Topics: Agriculture, Factory Farming, Food, Meat, Vegetarianism

You wont believe what goes on at these farms. Lee Camp, redacted tonight.

Farm to Fridge.

Beef-eating 'must fall drastically' as world population grows. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Dec. 5, 2018.

Current food habits will lead to destruction of all forests and catastrophic climate change by 2050, report finds

Creating a Sustainable Food Future. World Resources Institute.

By 2050, nearly 10 billion people will live on the planet. Can we produce enough food sustainably? 

The synthesis report of the World Resources Report: Creating a Sustainable Food Future shows that it is possible – but there is no silver bullet. This report offers a five-course menu of solutions to ensure we can feed everyone without increasing emissions, fueling deforestation or exacerbating poverty. Intensive research and modeling examining the nexus of the food system, economic development, and the environment show why each of the 22 items on the menu is important and quantifies how far each solution can get us. 

Creating a Sustainable Food Future has been produced by World Resources Institute in partnership with the World Bank, UN Environment, UN Development Programme, and the French agricultural research agencies CIRAD and INRA.

The way we eat is killing us – and the planet. Felicity Lawrence, Guardian. Jan. 28, 2019.

The global food system is causing an ecological and health catastrophe – individual action won’t be enough.

The distinguished medical journal The Lancet has issued not one but two apocalyptic warnings about our food in under a month. One of its special commissions reported earlier this month that civilisation itself was at risk from the effects of the current food system on both human health and the Earth’s ecosystems. 

This week comes the next instalment from another special Lancet commission which finds that pandemics of obesity and malnutrition are interacting with climate change in a feedback loop and represent an existential threat to humans and the planet. The modern western diet has become a highly damaging thing that needs a complete overhaul if we are to avoid potential ecological catastrophe. It concluded that we need to halve global meat consumption, and more than double the volume of whole grains, pulses, nuts, fruit and vegetables we eat. 

Cue howls of indignation from big food and its cheerleaders, the libertarian right. Those nanny statists have gone nuts eating their own double dose of nuts! Cue cries of distress from champions of local, low-impact agriculture who include grass-fed animals, and their meat and manure, in their sustainable mix. These self-appointed experts don’t understand farming! Cue grim food wheels with only a quarter of a rasher of bacon or a fifth of an egg a day. Those miserabilist medics want us all to go vegan!

Yet the evidence that our diets are the largest cause of climate change and biodiversity loss is now overwhelming. The global food system is responsible for up to 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions, the livestock sector on its own accounting for about half of that total or 14.5%. The modern western way of eating is also making very large numbers of people fat and sick as other parts of the world adopt it. Diet-related diseases now cause roughly 11 million deaths a year as preventable cancers, heart disease and strokes, obesity and diabetes have spread along with our way of eating. More than 800 million people are estimated to be chronically undernourished, and 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, yet at the same time 2 billion are overweight or obese. In poorer counties you can even find obesity and stunting within the same family as calorie-heavy but nutrient-light processed industrialised foods are adopted. 

In other words, something has gone horribly wrong and we don’t have much time to fix it.

European farms could grow green and still be able to feed population. Rebecca Smithers, Guardian. Feb. 20, 2019.

Research shows loss in yields could be offset by reorienting diets away from grain-fed meat

Can We End Animal Farming Forever? Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Nov. 12, 2018.

A new book says we should stop killing animals altogether... and that it's possible.

Here is a bit of bad news: Humanity is committing an ongoing moral atrocity at an almost unthinkable scale.

 

There is, however, also some good news: We might be able to end it more easily than people assume. 

The moral problem with our current practice of killing and eating of animals is very clear. Non-human animals are quite obviously sentient and feel fear, pain, and sorrow. Most of us know this, which is why we object to animal cruelty when it’s perpetrated against puppies or kittens. But off in places we keep out of sight, billions of animals are being constantly subjected to unimaginable cruelty. Baby chicks are thrown away by the thousand to suffocate, animals are raised in crowded darkness, their entire lives consisting of never-ending stress and pain. This only begins to touch on the horrors. 

