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.
Two poles that once hoisted a clothes line stand rusting and unused in Elsie Herring’s back garden in eastern North Carolina. Herring lives next door to a field where pig manure is sprayed and the drifting faecal matter wasn’t kind to her drying clothes.
“The clothes would stink so you’d wash them again and again until they fell apart,” said Herring, whose family has lived in Wallace since her grandfather, a freed slave, purchased land in the 1890s.
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With cards spelling out "Costco Pollutes" and "Boycott Costco," opponents of a chicken processing plant in Fremont and four recently-approved, confined animal feeding chicken operations (CAFO) in Washington County, hoped those driving into the parking lot of the Costco Store on Dodge Street in Omaha would think twice about entering the store Saturday.
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The way we grow our food and raise livestock has changed significantly over the past several decades. Independent, small-scale family farms are increasingly giving way to industrial factory farms.
Factory farms have problems, one of which is their contribution to global climate change.
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Swords remain crossed over Costco’s plans for a chicken plant in Fremont and the battle lines moved to Omaha Saturday.
Dozens turned out at the Costco near 120th and Dodge to protest the proposed facility.
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In November 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved AquaBounty salmon, a genetically engineered (GE) “frankenfish” engineered to grow about twice as fast as typical farm-raised salmon. In Canada, the GE salmon are already being sold and eaten, to the tune of 5 tons in 2017, and could be coming to U.S. grocery stores as early as 2019, with no labels as such. Farmed fish facilities, often described as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) of the sea, pump water from rivers into their hatcheries, then pump it back out to the river once it’s no longer clean.
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The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, became a national news story, and for good reason. Republican leaders in the state were finally forced to take steps to stop the poisoning of Flint's drinking water with lead and other toxins, foisted on the community as part of a short-sighted cost-cutting measure. Despite improvements, the future of Flint's water supply is uncertain, but at least that story has brought increased attention to the problem of lead in water in many large cities, including Chicago.
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It has happened at slaughterhouses run by Smithfield Foods, Swift and Agriprocessors.
Now U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has swooped down on Southeastern Provision, a cattle slaughterhouse in Bean Station, Tennessee.
On April 5, with helicopters chopping overhead, 97 workers, mostly Hispanic, were detained by ICA. That left a workforce of only three. According to an article in the New Yorker, 32 of the detainees were released the same day, 54 were kept in detention and 10 were arrested for defying previous deportation orders.
Original news reports about
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Murphy Brown LLC, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, has been hit with lawsuits from more than 500 North Carolina residents who say their operations and manure lagoons are harming their health and lowering property values. In April 2018, a federal jury ruled in the favor of area residents, awarding the plaintiffs a collective $750,000 in compensation plus another $50 million in damages; the lawsuit is the first of 26 nuisance lawsuits filed against Murphy Brown. In 2017, North Carolina legislators passed a law setting a cap on how much people can receive
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Fish farms are the water-based equivalents of land-based concentrated animal feeding operations, and as such they create the same, if not worse, environmental concerns. Since the salmon pens are placed along wild salmon runs, they pose a severe threat to wild salmon that pass by, exposing wild fish to diseases such as piscine reovirus, which now threatens wild salmon with extinction. Toxicology testing reveals farmed salmon is one of the most toxic foods in the world — more than five times more toxic than any other food tested, with eight times higher PCB levels than wild salmon.
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More than 160 people crowded into a little country club on an overcast spring evening, but they weren't there for a round of golf. These people were more concerned with row crop fields and manure pits than fairways and sand traps.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources' public meeting Wednesday at the Tipton Country Club addressed public comments and concerns with the proposed Tipton East concentrated animal feeding operation.
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