Background

Factory Farming

In the last few decades, consolidation of food production has concentrated power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. Many of today's farms are actually large industrial facilities, not the green pastures and red barns that most Americans imagine. These consolidated operations are able to produce food in high volume but have little to no regard for the environment, local farming economies, animal welfare, social upheaval, community choice or food safety. In order to maximize profits, factory farms manipulate governing decisions at the state and federal levels and block municipal community governments from banning the outright corporatization of agriculture. What "regulations" exist are generally corporate-friendly and at-best allow only for  limiting the most blatant of threats to the health of human and natural communities.

What is a Factory Farm?

The government calls these facilities Concentrated (or Confined) Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Agribusiness corporations have invested heavily in public relations campaigns to redefine them as "advanced farming" or "modern farming." The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a "CAFO" (factory farm) as "new and existing operations which stable or confine and feed or maintain for a total of 45 days or more in any 12-month period more than the number of animals specified" in categories that they list out. In addition, "there's no grass or other vegetation in the confinement area during the normal growing season." 

Numbers for both large and medium factory farms are listed on the EPA's site. A large factory farm includes 1000 cattle (other than dairy, which is 700), 2500 hogs over 55 pounds, or 125,000 chickens (as long as a liquid manure system isn't used). A liquid manure system is when the animal's urine and feces are mixed with water and held either under the facility or outside in huge open air cesspools that the corporations have christened "lagoons" - these manure systems create a lot of pollution (which many times taxpayers end up paying for). The chickens they refer to are chickens other than laying hens – laying hens must number between 30,000 - 82,000, depending on how the manure is handled.

A medium factory farm has between 300-999 cattle other than dairy (200-699 if dairy), 750-2,499 hogs if 55 pounds or more, and 37,500 to 124,999 chickens (other than hens that lay eggs) if the facility doesn't use a liquid manure handling system.

These industrial facilities share many characteristics, including:
Excessive Size
•    Unnaturally large numbers of animals are confined closely together. Cattle feedlots generally contain thousands of animals in one place, while many egg-laying businesses house one million or more chickens. The main animals for such operations are cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys, but this practice is also applied to sheep, goats, rabbits, and various types of poultry.
Disregard for Animal Welfare
•    Metal buildings confine animals indoors, with minimal room for normal behaviors and little or no access to sunlight and fresh air.
•    Animals are mutilated to adapt them to factory farm conditions. This includes cutting off the beaks of chickens and turkeys (de-beaking), and amputating the tails of cows and pigs (docking).
•    Pens and cages restrict the natural behavior and movement of animals. In some cases, such as veal calves and mothering pigs, the animals can’t even turn around.
Misuse of Pharmaceuticals
•    Low doses of antibiotics are administered regularly to animals in a preemptive move to ward off the diseases bred by unnatural, unsanitary conditions.
•    In addition to preventive medicines, animals are fed hormones and antibiotics to promote faster growth.
Mismanagement of Waste
•    Excessive waste created by large concentrations of animals is handled in ways that can pollute air and water.
•    Man-made lagoons on industrial farms hold millions of gallons of liquid waste, from which contaminants can leach into groundwater. The manure is normally sprayed on crops, but often excessively, leading it to run off into surface waters.
•    Nutrients and bacteria from waste can contaminate waterways, killing fish and shellfish and disturbing aquatic ecosystems.

Other than the Corporate-PR Euphemisms, Factory farms are also known as:
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)

Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)

Industrial Agricultural Operation (IAO)

Industrial Livestock Operation (ILO)

Corporate Control of Agriculture Deprives Fundamental Rights

Because U.S. courts have conferred constitutional protections on corporations, declaring them "legal persons" with protections in many cases greater than constitutional rights of living people, the American system of government has made it virtually impossible for citizens to govern corporate behavior, harms, and rights violations. Local governments have been declared subordinate to the rights of business corporations and citizens have been declared bereft of any right to self-government in the communities where they live.
•    One corporation often owns or controls all aspects of the production process, including animal rearing, feed production, slaughter, packaging and distribution. Known as vertical integration, this approach leads to tremendous consolidation of power that is leveraged against small farmers and diminishes corporations’ accountability for irresponsible practices.
•    Contract growing indentures independent farmers to grow livestock for a corporation. In the contract system, the corporation dictates all aspects of raising the animals, while the farmer is left with the risk, overhead, waste, and the disposal of any animals that don’t survive until slaughter, as well as legal liability for harm inflicted on the community and environment.

The True Costs

Industrially produced corporate food appears to be inexpensive, but the pricetag doesn’t reflect the actual costs that we taxpayers bear in subsidies (the lions share of federal farm subsidies go to large agribusiness corporations, not independent and family owned farms). Factory farms pollute communities and adversely affect public health, thereby increasing medical costs for those living near such farms—costs that are often shouldered by public budgets.iv Taxpayers fund government subsidies, which go primarily to large industrial farms. Jobs are lost and wages driven down, as corporate consolidation bankrupts small businesses and factory farms pay unethically low wages for dangerous, undesirable work. Community rights are subordinated by law to corporate privileges that dictate agricultural methods, financing, ownership, food quality, environmental and social sacrifices required to create the illusion of "efficiency."

Because factory farms are considered “agricultural” instead of “industrial,” they are not subject to the regulation that their scale of production (and level of pollution) warrants. Because their legal departments write the bills and regulations that frequently become law, for us to obey, and because they employ powerful lobbyists that argue for the under-funding and defunding of government agencies responsible for monitoring agricultural practices, industrial farms are left free to pollute, to hire undocumented workers (and pay them next to nothing), and to locate their businesses without regard to the wishes, consent or impact that has on our communities.