CAFOs vs. Free Range
Demand Labels on Factory-Farmed Meat
Factory farms, or Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), are a disaster for the environment and our health. Nearly 65 billion animals worldwide, including cows, chickens and pigs, are crammed into CAFOs, where they are literally imprisoned and tortured in unhealthy, unsanitary and unconscionably cruel conditions. Sickness is the norm for animals who are confined rather than pastured, and who eat GMO corn and soybeans, rather than grass and forage as nature intended.
Iowa’s largest water utility is threatening to sue three rural counties for allowing excess farm chemicals to contaminate drinking water, a dispute that is triggering a wider debate over the best way for Midwestern states to stop pollution from fertilizer runoff.
The Des Moines Water Works’ action is being closely followed by environmental advocates and could have far-reaching implications for states like Minnesota that have battled similar threats to drinking water.
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A broad-based coalition is calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to halt proposed changes to federal aquaculture regulations, warning they could damage the environment and existing businesses.
The proposed amendments to the federal Fisheries Act would exempt the aquaculture industry from provisions that "prohibit the release of deleterious substances into water frequented by fish."
Coalition members are worried the changes will result in pesticides routinely being dumped into the Bay of Fundy and remove Environment Canada's role in aquaculture activities, said spokeswoman
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Few people know the pig business like North Carolina’s Don Webb.
Webb raised pigs in Wilson County, North Carolina, until, in the late 70s, residents told him the smell near his farms was unbearable. He tried some solutions. They didn’t work.
“I was riding down the road and got to thinking of my own mother and father and what would I do if one of these was their homes [near the pig farms],” Webb said in his heavy Southern drawl. “So I got out of the business.”
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Three problems with the US food supply that is making food a source of disease rather than optimal health include: the way our food is raised; the way it's processed; and the routine use of hazardous drugs and chemicals.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world that produces and processes food in a way that defies both science and common sense.
As noted in the featured TED lecture, 86 percent of every dollar you spend at the grocery store goes toward paying for processing and marketing of the food.
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Every five years, the United States Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) get together to revise their recommendations about what Americans should eat. These guidelines influence doctors' health advice, food labels, the ever evolving food pyramid-turned-plate, and what goes into school lunches. For instance, in 2010, a time when more than half of adults were overweight or obese, the agencies recommended things like drinking water instead of sugary beverages, filling half your plate with fruits and veggies, cutting sodium, and just eating less in general.
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Recommended changes to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a farm program designed to encourage conservation, may instead promote the expansion of factory farms that harm the climate. EQIP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA NRCS), and is one of the largest federal conservation programs. It is a voluntary program that provides financial and technical assistance to agricultural producers to address soil, water, air, and other natural resource concerns.
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Photo courtesy of USDA NRCS
A “Cow Palace” in Washington State threatens public health with its acres of untreated animal waste.
A city in Iowa spends nearly $1 million a year to keep illness-causing nitrates, generated by farm runoff, out of public drinking water.
And who can forget the plight of Toledo, Ohio, residents whose water last summer was so contaminated by farm runoff that they couldn’t even bathe in it, much less drink it?
For decades, America’s chemical-intensive, industrial farming operations have spewed nitrates and other toxic chemicals, animal waste, ammonia, antibiotics, carbon
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Last week, I attended the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) conference in Boca Raton, Fla. I live in Maine so you might assume that I was overjoyed to be in the sunshine state while back-to-back blizzards crippled the frozen northeast.
But truth be told, I love snow. The bigger the storm, the higher the snowbanks, the more I am transported back to the place I grew up—a farm in Pittston, Maine. During the snowstorms of the early 1980s, my brother, sister and I would don our Moon Boots and play “king of the mountain” atop the monstrous snowbanks created when my father
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There have been many concerns raised in recent years about the overuse of antibiotics on farms, but the effect such uses have on human health is not fully understood.
Researchers at Texas Tech University are now suggesting that airborne dust could be a pathway for antibiotic-resistance bacteria to travel from feedlots to human environments.
Scientists collected air samples upwind and downwind of 10 feedlots in the southern High Plains region and found greater amounts of bacteria, antibiotics and DNA sequences responsible for antibiotic resistance downwind of the feedlots
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