My wife and I left Iowa before settling and starting our family but we have lots of friends and family still in the state. The effects that mass ag and the toxins generated have on the state...
A large CAFO in your backyard is akin to living next to a power plant or waste treatment facility […] In North Carolina and Iowa, […] excess manure, when applied to fields, poisons drinking water.
My wife and I left Iowa before settling and starting our family but we have lots of friends and family still in the state. The effects that mass ag and the toxins generated have on the state cannot be overstated - Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country.
I feel fortunate in that I only lived in the state for ~15 years, much of it on the Mississippi River and decently far removed from the super highly-concentrated agriculture of the rest of the state, but I fear for my wife who was born and raised in the dead center of the state for 30 years. Stories like this make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s like watching a state-sized car crash in slow motion.
Yeah there are a lot human victims of animal agriculture that rarely get heard about in all the discussions about it. Even the crops grown in Iowa (and a lot of places around the world) are mostly...
Yeah there are a lot human victims of animal agriculture that rarely get heard about in all the discussions about it. Even the crops grown in Iowa (and a lot of places around the world) are mostly animal feed crops. ~40-50% of corn is for animal feed with the other half being for ethanol, around ~75% of soy is, almost all hay, etc. All the fertilizer runoff and pesticides for those are going towards feed crops where almost all the energy will be lost
This system of intensified confinement has made the American meat industry widely and increasingly emulated. It makes money. It has abundantly served growing global appetites for cheap burgers, hot dogs and chicken wings.
[...]
As the industry has replicated the factory farm model across the world, the number of livestock has swelled, leading to more livestock-related planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The production of livestock globally accounts for somewhere between 16.5 and just under 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers have determined that, even if the world stopped using fossil fuels, the largest source of heat-trapping gases, there’s no way to meet global climate goals without reducing emissions from the food system, including from cattle.
For anyone looking to read more about how the US food industry got into this sorry state, I can highly recommend the book Barons by Austin Frerick. It's a dive into various food industries. A...
For anyone looking to read more about how the US food industry got into this sorry state, I can highly recommend the book Barons by Austin Frerick. It's a dive into various food industries. A company mentioned in passing in this article, JBL, is a major player there. I believe it's a PhD thesis turned into a book or something, but it's not academic (i.e. hard to read) in that sense. Plenty of citations though.
A pattern described in that book continues here in this article: industrial sized farming demolishes the environment. It's a breed of farming that follows the incentives of capitalism to specialize to it's logical and most extreme conclusion. Unfortunately what unleashed capitalism wants is not what's good for the environment. There's no grass, no flowers, just concrete lots built to be the most profitable way to make money.
My wife and I left Iowa before settling and starting our family but we have lots of friends and family still in the state. The effects that mass ag and the toxins generated have on the state cannot be overstated - Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country.
I feel fortunate in that I only lived in the state for ~15 years, much of it on the Mississippi River and decently far removed from the super highly-concentrated agriculture of the rest of the state, but I fear for my wife who was born and raised in the dead center of the state for 30 years. Stories like this make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s like watching a state-sized car crash in slow motion.
Yeah there are a lot human victims of animal agriculture that rarely get heard about in all the discussions about it. Even the crops grown in Iowa (and a lot of places around the world) are mostly animal feed crops. ~40-50% of corn is for animal feed with the other half being for ethanol, around ~75% of soy is, almost all hay, etc. All the fertilizer runoff and pesticides for those are going towards feed crops where almost all the energy will be lost
For anyone looking to read more about how the US food industry got into this sorry state, I can highly recommend the book Barons by Austin Frerick. It's a dive into various food industries. A company mentioned in passing in this article, JBL, is a major player there. I believe it's a PhD thesis turned into a book or something, but it's not academic (i.e. hard to read) in that sense. Plenty of citations though.
A pattern described in that book continues here in this article: industrial sized farming demolishes the environment. It's a breed of farming that follows the incentives of capitalism to specialize to it's logical and most extreme conclusion. Unfortunately what unleashed capitalism wants is not what's good for the environment. There's no grass, no flowers, just concrete lots built to be the most profitable way to make money.