bedding, and comfortable from
the animals' point of view.
Food Irradiation: The Wrong Answer for Food Safety
Though most Cold War-era nuclear technologies such as the atomic coffeepot
and plutonium-heated long-johns have fallen into the dustbin of history,165
food irradiation has not only survived into the 21st century, it is on the
verge of becoming the food industry's no. 1 weapon in the war against
food-borne illnesses. No one is against creating a safer food supply. But
there are plenty of reasons to be against food irradiation.
Irradiation is murder on family farmers and marketplace diversity, because
it uses huge, centralized facilities and is intended to correct
quality-control problems endemic to today's factory-style food processing
plants.166 Simply put, irradiation and consolidation go hand-in-hand. IBP
and Tyson Foods, whose pending merger would spawn the country's largest
poultry and red meat conglomerate, are among the many corporate giants that
are on the verge of selling irradiated food in mass quantities.
III. Building Sewerless Cities
Part Three: Building Sewerless Cities describes the impacts on water
quality resulting from the separation of animals from the land. At one
time, crop and livestock production were complementary enterprises on
farms. Most of the nutrients originating from the soils of a given area
were returned to that same area. Animals' living quarters were bedded with
hay or straw and, when soiled, the bedding was removed to a manure heap
where it composted, killing most of the pathogens that may have been
present in the manure. Under such conditions, environmental problems
arising from animal production activities, when they sometimes occurred,
were minimal and relatively easily solved by improving management or taking
other, relatively low-cost, remedial measures.
Environmental problems were exacerbated when specialization separated
livestock production from the land and the availability of cheap, mineral
fertilizers made it possible to produce crops without manure nutrients.
Today, most farm animals are concentrated in large holdings on small
acreages and are raised under intensive conditions resembling manufacturing
processes. Animal feeds generally come from areas far away from the
industrialized livestock farm. Manures from these "animal factories" may be
handled as wastes or surpluses to be disposed of, rather than as valuable
soil amendments, and may be applied to the land in quantities far exceeding
the nutrient needs of crops. Quantities of liquid waste can be enormous. At
a single site in Missouri, one hog factory produces fecal waste equivalent
to that of a city of 360,000 people.
Earthen manure storage basins have leaked manure onto cropland and into
streams, killing the life in them. Some leaks were found to be deliberate;
others were unintentional minor accidents or widespread catastrophes.
Either way, it seems clear that the liquid manure storage technology is
fundamentally unsafe.
Besides the plant nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, liquid
manure also contains bacterial and viral pathogens, parasites, weed seeds,
heavy metals, and even antibiotics, disinfectants, and insecticides, when
these are present on the farm. In 1988, an expert panel convened by the
World Health Organization identified liquid manure spreading as a critical
pathway by which salmonellae and other pathogens are transferred to the
natural environment.
Part Three concludes by noting that options exist for safer, more
environmentally-friendly hog production using pastures (outdoor production)
and deep-bedding (indoor production) that are within the financial range of
independent family farmers. Being more management-intensive than
capital-intensive, these other options, if mandated, could also allow
independent family farmers to compete with larger operations on a playing
field that favors hands on husbandry and management over capital.
IV. Part of the Pig Really Does Fly
Part Four: Part of the Pig Really Does Fly describes the air quality
impacts of animal factories and recommends solutions. Neighbors of hog
factories report not being able to go outdoors or let their children play
outdoors due to odors from nearby hog factories. Some report lining their
windows and fireplaces with plastic to keep the stench from coming into
their homes. Animal factories need not be large to create a problem.
Increasingly, to save on labor and because the technology is almost
exclusively recommended by the industry and land grant universities,
smaller farmers have adopted liquid manure handling systems and create the
same detrimental effects, albeit on a smaller scale. Recent studies have
shown that dusts and gases responsible for hog factory odors are having
serious respiratory impacts on nearby residents.
As much as 70 to 80 percent of the nitrogen in a liquid manure storage
facility changes from liquid to ammonia gas and escapes into the
atmosphere. The gaseous ammonia returns to earth, precipitated from the
atmosphere by rain. Nitrogen-enriched rainfall contributes to excessive
algae growth and can damage or alter natural habitats, for instance,
causing nitrogen-loving plants to replace the existing flora in a given
area. Methane is a significant greenhouse gas that is emitted by liquid
manure storage.
The most significant contribution to the reduction in greenhouse gasses
that farms can make is to change manure management. The change can go in
two directions: away from liquid manure and open lagoon storage toward more
costly and complex management systems, such as electricity generation from
methane, or toward ecologically sound and less complex management systems,
such as manure handling incorporating straw or other natural bedding and
composting. The latter direction is least costly for small livestock farms
and not only reduces greenhouse gases, but replenishes the soil carbon.
V. Hog Factory in the Back Yard
Part Five: Hog factories have divided communities, neighborhoods, and
families. In most cases the people who feel the strongest impacts from hog
factories are people who have lived in their rural homes for most, if not
all, of their lives, many of whom farm or have farmed, with livestock, as
well.
Part Five describes the ways in which corporate hog factory owners have
used the public's sympathy for family farmers to obtain exemptions for
their activities from local zoning laws and from county and state
regulations. For example, thirty states have enacted laws exempting farm
animals from protection under their anti-cruelty statutes. "Strategic
lawsuits against public participation," or SLAPP suits, can be brought
against citizens who protest siting of animal factories in their
communities. In at least 13 states, agricultural disparagement laws,
popularly known as "veggie libel laws," protect food products and
production processes from "disparagement." The very laws enacted to protect
small farmers from frivolous complaints serve to protect corporate hog
factories from well-grounded complaints over their much larger impacts on
the environment and on public health and welfare. Such laws erode
democratic processes.
