
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.
Today, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) announced the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act, legislation that would place the liability for responsible disaster mitigation on corporations and industrial operators by requiring those entities to register with USDA, submit disaster preparedness plans, and pay a fee to establish a fund focused on disaster events.
Read moreLaketown, Wisconsin is again at the center of a battle over how communities can regulate large, industrial farming operations in their backyards. Laketown is the target of a lawsuit supported by the state’s largest business lobbying group, which claims the town board overstepped its role when it passed a local ordinance to prevent pollution from CAFOs.
Read moreThe Environmental Protection Agency is charged with protecting important waterways from pollution, but manure from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, continues to harm waterways — and only one-third of the largest facilities have a federal permit. States are largely responsible for issuing these permits, but that has resulted in patchy oversight, despite CAFOs being known environmental dangers.
Read moreDespite a significant body of research documenting CAFOs’ adverse health impacts on workers’ respiratory systems and the continued growth of animal factory farms across the country, the health of animal agriculture workers has been ignored for decades, though their problems are systemic.
Read moreA petition filed today from the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice aims to help residents like Hall by changing the way CAFOs are classified under the Clean Water Act. A mountain of research over the past couple decades has shown the human and environmental health impacts of water pollution stemming from CAFOs.
Read moreMona Lisa Wallace sued Smithfield arguing that the company’s factory operations were interfering with the reasonable use and enjoyment of her clients’ homes. In federal court in Raleigh, Wallace and her legal team brought civil actions against Smithfield to force change within the industry. Smithfield vowed never to settle the cases.
Read moreThe Center for Food Safety and allied organizations submitted comments to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) August 1 and two weeks earlier regarding the agency's proposed Aquaculture Opportunity Areas in the Gulf of Mexico and the Southern California Bight. These Aquaculture Opportunity Areas (AOA) identify places that NMFS deems suitable
Read moreFood prices are soaring because “monopolies are driving up the price you pay for food” and “slowly killing rural America,” according to Robert Reich, author, lawyer, former U.S. secretary of labor and co-founder of Inequality Media.
Read moreKeeping a few chickens in your garden may be a small, fragile, kind of freedom…but its freedom nonetheless, and power structures are easily petty enough to destroy even that modicum of independence. At its heart, self-reliance of any kind is the antithesis of everything driving us toward the “new normal”.
Read moreThe community members in Iowa breathed a huge sigh of relief, grateful their determination, creativity, and persistence had paid off. They had successfully fought off an industrial-sized animal operation that would have polluted the communities’ air and water, damaged public health, and threatened the quality of life for nearby residents.
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