Features » March 22, 2006

Meat-Industrial Complex

How factory farms undercut public health

By Mark Winne

The sorry gaze of a factory farm commodity.

Drive through Don Oppliger’s Feed Yard in Clovis, New Mexico, and you’ll see 35,000 head of beef cattle confined to pens that stretch across the flat, barren landscape.

The constant shuffling of hooves raises a bacteria-laden dust cloud that’s carried by the prevailing winds into west Texas, where it joins the plumes of hundreds of other feedlots. At one end of the complex sits a giant lagoon that catches the operation’s chemicals, urine, antibiotics and other effluvia. In the narrow strip of land that separates the fencing from the road lie the carcasses of dead cows (a.k.a. “downers”), eyes bugged out, tongues dangling and bellies bloated in the summer heat.

Moving from bovine to porcine, factory hog farms generate an odor so intense it would knock a buzzard off a shit-wagon. In cramped warehouse structures, as many as 20,000 hogs are confined for their entire lives. After five months, the mature hogs are sent off to the slaughterhouse to have their throats slit and carcasses dipped in chemical vats to loosen their skins. According to Anita Poole, legal counsel for the Oklahoma-based Kerr Center, which has fought that state’s takeover by the hog industry, “The average Joe Blow who might stumble into a hog facility would never want to eat pork again.”

U.S. shoppers spend less on food as a percentage of their total annual expenditures than anyone else in the world. But this is because factory livestock farms—labeled “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs) by government agencies—don’t pay for the natural resources they have squandered, the farm labor they have maltreated, the declining health of residents who live near their operations, or the animals that have been exploited far beyond their biological capabilities.

Texas County is in Oklahoma’s Panhandle region. In 1990 it had 11,000 hogs. Today, according to the Kerr Center, the number has swollen to more than one million. For a region that was in economic decline, the offer by Seaboard Farms to locate an industrial-style hog operation held out the promise of reinvigorating the flagging economy, creating desperately needed jobs and re-filling the empty school desks.

But it came with a price. Seaboard demanded and received $60 million in local and state government assistance. This worked out to $27,552 per new job, a tolerable sum if the jobs paid $20 per hour, but the average hourly Seaboard wage was less than $8. In spite of the low wages, the deal might have been justified if the community received a commensurate growth in tax revenues. But by the time the county completed the financing deal with Seaboard, they had agreed to taxes of $9,700 per year until 2017 on a business site valued at $100 million. Even after Seaboard agreed to pay $175,000 annually to the district’s school board for the next 25 years, this still amounted to the county forgoing $120,000 per year.

Factory hog operations not only pay a meager return on a community’s investment, they also extract a high price from the surrounding region. With Seaboard’s influx of jobs came an increase in population, which in turn brought about a sharp rise in crime. From 1990 to 1997, crime in Texas County increased by 74 percent compared to a 12 percent decline in other rural Oklahoma counties. And factory farm workers in the West and Midwest are increasingly Mexican immigrants, only about half of whom are legally documented. They bring with them a host of needs that these rural communities are unequipped to handle.

But the worst problems are created by the ungodly amount of manure—an estimated 15 million pounds per day in Texas County. Because of water run-off from factory farms, both groundwater and surface water quality have declined. Even worse, the Ogallala Aquifer upon which the region depends for its water is being depleted at a rapid rate. The Oklahoma Water Resource Board reported that water levels in many Texas County wells have dropped 50 to 100 feet over the last 30 years, due in large part to the high water demand of factory hog operations and the irrigated farmland that supports them.

Across the nation, factory farms of all types are wreaking environmental havoc. A 1995 North Carolina manure spill killed 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal shellfish beds. In 2004 the Iowa Department of Natural Resources recorded ammonia levels near a hog factory that were six times the recommended health standard. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, air pollution from factory dairy farms is a major reason that the region’s children have asthma rates three times the national average. In eastern New Mexico—the state’s factory dairy farm belt—recent research discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria in dairy yards. For these reasons, the American Public Health Association has urged all levels of government to impose a moratorium on new CAFOs until a comprehensive environmental and health assessment can be conducted.

Herein lies the rub. The same government and private industry partnership that brought CAFOs to America’s marginalized rural communities is highly invested in not just keeping them there, but in seeing them metastasize. Through lax environmental regulations or the under-funding of agencies charged with regulating CAFOs, state governments have fostered CAFO-friendly policies at the public’s expense. To further protect their flank, factory farm interests have worked aggressively in state legislatures to restrict the ability of local government to keep CAFOs out of their communities. And just to be sure, New Mexico’s dairy industry considers it an act of “civic duty” for its farmer members to “serve” on local commissions and boards.

