Factory farms aren't just abusing animals—they're destroying the environment
by Nancy Lawson
A drive down an empty road in North Carolina's coastal plain reveals few signs of life: birds flying over parched fields, a woodpecker drumming for food, three long white buildings standing against the horizon. But yards from the asphalt, behind a "private drive" posting, is the evidence of thousands of lives cut short: a trash bin overflowing with discarded pigs, the swollen teats of a sow on top pointing toward a hazy sky.
Closer to the buildings, panicked squeals of pigs crammed inside break the silence. Their fates rest in the hands of a man who patrols his land in a golf cart. Armed with a rifle, he careens up to environmental activist Rick Dove to deliver a line he's clearly been saving for this moment: "Dove-hunting season's coming on soon."
Accustomed to the occasional belligerence of factory farm operators and others with a stake in one of the nation's most polluting industries, Dove and his colleague, Lower Neuse Riverkeeper Larry Baldwin, take the threat in stride. They shoot more photos of the property, collect a water sample from a culvert, and tell the man with the 3,000 pigs to have a nice day.
A longtime critic of agribusiness, Dove is outspoken about the inhumane treatment of the 10 million animals suffering in North Carolina's pig facilities, where breeding sows often live in crates so tiny they can't turn around.
But it was the abuse of a different kind of animal that first landed him in confrontations with factory farmers: the fish of his beloved Neuse River. In the years since a mysterious season of unprecedented pollution claimed up to a billion of them in 1991, they've continued to die by the millions, often covered with bleeding lesions covering their bodies.
As the Neuse River Foundation's first Riverkeeper, Dove discovered what scientists would later confirm: The fate of the fish and the miserable existence of the pigs were inextricably linked. He pinpointed the problem by flying over it, and what he witnessed astounded him. Pig waste sprayed onto fields that surrounded giant cesspools of manure—euphemistically called "lagoons" by the industry—was flowing into the watershed.
From a single spot in the air, Dove could count 100 lagoons. On successive trips, he documented many more: "I saw thousands and thousands of lagoons everywhere," he says. "Most all of them are right next to wetlands, streams, creeks, and rivers."
Now a volunteer with Waterkeeper Alliance, an organization devoted to protecting waterways, Dove is pitting the detective skills he pioneered in North Carolina to take on another segment of agribusiness: the chicken farms of Maryland's Eastern Shore.
He's in for a tough fight. Worldwide, animal agriculture is likely the largest source of water pollution, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's November 2006 report, Livestock's Long Shadow. Even more astounding, the report revealed that meat, egg, and milk production are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than transportation, making animal agriculture a leading contributor to climate change.
While marine and freshwater species struggle for clean air and water, the earth's atmosphere gasps, too. Eighteen percent of greenhouse gases, measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, result from activities associated with farm animal production, including deforestation for pasture and feed crops; use of fossil fuels in farm machinery and fertilizer manufacturing; energy consumption to power factory farms; and release of methane from manure pits and the digestive systems of cows and other ruminants into the atmosphere.
Mountains of Waste
A promotional poster encased in a glass shrine to local industry at the Duplin County, N.C., airport paints a more benign picture of industrial pig farming, touting one corporate giant's environmental stewardship and attention to animal welfare. But a flight over the countryside reveals something different. Pigs, chickens, and turkeys are missing from aerial views of the modern agricultural landscape. Most of the nearly 10 billion farm animals raised and slaughtered in the United States each year are treated like meat-, egg-, and milk-producing machines, hostages to an indoor intensive confinement system that denies them many natural behaviors, selectively breeds chickens and turkeys to grow more rapidly than their bodies can withstand, cuts off parts of chickens' beaks and piglets' tails without anesthesia, and overcrowds animals into trucks—with no protection from the elements—for transport to slaughterhouses that are often a long distance away.
Instead of red-roofed barns and animals grazing in pastures, huge one-story buildings surrounded by ponds of raw sewage dominate the scenery, sometimes emitting a stench powerful enough to gag pilots at 3,000 feet. Fortressed by private roads and forests, pig factories scar the landscape, their nitrogen- and phosphorus-laden runoff leaving glowing algal blooms in their wake.
Though manure is an age-old fertilizer, animals kept by the thousands generate more waste than surrounding lands can absorb. To try to prevent lagoon overflows, farmers spread the effluent over these "spray fields." Sometimes, says Dove, they even mist it into the air, raining down a fountain of feces. On the worst days, he adds, "we see so many violations we can't document them all."
