Mystery Meat Magazine Issue 2 | Page 4

What Factory Farming?

By Jacob Gorski

What is factory farming? Many people don’t understand what factory farming is and all the hidden implications that surround it. Factory farming is a growing trend in the United States that the public can no longer ignore. It is reasonable to think that knowledge of factory farming would be as wide spread as its use, but this is not the case. The development of factory farming has not coincided with a development of knowledge and understanding of factory farming. This is evident with the EPA failure to make information about CAFOs public. CAFO stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, which is equivalent to Factory farming. The EPA’s efforts to make CAFOs more transparent were struck down by special interest groups in the factory farming industry and congressmen. The opposition to the EPA’s efforts used the argument that making information public about CAFOs would be a security risk for the farmers and the national food supply. This debate around CAFOs was happening just a few months before the re-election of President Barack Obama, which was a factor in the EPA’s retraction of its pursuits to make information about CAFOs public on July 13st, 2012. In this article, I hope to bring light to the enigma that is factory farming.

What do we consider factory farming? It isn’t like the traditional view of farming with a barn full of animals that have free reign over a grassy field. Factory farms are instead based off of efficiency and profit. These operations maximizes their goals by making the process less labor intensive and more automated. For example, it is possible for them to automate the feeding their animals. They also condense animals into very small quarters, in some cases small enough to making laying down difficult or impossible. Due to these small quarters, it is common for sickness to spread rapidly throughout the animal population. Farmers address this by using antibiotics as a preventative measure. The importance of efficiency is paramount over all others concerns to the farmers of these operations. Now, why should we care about factory farming?

"It is reasonable to think that knowledge of factory farming would

be as wide spread as its use, but this is not the case."

Mystery Meat Magazine: Issue 2

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