ANIMAL WELFARE •CAFOS: COOPERATIVE LEARNING
primer: Waste Management
Confining thousands or millions of animals in a small amount of space poses a challenge: what
do with the enormous amounts of feces and urine? Poultry, swine, and cattle raised in U.S.
operations produce an estimated 335 million tons of waste annually. 3 In fact, a single confined
animal feeding operation (CAFO) can produce as much waste as a small city. 4 What do they do
with all that waste? It is often spread or sprayed onto nearby agricultural land as fertilizer, or put
into manure lagoons.
When the waste is overapplied to agricultural areas, the excess can seep into groundwater or
nearby waterways as runoff, contaminating the water. Lagoons can also seep into groundwater
or nearby waterways when overfilled or damaged. When intense storms hit a region with CAFOs,
manure lagoons can be damaged or flooded, causing manure, viruses, parasites, bacteria,
pesticides, and other matter, to be released into the environment. 5 Public health near manure
lagoons is a public health issue year-round, 6 not just during storms: “Life expectancy in North
Carolina communities near hog CAFOs remains low, even after adjusting for socioeconomic
factors that are known to affect people’s health and life span.” 7
primer: ANTIBIOTIC USE & RESISTANCE
In the 1940s, experiments found that feeding low doses of antibiotics to animals caused them
to gain weight faster even when eating less. These findings prompted the introduction of
antibiotics to the diets of healthy poultry, swine, and cattle. 8 By 2009, a whopping 80 percent of
antibiotic drugs sold in the U.S. were used for food animal production alone. 9 The nonmedical
use of antibiotics in food animal production has dangers, though: it creates an environment that
favors antibiotic-resistant bacteria, eroding the effectiveness of lifesaving drugs for animals,
and the people (like you and me) who eat them.
Frequent dosing of antibiotics means animals are more prone to catching strains of diseases
that are resistant to medicine. Farm animals often suffer from antibiotic-resistant respiratory and
intestinal diseases, made even more contagious by their confined living quarters. 10
GOOD FOOD PURCHASING PROGRAM • GOOD FOOD RISING
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