Good Food Rising Youth_Toolkit_JooMag | Page 107

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 105