Even though many people are queasy about industrial farming, most of us do not make it one of our main causes. People think that human issues are more important, but they are also simply overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. Meat is such a core part of the average diet (only a tiny fraction of people are vegetarian), and there are so many people on earth, that it’s unclear how you could possibly eliminate, or even substantially reduce, animal suffering. You could convince people one by one to go vegan, since if everyone was a vegan there would be no problem. But as a practical matter, that seems unlikely to work: It’s good to create new vegans where possible, but knowing about the problem does not turn people vegan. (I am not a vegan myself, though I have been a vegetarian for 10 years. I have had to eat a lot of shitty food, and pass up a lot of delicious food, in order to keep it up. Once, when I went to a steak restaurant with some friends and asked for something vegetarian, I was brought nothing but an entire plate of almost-raw broccoli, stalks and all. Here I am looking at it. Many chefs hate vegetarians.) In the absence of a sudden mass conversion to a fruit and nut diet, are we stuck with this problem forever? 

In his new book The End of Animal Farming, Jacy Reese argues that we are not. Reese believes that with considerable effort, we can end animal farming altogether within 100 years, and that when we do, our era will come to seem as morally backward as the distant past now seems to us today.

How Can You Talk to Kids About Factory Farming? These Books Can Help. Reynard Loki, Truthout. Oct. 28, 2018.

Many children play with toys that evoke the bucolic life on a farm. And many will likely visit a small local farm, where animals have space and access to sunlight and the outdoors. But most kids are probably not aware that, for the vast majority of farmed animals, life is anything but happy.

Consider the life of a chicken trapped on a factory farm. If she is one of the 9 billion chickens who suffer and die on US factory farms for their meat, she is committed to a life of unending misery, fed an unnatural diet to spur abnormally rapid and painful growth. Perhaps she is one of the 26 to 30 percent of chickens raised for their meat who can’t even walk normally because their skeletons are not able to support their rapidly growing bodies. She will live an average of just 42 days. If she is one of more than 300 million chickens raised in factory farms every year for their eggs, most of her beak was cut off with a scalding hot blade when she was just hours or days old. As a hen, she lives her entire life in a tiny wire “battery” cage, with up to 10 other hens. She may be sick or injured, but she will receive no medical care. She is forced to live alongside dead and dying cagemates. After about two years of this unimaginable suffering, she is considered “spent,” and sent to a slaughterhouse. After her brief life, she must endure a terrible death as she is stunned in an electrified water bath before her throat is slit. (There is no law requiring chickens to be rendered unconscious before slaughter.)

Consider also the life of a mother pig trapped on a factory farm, where she is confined to a gestation crate barely larger than her own body. She is unable to turn around or even lie down comfortably for almost her entire life. Once she gives birth, she is impregnated again, in a cruel cycle that goes on for up to four years before she is killed for her meat. Her piglets are ripped from her when they are just 10 days old, and their tails cut off and their teeth clipped. Her sons have their testicles ripped out without any anesthesia or painkillers.

These are the brutal realities for millions of animals trapped on factory farms. ...

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Q: What would you tell parents who want to avoid purchasing meat produced in factory farms, or parents who are considering switching their families’ diets to more plant-based eating? 

A: I’d tell them they are helping not only the planet but themselves and their children by encouraging them to eat more fruits, vegetables and grains. Factory farming heats up our planet, pollutes waterways and air, and eats up land used to grow the grain that feeds livestock — and lots of water too. It also hurts the people who live near and work at [the farms]. Even if a family isn’t vegetarian or vegan, just reducing the amount of meat and dairy we eat can make a difference, and there are so many good plant-based options these days, with many more coming to market every week.

Investigation Exposes Animal Abuse at US Supplier to World’s Largest Meat Company. Reynard Loki, Truthout. Sep. 8, 2018.

