Factory Farming Issue - Essay Example

Factory Farming Issue With the increase of population the question how to feed people becomes more and more problematic, so factory farming has become the solution for the problem of food insufficiency. Even though factory farming is considered to be very profitable from economic point of view, still it is harmful for multiple reasons, as it affects human health, abuses animals, and pollutes environment. This means that factory farming has more disadvantages than advantages. Factory farming is a kind of farming that is able to produce vast amount of livestock (chickens, turkeys, cattle, and hogs) in order to retrieve meat, milk, and eggs for massive trading of food. The industrial livestock production is based on incubation of animals in special farms, when their growth is massive and fast enough to produce tones of food in a very short period of time by feeding the animals in a special way (Kaufmann n.pag.). Factory farming appears to be a good solution of the issue of feeding billions of people who inhabit our planet and it indeed has a lot of advantages. First of all, use of factory farms dramatically reduces the cost of food. The point is that factory farming allows agricultural producers to make the process of nurturing animals faster. These quite big rates of producing make the products cheaper, as growth of production leads to growth in quantity of the animals raised in such massive farms (Duram 139). Second of all, as far as animals are not raised in proper conditions, their nurturing is quite cheap and convenient, so it becomes possible to produce such huge quantities of food that they are sufficient for numerous people of the world. Moreover, factory farming creates a lot of job opportunities for people who live in suburbs, as they become able to find jobs on the big factory farms, which require a lot of workers to maintain such a massive production. Also, factory farming is a constantly developing industry, where technologies are crucial for increase of the production, which affects development of agriculture in general (Kaufmann n.pag.). Finally, the proponents of factory farming claim that it is inevitable for modern society, which population rates are increasing enormously and private farms become not able to cover all the demand for food that exists nowadays. Despite all the advantages of the factory farming, it affects negatively a lot of different aspects of our lives and the very first one of them is human organism. Because of the bad conditions livestock live in factory farms, there may be multiple diseases spread within those farms, which affects the quality of production retrieved from the farms, and it was noted in the report “Factory Farming: The Impact of Animal Feeding Operations on the Environment and Health of Local Communities” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (n.pag.). For example, the worse outcome of such nurturing is spoiled meat that consumers buy without any suspicion that it might be infected. However, some farms take care of their animals’ health by feeding them with hormones and antibiotics in order to prevent their diseases and make their growth faster. These hormones and antibiotics stay in the livestock’s organisms and affect the quality of their meat, so people who later eat it also get small doses of the artificial hormones and health-worsening antibiotics. Furthermore, the corn that factory farming producers use to feed their animals contains a lot of hazardous pesticides, which eventually pollute consumers’ organisms and some of them even are irretrievable from human bodies. Hence, it is not strange that multiple medical researches denote that such disease as cancer in multiple cases comes from consumption of the food spoiled by pesticides and hormones (“Pesticides in the Environment” n.pag.), which stay in human bodies and cause such a dangerous disease, because human body literally rebels against its pollution by humans themselves. Moreover, there are some kinds of flu (like the bird one) that may be passed from animals to humans through meat consumption; these diseases often cause pandemic situations in different parts of the planet (Brown n.pag.). One of the most controversial issues regarding factory farming is animal abuse that is happening within the scopes of such high-scale type of production. First of all, animals that live in such farms have absolutely inconvenient conditions, inappropriate for normal existence. They get placed closely to each other, as they usually live in cages and crates, without any access to outdoor environment, because the farms are closed spaces. Thus the animals don’t even have enough space to move or exercise, which normal animals need for development. In fact the animals may even never breathe any fresh air and see daylight throughout their entire lifetimes, which is absolutely inhumane animal treatment on the part of factory farms’ producers. Moreover, because of inappropriate conditions of life and density within the cages, animals are often get injuries and social stress because of big amount of other animals around them and lack of space to move. In order to prevent animals injuring each other producers use some prevention methods like clipping off animals’ teeth without any anesthesia used beforehand. As it has already been mentioned above, there is a big chance for factory farming animals to get infected and gain some other multiple diseases living in the farms. Different infections spread fast within the animal population because of the stressful conditions and overcrowded environment they live in. Furthermore, in order to make the livestock grow faster, producers often feed animals with special kinds of corn that make animals overfeed and obese. For instance, a modern regular supermarket chicken has twice as more fat and a third less protein that a supermarket chicken contained forty years ago (Lymbery n.pag.). All these factors of production not only make factory farming animals’ lives unbearable but also shorten their lifetime, as producers want animals grow quickly in order to sell them as products and replace them with new animals so that production would not ever stop. As far as factory farming is a huge industry, it enormously affects the world’s ecological situation. Such farms have a lot of waste thrown into water and ground, which spoils environment by agrochemicals. However, the biggest problem concerns the resources used to feed the animals in such factory farms. Given that the animals are usually overfed, it means that producers need to grow the feed, using some chemicals in order to make the process faster. This leads to depletion of recourses, which eventually may result in land degradation, so in order to maintain the factory farming production producers will have to use stronger chemicals to grow feed. For example, the quality of water across the United States is threatened by phosphorus and nitrogen which contain in the waste produced by the factory farms. Some researches show that the waste from the farms spoil ground water with a dangerous microorganism, called Pfiesteria piscicida, which results in the death of more than one billion fish in coastal waters in North Carolina (“Pollution from Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health” n.pag.). Moreover, the entire production makes a lot of waste which is being thrown out without any recycling, which pollutes soil, water, and air. Economic aspect of consideration of the issue of factory farming is rather contradictory. On the one hand, because of intensive production the farms make food cheaper for consumers, which is appropriate enough for people to prefer these products before those produced on private factories by ordinary farm owners. Hence it turns out that if buying factory farming products is much more profitable for consumers, private farms lose their buyers, which leads private business to stagnation and eventually it disappears. Thus factory farming maintains huge agricultural corporations and destroys private entrepreneurs. Consideration of the issue of factory farming from ethical point of view makes the problem very complicated, as it turns out that this form of food production is totally inhumane. First of all, animal abuse and inappropriate living conditions for animals are totally unethical, as animal life becomes just a mean for human existence. Thus people raise animals in bad conditions, feed them with antibiotics and hormones; moreover, they make their lives shorter and don’t even provide them with normal conditions like daylight, fresh air, and sufficient space to move, which are in fact crucial for animals’ existence. Moreover, some Greenpeace defenders of animal rights argue that farming factories abuse animals by killing them without any anesthesia, which is inhumane and increases overall amount of cruelty and animal abuse. In fact their claims are totally reasonable and truthful, as animals indeed are being treated cruelly in those factory farms. It turns out that even though factory farming has a lot of advantages like lower price of products and massive production, still there are a lot of issues engaged with it. The most crucial of them are enormous air pollution caused by the farms, health issues that people get from eating the products, and inappropriate conditions in which livestock is being held in the farms. Works Cited Kaufmann, Mark. "Largest Pork Processor to Phase Out Crates", The Washington Post, January 26, 2007. Duram, Leslie A. Encyclopedia of Organic, Sustainable, and Local Food. ABC-CLIO, 2010. “Factory Farming: The Impact of Animal Feeding Operations on the Environment and Health of Local Communities”. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from: http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/conference/2006_conference/abstracts/session_D1.html "Pesticides In the Environment". Pesticide fact sheets and tutorial, Module 6. Cornell.edu. Web. Brown, David. "Back where virus started, new scrutiny of pig farming". The Washington Post,October 25, 2009. Lymbery, Philip. "Facts and Figures." Compassion in World Farming, 2012. Web. "Pollution from Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health". Natural Resources Defense Council. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/nspills.asp Read More