Some operations in Maryland stockpile chicken manure in miniature mountain ranges. "When the rain comes down, it gets into these piles and comes out the bottom as leachates, and the arsenic and the nitrogen and the phosphorus and the E. coli … are as much as 1,000 times what the safe levels are," says Dove. "It's off the charts."
Near broiler chicken farms that squeeze tens of thousands of animals into narrow buildings, tidal waters flush waste from discharge pipes directly into Chesapeake Bay tributaries.
Unlike human waste, sewage from factory farms is not treated. What doesn't seep into groundwater or befoul waterways sometimes breaks down into particulate matter and gases that fill the air and settle into streams, forests, and surrounding communities.
"I don't cook out because it might get in the food," says René Wilson, whose Warsaw, N.C., home is in the heart of Duplin County's pig country. Brown spots dot Wilson's clothes, which begin to fall apart after six months. At 56, she has "sick sinus syndrome." When her family buries loved ones at the local cemetery, they have to hold their noses.
Around the country, rural residents have watched—and smelled—as a once bucolic countryside gives way to a new kind of animal agriculture. Though Wilson and others can't prove the link between their illnesses and neighboring pig facilities, studies are confirming the potential damage to human health caused by factory farms' release of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds, and endotoxins. The situation is so dire that in 2003 the American Public Health Association called for a moratorium on the largest factory farms until more data could be gathered. And the American Journal of Public Health dedicated its March 2007 issue to the people of Duplin County, describing the environmental damages of pig factories as integral to the community's fight for civil rights.
Destroying Wild Habitat
Nature is teaching an unpleasant lesson: Exploitation of one part of an ecosystem invariably affects others. Over the next century, farm animal abuse will likely contribute not just to the decline of human health—from pollution, zoonotic disease, antibiotic resistance, and artery-clogging meat-based diets—but to the extinction of species all over the globe.
The consequences are pronounced in places like the Chesapeake Bay, where nutrient runoff from the poultry industry fills waterways and global warming raises them higher.
This one-two punch in North America's largest estuary is a microcosm for the ills of animal agribusiness. Each year, factory farms on the Delmarva Peninsula raise half a billion broiler chickens in usually deplorable conditions. Egg facilities crowd laying hens into cages that provide each bird with less space than a sheet of paper. The local effects of raising so many birds in captivity include oxygen-deprived "dead zones" in the bay that destroy marine life. The global effects in this region—a haven for migratory birds—may be harder to reverse.
At Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Cambridge, Md., shore birds dive into vestiges of wetland being slowly inundated by an expansive river that, not long ago, was a narrow channel snaking through swamp grasses. At the visitor center, a volunteer tells a caller who wonders where the birds have gone: "If we hadn't lost the marsh, there would be a lot more critters."
Invasive species, sinking topography, and saltwater intrusion are partly to blame, says refuge manager Suzanne Baird, but there's no doubt the waters are rising. Though employees and volunteers are trying to literally stem the tide, they face an expensive uphill battle: 8,000 acres of marsh have been lost at a rate of 150 to 400 acres per year since the 1930s. By 2030, scientists believe most of the refuge will be open water.
The Choice is Ours
Slowing climate change involves adjusting everything from the energy we use to the food we eat. Most people know that trading a Hummer for a Prius can curb carbon dioxide emissions; few realize that reducing consumption of animal products may also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Though researchers have developed technologies for better managing factory farm emissions—including a method that captures methane for use as biofuel—making the waste "less bad" is not the answer to fixing a system that's "really objectionable on all fronts," says Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch.
Even if the animal agriculture sector applied all available technologies for reducing emissions, the resulting decrease in non-carbon dioxide gases would still be less than 20 percent, according to a recent article in The Lancet. Just stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions from the sector would require a per-person reduction of meat consumption to 90 grams a day (roughly the size of one hamburger patty), the authors wrote.
"To curb all the problems that come from modern meat production, we necessarily have to eat less meat, eggs, and dairy," says Danielle Nierenberg, animal agriculture and climate change specialist for The HSUS. "Many people will choose not to eat animals at all. But even for those who do eat animal products, reducing their consumption makes a big difference—both for animal welfare and the planet."