“From the day pigs are born until the day they are violently killed for JBS pork, their lives are filled with misery and deprivation,” said Matt Rice, president of MFA, in a press statement. “If JBS executives abused even one dog or cat the way their suppliers abuse millions of pigs, they would be jailed for cruelty to animals."

Death by Fertilizer. Nathanael Johnson, Grist. Oct. 2, 2018.

This breakthrough solution created a crisis as large as the one it solved. Since Haber’s discovery, humans have nearly doubled Earth’s natural flow of fixed nitrogen, overwhelming the capacity of ecosystems to remove it. The resulting buildup is poisoning the planet’s waterways, creating a crisis some consider even more threatening than the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Time to Drive Factory-Farmed Food Off the Market. Ronnie Cummins & Martha Rosenberg, Organic Consumers Association. Truthout. Sep. 12, 2016.

Factory farming is a trillion-dollar industry that has a devastating impact on food quality, human health, animal welfare, farmworkers, rural communities, water quality, air pollution, biodiversity, and greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, two-thirds of all farm animals are now confined on factory farms. In the US the figure is even higher — 90-95 percent.

The overwhelming majority of US and global farmland today is used either to raise animals before they are sent to the CAFO feedlots, or to grow the GMO and chemical intensive crops such as alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, soybeans and sugar beets.

The US factory farm meat, dairy and poultry industry is an out-of-control system based on cruel, filthy, disease-ridden and environmentally destructive animal prisons; GMO-and pesticide-tainted feeds; labor exploitation; false advertising; corporate corruption of government; and the use of massive amounts of dangerous pesticides, chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones and growth promoters.

Factory-farm meat, dairy, poultry and fish are the number one cause of water pollution, soil degradation, greenhouse gas emissions diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, reproductive defects, hormone disruption and obesity.

More weight on less meat. Mark Bittman, NYT. July 18, 2011.

Meat eater's guide to climate change and health. Environmental Working Group.

Plant-Based Diets Can Help Us Reach The 2 Degree Threshold. Carolyn Fortuna, Clean Technica. Oct. 5, 2018.

A report from researchers Poore and Nemecek at the University of Oxford points to one significant solution to meet the 2 degree threshold — avoiding meat and dairy products. They say that this is the single biggest way to reduce our environmental impact on the planet. Meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, yet they use the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s GHG emissions. The report indicates that, without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75%.

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“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” Joseph Poore, who led the research, said in an interview with The Guardian. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions. “Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems. Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.”

Slaughter Age vs. Natural Life Span. Colleen Patrick Goudreau. Apr. 11, 2012.

Though we kill over 10 billion land animals every year to please our palates, we too often try to absolve ourselves by making what we want to believe are guilt-free choices, failing to recognize the paradox of “humane slaughter” and never really knowing what the whole experience is for an animal from cradle (domestication) to grave (our bodies).

Though modern animal factories look nothing like what is idealized in children’s books and advertisements, there are also many misconceptions about the practices and principles of a “humane” operation. When we think about it for just a moment, the idea of breeding animals only to kill them is absurd at best, and people are often surprised to learn that most of the animals sent to slaughter are just babies, whether they are raised conventionally or in operations that are labeled “humane,” “sustainable,” “natural,” “free-range,” “cage-free,” “heritage-bred,” “grass-fed” or “organic.”

Slaughter Age vs. Natural Life Span

Pigs: Slaughtered at 6 months young; Natural life span: 6 to 10 years

Chickens: Slaughtered at 6 weeks young; Natural life span: 5 to 8 years for those birds bred as "egg layers" such as Rhode Island Reds; 1 to 4 years for factory layer breeds such as leghorns; and 1 to 3 years for "meat" breeds.

Turkeys: Slaughtered at 5 to 6 months young; Natural life span: 2 to 6 years

Ducks/Geese: Slaughtered at 7 to 8 weeks young; Natural life span: domestic ducks: 6 to 8 years; geese from 8 to 15 years.

