(The piece posted here is the Introduction to Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby. The new book (March 2010)  examines the environmental contamination and heath impacts of industrial livestock production.)

Many Americans have no idea where their food comes from, and many have no desire to find out.

That is unfortunate.

Every bite we take has had some impact on the natural environment, somewhere in the world. As the planet grows more crowded, and more farmers turn to industrialized methods to feed millions of new mouths, that impact will only worsen.

The willful ignorance of our own food’s provenance is curious, given our Discovery Channel-like fascination with the way in which everything else in our modern world is made. Some consumers will spend hours online reading up on cars, cosmetics, or clothes, searching out the most meticulously crafted or environmentally healthy products they can find, then run down to the supermarket and load their carts with bacon, butter, chicken, and eggs without thinking for a second where – or how – any of those goods were produced.

This is starting to change, of course. More Americans are coming to realize that the modern production of food – especially to provide for our affluent, protein-rich diet – has a direct and sometimes negative impact on the environment, the well-being of animals, rural communities, and human health itself. Some have joined in a contemporary consumer revolt of sorts that has put the corporate food industry on the defensive in recent years.

At the center of the storm are the large-scale, mechanized megafarms where hundreds of thousands of cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys are fed and fattened for market, all within the confines of enclosed buildings or crowded outdoor lots.

Government and industry call these massive compounds “confined [or concentrated] animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs (usually pronounced KAYfohs), though most people know them simply as “factory farms.” Chances are you have seen them from above, while flying in an airplane: long White buildings lined up in tightly packed rows of three, four, or many more.

CAFOs are where most of our animal protein – our milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, eggs, chicken, turkey, bacon, sausage, cold cuts, ribs, pork chops, and, increasingly, beef and fish – comes from these days. Old MacDonald’s farm – with his big red barn and clucking chicks in the yard – is quickly fading away into a romanticized past. Today, MacDonald would most likely be working as a contract grower for some conglomerate, raising tens of thousands of animals inside giant enclosures according to strict instructions dictated by the company, which typically owns the livestock but is not responsible for the thousands of tons of waste left behind before the survivors are trucked off to slaughter.

Large companies with kitchen-table names like Perdue, Tyson, Smithfield, Cargill, ADM, and Land O’Lakes now control much of the poultry and livestock production in the United States. They own the animals, they control the all-important processing and packing plants, they often operate their own distribution networks, and they sell an array of brands to consumers in the Supermarket.

This “vertical integration” model of production – some would call it an old-fashioned, illegal trust in need of a Teddy Roosevelt-style buster – leaves small and independent growers at such an obvious disadvantage that many of them give up animal agriculture altogether. Two percent of U.S. livestock facilities now raise 40 percent of all animals,1 and the vast majority of pigs, chickens, and dairy cows are produced inside animal factories.2

Livestock and poultry are very big business in America. Like all industries, agribusiness has barons that wield extraordinary political and economic clout, with billions at their disposal to spend on K Street lobbying, local and national political campaigns, saturation advertising, feel-good PR (see: “California, happy cows”), and other means of creating a favorable business climate for themselves.

And like many big industries, factory farms are major contributors to air, water, and land pollution. Science and government have concluded without a doubt that CAFOs are responsible for discharging millions of tons of contaminants from animal manure into the environment every year – much of it illegally.