Public policies supporting hog factories and excusing them from bad
behavior also help create an illusion that hog farming is industrializing
because technological advances have increased the efficiency (that is, have
reduced per-unit costs of production) of larger, more concentrated
operations. How many of these efficiencies are based on the ease with which
public policies allow hog factory operators to pass off unwanted costs of
doing business onto neighbors and society (i.e., make others pay) have not
been quantified. It is becoming clear, however, that by helping hog
factories avoid the expenses associated with socially responsible
practices, such protections give hog factories leeway to grow and squeeze
independent family hog farmers out of the market.
VI. Pigs in the Poky
Part Six: Pigs in the Poky describes the impacts of factory farming on farm
animals and their implications for human welfare.
Farmers who treat their animals with respect for their natures are
internalizing the costs of providing a decent life and humane environment
for them. Animal factories externalize those costs by evading that
responsibility. The first to bear these externalized costs are the animals
but the costs of the failure to farm in ways that respect the welfare of
farm animals extend beyond the boundary of the farm. Everyone ultimately
bears the costs of the reduced effectiveness of antibiotics. Taxpayers and
natural resource users bear the costs of soil and water pollution by liquid
manure spills. Future generations will bear the costs of global warming and
depleted resources. Until production systems meet the species-specific
needs of farm animals, we are farming beyond their ability to adapt.
Ultimately, ignoring the welfare of production animals makes animal
agriculture unsustainable.
Industrial rearing of farm animals has resulted in loss of individual
animals' fitness and in loss of genetic diversity. It has increased the
incidence of environmentally-induced animal illnesses, diseases, and
injuries as well as the frequency of abnormal behaviors indicative of
severe mental distress. Factory farming is pushing animals beyond their
ability to adapt. Consequently, many die prematurely from the stress. For
example, Time Magazine reported in November 1998 that the 1997 hog death
toll at Seaboard Farms in Oklahoma was 48 hog deaths an hour, or 420,000
for the year. Industry spokespeople estimate that as many as 20% of
breeding sows die prematurely from exhaustion and stress due to impacts of
restrictive confinement and accelerated breeding schedules.
Industrial hog rearing methods are especially hard on pigs in the breeding
herd who are confined to crates so narrow and short that they cannot walk
or turn around. The inactivity leads to muscle atrophy and osteoporosis.
Sows, adult females, may collapse and not be able to stand up again when
they are made to walk. They may be beaten and dragged before they are
killed and placed on the "dead pile" to be picked up by rendering trucks.
The mass production of farm animals in industrial systems has resulted in a
changed "disease panorama" across animal agriculture. New animal diseases
have emerged and they are harder and harder to treat. Animal diseases also
have consequences for the safety of food consumed by people. When pathogens
in fecal matter contaminate the carcass at the slaughterplant, some can
remain on the meat that reaches the grocers' counter.
An estimated 76-80 million cases of foodborne disease occur annually in the
United States. An estimated five thousand twenty deaths from foodborne
disease occur each year. Research completed by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's Economic Research Service (ERS) indicates that meat and
poultry sources account for an estimated $4.5 to $7.5 billion in costs
stemming from foodborne illnesses in the United States each year.
Opinion polls conducted in the United States indicate that the public cares
about the welfare of farm animals. A growing number of farmers are finding
special niches in the market where consumers will pay more for pork
certified as having been raised according to strict protocols drafted by
established animal welfare organizations. Animal welfare is an issue around
which both farmers and consumers can come together to oppose hog factories
and those who profit from them.
Many of the problems we now associate with industrialized animal production
have their roots in the mistaken paradigm that forces animals to fit into
production systems designed with human convenience and extractive profits
in mind. Many of the solutions to those problems will be found again by
adopting technologies and production systems that work with the natural,
biological, and behavioral characteristics of farm animals rather than
against them.
VII. Stop the Madness!
Part Seven: Stop the Madness! describes effective strategies that national
public interest organizations and local citizens groups are following to
protect family farms, environmental quality, public health, animal welfare,
community well-being, and social justice.
Part Seven also describes the activities of organizations that are actively
developing and promoting alternatives to factory hog farming. An effort to
develop humane, sustainable, alternative forms of animal farming must go
hand in hand with efforts to end animal production that is exploitive of
people, animals, and future generations and wasteful with respect to care
and use of natural resources. Without viable and preferable alternatives,
an old paradigm will not be displaced.
There is today an urgent choice before the American public and its
institutions. We can ignore the massive and destructive structural changes
occurring in U.S. agriculture, and thus simply hope for the best.
Alternatively, we can try to correct the problems that have occurred and
search for less destructive and more ecologically, socially, and ethically
desirable methods of production. We can take forceful steps to see that
technological change in agriculture is channeled for the betterment of
human life and society.
Foundations can:
* Help make it easier for activist groups to collaborate on important
national, state, and local actions.
* Support litigation against polluters.
* Enhance activists' scientific understanding of the issues surrounding
factory farms.
* Ensure that state and federal regulatory agencies and Congress are
well-informed about policies that would reduce the adverse impacts of
factory farms.
* Help activist groups call for stronger laws and regulations at the local,
state, and national level.
* Support media work to educate the public about factory farming and its
implications for the quality of life that could be experienced by current
and future generations.
* Publicize and ensure adoption of sustainable alternatives to systems that
pollute and are inhumane.
* Investigate legal authorities for reducing pollution.
* Build a campaign to mobilize activists around the issues.
* Encourage colleagues in the funders' community to become informed on
animal factory issues and support reform efforts.
Mark Ritchie, President |