Cattle: “Beef” cattle slaughtered at 18 months young; dairy cows slaughtered at 4 to 5 years young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years

Veal Calves: Slaughtered at 16 weeks young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years

Goats: Slaughtered at 3 to 5 months young; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years

Rabbits: Slaughtered at 10 to 12 weeks young; Natural life span: 8 to 12+ years

Lambs: Slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks young for “young lamb” and under 1 year for all other; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years

Horses/Donkeys: Slaughter age varies; Natural life span: 30 to 40 years 

When we tell ourselves we’re eating meat from “humanely raised animals,” we tend to refer to the conditions under which animals are raised—not killed. The slaughtering of an animal is a bloody and unpleasant act, and death does not come easy for those who want to live – whether done on a backyard farm or in a chaotic slaughterhouse where desensitized, stressed-out workers often commit unthinkable acts of cruelty – simply because they can. And this end is the same for all animals, whether they’re used for their flesh, milk, or eggs. Dairy cows and egg-laying hens are ultimately slaughtered for meat when the profits to be gained from their flesh outweigh the cost of keeping them alive.

In my opinion, the movement toward “humanely raised food animals” simply assuages our guilt more than it reduces animal suffering. If we truly want our actions to reflect the compassion for animals we say we have, then the answer is very simple. We can stop eating them.

The lives of beef cattle and dairy cows. Animal Defenders International. December 2018


Cattle are farmed either to produce milk or to produce meat but the two industries are intrinsically linked.

Cows reared for beef

In the UK, some beef cattle spend their time between living indoors in sheds during the winter months and outside for the rest of the year, others are reared indoors in intensive systems year-round. While calves in less intensive systems may stay with their mother until they are weaned, others are taken from their mothers as soon as 12 hours after their birth and are raised in pens on milk replacements and pellet feed. Within the first weeks of life male calves are castrated and have the buds of their horns burned off with no anaesthetic.
Outdoor reared cows feed on pastures before slaughter whilst others are transported to ‘fattening sheds’ and fed high-bulk cereals. The conditions in the fattening sheds are barren and crowded and may or may not have straw covering the slatted concrete floors; the cows often find it difficult to stand and may become lame as a result. They are sent for slaughter at approximately 10-12 months of age. Sometimes transported great distances, this adds to the stress they must endure, and the spread of disease. Once arriving at the slaughterhouse, the cattle are stunned (often ineffectively) using a captive bolt pistol before being shackled upside down by the leg and having their throat slit.

Cows reared for dairy

In the UK, dairy cows are most commonly kept in pastures during the summer months and indoors in the winter. However, the practice of keeping cows indoors all year round, known as zero-grazing, is becoming more prevalent. Cows naturally produce milk for their own babies after giving birth, but dairy cows are subjected to the same cruelty as in other intensive farming systems to constantly supply humans with milk. Maximum production is paramount to farmers and cows are bred to produce between 20 and 50 litres of milk each day; around ten times the amount her calf would suckle.

Calves are usually taken from their mothers within the first two days of birth, breaking the strong maternal bond and causing suffering, anxiety and depression for both mother and baby. Under natural circumstances, a calf would suckle between six months and a year. Cows are impregnated again approximately 60 days after giving birth to continue the cycle of milk production.

Despite being able to live up to twenty years of age, dairy cow milk production reduces after the first two or three years, and so they are sent to slaughter, usually at around 6 years of age. Their meat often ends up in low-grade burgers or pet foods.

Female infants taken from their mothers may also become dairy cows, going through the same process of impregnation and losing several babies, as their mother did. Male infants may be killed as soon as they are removed from the mother or grown for ‘low quality’ meat. Male or female calves could also be sold and reared as veal.

Action

You can help cows reared for meat and dairy by adopting a plant-based, vegan diet.





Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits. Marco Springmann et al, Nature. Oct. 10, 2018.

