To be completely honest from the outset, I like most cats, am a carnivore, and I know of no way to eat meat without killing it first. But I believe that food animals should be raised, treated, and killed humanely on family farms. Beyond violating animal rights, factory farms threaten human health and the environment.
The world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial farming if it is to avoid catastrophic impacts on life on earth, according to the head of one of the world’s most highly regarded animal campaign groups.
Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more recently Deadzone, said:
Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive, inefficient, wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a total rethink of our food and farming systems before it’s too late.
His comments came on the eve of Compassion’s recent Livestock and Extinction conference in London, which brought together scientists, campaigners, U.N. representatives and multinational food corporations including Compass, Tesco and McDonald’s. The conference aims to bring together a wide range of voices and connect up the many impacts that factory farming has on our planet.
The conference came against a backdrop of alarming exposés of industrial farming. Last month, a Guardian/ITV investigation showed chicken factory staff in the U.K. changing crucial food safety information on chickens, while a month ago the European Commission admitted that eggs containing a harmful pesticide may have been on sale in as many as 16 countries.
In the U.S. in August, meanwhile, campaigners identified the world’s largest ever "deadzone" —an area in the sea where pollutants from farms create algal blooms that kill off or disperse marine life—and singled out the U.S.’s heavily industrialized factory farm system as a major cause…
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I trust that many of you know far more about this subject than I do, so I welcome your input.
RESIST THE REPUBLICAN REICH!!
10 Responses to “Family Farms Not Factory Farms”
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I’m more of an obligate omnivore … although people with food allergies/sensitivies need to avoid foods we are allergic to, we also need to spread out the food families we do eat as much as possible. If one has food allergies, it’s clear one is prone to them, and eating too much too often of the same food can create an allergy to it down the road, and then what does one do? And I am absolutely with you on factory farms being – shall we say – less than ideal, both for the animals and for the eventual consumers … and, really, for the farmers as well.
Outside of that, I really only know bits and pieces. But I can testify that I worry about antibiotic overuse probavly more than any other factor in our system – and that is saying something. Combine overuse of antibiotics in foods causing the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria with increasing numbers of anti-vaxxers and what do you get?
I agree with Joanne! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
If we don’t control the amount of pollutants in our water, our grandkids are doomed to die from thirst because our recklessness! And the air is the in the same trouble. What gets to them first is a toss up! NOW, is that what we want for future generations? I will say NO!
Thanks for the time to rant, TC! See ya later
This is so sad.
The rural farms are just about gone, with the industrialized farming being big money. We must leave the earth better than it is now. 60 years is right around the corner. Then what??! The ruination of the environment is not the answer for the generations to come.
As I understand it, even the massive amount of cow patties, and associated methane, adds significantly to our impact on the atmosphere.
I am not totally vegan, but trying. I grew up knowing that the chickens were there for food, as was the pig. Small farms do not pollute the way commercial farms do, and the animals are not treated so cruelly. The over use of antibiotics in animals has caused problems for all of us. The Mississippi river is heavily polluted from the run off from factory farms. It will be as difficult to convince people of the above facts as it is to convince many of them that climate change exists.
I have no knowledge of American farming other than that all American farms, even family farms are huge compared to European farms, especially in north-western Europe. That is why smart growers started the glass-house industry for vegetables and flowers as early as the beginning of the previous century and factory farming for chickens and pigs soon followed. By now everything that is “farmed” for meat or dairy is factory farming: only sheep seem exempt, but a lot of cows never see a meadow in their life. Here most, if not all, farms are what Americans would call family farms, so that doesn’t help to distinguish environmentally friendly and animal friendly farming from mass production farming.
In the ’70s it became clear that large scale (factory) farming did a lot of damage to both the environment, the animals that were farmed and ultimately the health of consumers and a lot has been done, starting in The Netherlands and now within the EU to regulate better on environmental, welfare and health issues. In all it is known to be better regulated than in the US, but it isn’t enough and there are a lot of activist groups raising the awareness of consumers on all these issues and that does help. For a number of years now all kinds of meat are sold here under a rating system devised and checked by the SPCA. No stars means the animal has been treated very badly, kept penned up in the smallest amount of space allowed and fed unnatural foods to make it grow as fast (explode) as possible. Three stars is the best treatment, a life outdoors when possible and as natural as possible. Usually three stars means organically farmed. For dairy products the producer can only use the coveted term “meadow milk” if the cows have been grass-fed, i.e. have been allowed to graze 120 days a year for at least 6 hours per day. But as is with everything else, it all depends on how well farmers are kept to maintain these standards.
Don’t think it has been easy here, farmers have traditionally been the largest lobby and still are in many ways. But all in all, the approach of raising consumer awareness has been successful. The use of eggs from what we call laying batteries is nearly non-existent, even in cheap mass-produced products, poultry is given more minimal space, consumers have forced supermarkets to forego their cheap “plof” chickens (chicks “exploded” into maturity within 6 weeks), it’s illegal to pull teeth or castrate piglets without anesthetics, there is a small, but significant and steady tendency to buy organic meat and there is an equally significant and steady tendency to eat less meat (on meatless Mondays for instance).
“killed humanely” seems like an oxymoron to me, but then I am (proudly) Vegan.
Ripping those poor little plants out by their roots, and cutting them up when their sap is still flowing is terribly cruel to them. How could you?
That reminds me of the old joke:
I’m a vegetarian NOT because I love animals … but because I hate plants!
Stinking Plants!!