Animal Farming

First of all let's take a look at the definition of the word "Factory Faming", "The practice of raising farm animals in confinement at high stocking density and extremely restricted mobility." Before researching on the definition of factory faming, I had no idea of how farm animals were "processed" in the world, especially in that atrocious way.

I can now see factory farming simply as part of a systematic effort to produce the highest output at the lowest cost and with no animals in mind, only money. And after reading the article by Michal Pollan and his point of view of the factory farming, I would like to focus on a few other aspects of factory farming like the cost of production, quality of food, human health, diseases, pollution and ethics.

While researching about the topic, I found something very interesting about the cost of production. Intensive factory farming tends to produce food that can be sold at lower cost to consumers but that can only be achieved by reducing land cost and management cost. This to animals can only mean one thing, small wire cages lined up in rows, probably inside a warehouse. For the chickens in example, saving money means controlling environmental parameters like exposing chickens to artificial light cycles to stimulate egg production year-round. A forced production of egg from a single chicken would be 85 eggs per year; today, factory farming is pushing that number to well over 300 eggs per hen per year, laying hens' bodies are severely burdened. Factory owners also use warehouses to minimize cost. That causes the air in factories to be filled with dust, dander, and noxious gases, which are produced as the animals' urine and feces builds up inside the warehouse. Because of these facts, food produced by factory farming methods is often classified as being poorer quality than that produced by traditional methods. Factors of this also include poor quality diet of artificial feeds, lack of exercise which affects muscle quality and the use of additives to affect the product appearance.

Not only the animals' health but also our health has also been affected by factory farming. Peculiar new diseases have been amplified by these aberrant agribusiness practices. For example, "Mad Cow Disease", a fatal dementia affecting cattle, spread throughout the world when dead cows were fed to living cows. But it doesn't stop there, when people eat cows with "Mad Cow Disease," they get a fatal dementia that affects humans, called C.J.D. Another disease that can jeopardize human health is the avian influenza. Many people have died from the so-called "bird- flu," over one million chickens have been killed in the panic to stop the spread of the disease. Also, millions of Americans are infected, and thousands die every year from contaminated animal "food" products. Despite repeated warnings from consumer advocates, the Department of Agriculture's inspection system remains inadequate. I believe consumers can now begin to expect animal products to be tainted.

Pollution to our environment is also a big factor when considering the large quantities and concentrations of waste that are produced