Abstract
The food system is a major driver of climate change, changes in land use, depletion of freshwater resources, and pollution of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems through excessive nitrogen and phosphorus inputs. Here we show that between 2010 and 2050, as a result of expected changes in population and income levels, the environmental effects of the food system could increase by 50–90% in the absence of technological changes and dedicated mitigation measures, reaching levels that are beyond the planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity. We analyse several options for reducing the environmental effects of the food system, including dietary changes towards healthier, more plant-based diets, improvements in technologies and management, and reductions in food loss and waste. We find that no single measure is enough to keep these effects within all planetary boundaries simultaneously, and that a synergistic combination of measures will be needed to sufficiently mitigate the projected increase in environmental pressures.

Mighty Meat Proposes A World Where Meat Alternatives Are Better For You & The Environment. Kyle Field, CleanTechnica. Oct. 12, 2018.

Digging into the ingredients for Mighty Meat’s products will reveal that the core ingredients are a few types of legumes and mushrooms. From a protein standpoint, it is comparable with chicken and ranks positively on every single nutritional marker against any meat.

The Best Vegetarian and Vegan Meat Substitutes to Try. Jolinda Hackett, The Spruce Eats. May 31, 2018.


An electrifying idea. George Monbiot. Nov. 6, 2018.

The most important environmental action we can take is to reduce the area of land and sea used by farming and fishing. This means, above all, switching to a plant-based diet: research published in the journal Science shows that cutting out animal products would reduce the global requirement for farmland by 76%. It would also give us a fair chance of feeding the world. Grazing is no answer to the ecocide caused by grain-fed livestock: it is an astonishingly wasteful use of vast tracts of land that would otherwise support wildlife and wild ecosystems. 

The same action is essential to prevent climate breakdown. Because governments, bowing to the demands of capital, have left it so late, it is almost impossible to see how we can stop more than 1.5° of global warming without drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The only way of doing it that has been demonstrated at scale is to allow trees to return to deforested land. 

But could we go beyond even a plant-based diet? Could we go beyond agriculture itself? What if, instead of producing food from soil, we were to produce it from air? What if, instead of basing our nutrition on photosynthesis, we were to use electricity, to fuel a process whose conversion of sunlight into food is ten times more efficient? 

This sounds like science fiction, but it is already approaching commercialization

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We have allowed a mythical aesthetic to blind us to the ugly realities of industrial agriculture. Instilled with an image of farming that begins in infancy, as about half the books for very small children involve a rosy-cheeked farmer with one cow, one horse, one pig and one chicken, living in bucolic harmony, we fail to see the amazing cruelty of large-scale animal farming, the blood and gore, filth and pollution. We fail to apprehend the mass clearance of land required to feed us, the Insectageddon caused by pesticides, the drying up of rivers, the loss of soil, the reduction of the magnificent diversity of life on Earth to a homogenous grey waste.

3 simple tasks to improve your carbon footprint. Kyle Field, CleanTechnica. Dec. 14, 2018.

According to The Guardian, the meat and dairy industries produce 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gases, but only 18% of the calories consumed by humans around the world. Additionally, it uses 83% of farmland, which is directly contributing to climate change and, “Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.” That’s a pretty tall side order to take in along with every portion of meat and dairy just by itself. 

Meat fans will list out the ways meat can be raised more responsibly, but it is simply on a different level entirely. It’s to the point where, “even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing,” according to The Guardian. 

I’m not proposing that everyone give up meat entirely, though that is clearly the most sustainable, low carbon way to live. Instead, I think it’s easier to either give up meat most days during the week, or just eat meat as a special treat. Alternately, significant gains could be had from just dropping beef and opting for chicken or pork, which are responsible for just 1/4 of the emissions per serving compared to beef.

What’s the alternative to factory farms? Book review by Martin Empson, Climate & Capitalism. Jan. 20, 2019.

‘Farming, Food and Nature’ offers a powerful critique of industrial livestock production, but fails to challenge the profit-system that drives it.

Joyce D’Silva and Carol McKenna, editors
FARMING, FOOD AND NATURE: Respecting Animals, People and the Environment
Routledge, 2018