The halls of academe have likewise been compromised by CAFO industry “donations” to universities. Rather than use their scientific talents to assess the impact of CAFOs, research faculty are required to solve the industry’s problems (e.g., disposing of Himalayan mountains of manure). In 1998, New Mexico State University researcher Stephen Arnold found serious air and water quality problems near dairy operations in southern New Mexico. When the results were released through professional journals and conferences, the dairy industry complained so vehemently to the university that Arnold abandoned his research. And the Kerr Center’s Poole reports, “Oklahoma State University won’t do community impact research because of all the money they get from the pork industry.”

Barely 5 percent of U.S. farms now raise 54 percent of the country’s beef and dairy cattle. Corporations now produce 98 percent of all poultry. Small to mid-size family livestock farms are going the way of the dodo. While “local food movements” and a resurgent interest in grass-fed and free-range animal production are gaining traction and deserve our full support, they will never be enough to stem the “blood-dimmed tide” of the livestock industry.

Are the research reports, the scientific studies, and the occasional manure spill only isolated “factoids” in an otherwise benign landscape of inevitable agricultural modernization? Or is the increasing flow of data and the growing number of incident reports the proverbial canary in a coal mine? A recent World Watch Institute paper pronounced, “Factory Farms are breaking the cycle between small farmers, their animals and the environment, with collateral damage to human health and local communities.” And the Washington Post reported on North Carolina State University professor C.M. “Mike” Williams, who has spent five years researching how to treat manure from the state’s 10 million hogs. He concluded, “I do not feel that system [of factory hog farms] is long-term sustainable.”

Dr. Charles Benbrook, a former executive director of the Board of Agriculture for the National Academy of Science, shares Williams’ assessment. After years spent studying the dairy industry, Benbrook says he is “perplexed” by the growth of gargantuan dairy farms west of the Mississippi where subsidized water supplies in an otherwise dry landscape have made the expansion of dairy herds feasible—in the short term. In the long term, says Benbrook, further expansion of factory dairy farms “doesn’t make sense and is patently unsustainable because water will become too costly, and in not less than five years, but surely no more than 20, the dairy waste stream will overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the local environment.”

In other words, our food system may be looking at a doomsday denouement before the middle of this century. It is becoming increasingly certain that the water will run out, the land will no longer absorb the torrent of nutrient waste spread upon it, and the over-bred, antibiotic and hormone-injected animals will eventually succumb to their natural limitations. Poole puts it this way, “The factory system of food production will simply implode.” Until the citizens of the heartland rise up in sufficient numbers to hold their government and the corporations accountable, this is both the best and worst we can hope for.

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• Reader Comments

  Oink ... Moo ... Hotdogs and Hamburgers.

  Meat and meat byproducts like lips and assholes.

  Yummy?

  They use everything,
  but the squeal and the moo,
  for real, they even use the poo.

  I haven’t been able to bring myself to eat a hotdog for many years.

  When I was a kid we lived on a small farm and I thought nothing of it , or almost nothing, when my dad chopped the head off a chicken every now and then. I collected eggs every day from our little flock of chickens. Ahh ... the idyllic innocence of youth, but it never bothered me until I had the opportunity to see larger commercial farms and the conditions that they kept the animals in to ‘feed the city people’ as they explained it to me. After seeing the wholesale slaughter it did make the individual slaughter back at home a subject for more serious reflection, especially when it became my chore to chop a chicken eevry now and then.

  Now I live in town but we have a small organic free range poultry farm nearby for fresh eggs and poultry. Even the grocery stores have organic products available. It’s a better and more responsible choice. Not only for poultry and eggs but fruits, vegetables, rice and beans too.

  These days I make an effort to eat less animals and make better choices when I do and try to remember to be thankful to be at the top of the food chain.

  Posted by David in Canada on Mar 25, 2006 at 2:55 AM

  ... and doesn’t the piggy in the picture at the top of the article look sad?

  Posted by David in Canada on Mar 25, 2006 at 2:55 AM

  One of the points this writer tries to make about factory farms is the environmental damage they cause and how they monopolize vital resources like water causing cost increases for the community.  They mostly exist because of the monopolization of the market for poulty, pork, and beef by four big food processing and packing conglomerates who control between 65 and 80% of the market for these products.  These big conglomerates pressure the intermediate factory farms (called Consolidated Animal Feedlot Operations-or CAFOs by the industry and the USDA) by downward monopsonist pressure on the “gate prices” of their livestock thus forcing more intensive breeding and use of anti-biotics, steroids and growth hormones, and other such inputs to compensate for the squeeze applied by the “Big Four.”  There has been a great shift in the proportion of the food dollar going to factory farm intermediaries over to the big packing houses and mega-retailers like the Walmart Supercenters.  Even the factory farmer is being sqeezed out and those remaining have become less independant ranchers than an intermediary link in a global agribusiness chain controlled by the big packing monopolies. 

  Often this creates uneconomic and wasteful activity like independant free range ranchers in Iowa for the first time having to ship beef at big losses over long distances instead of to an IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) packing house nearby because companies like IBP now own their own herds and don’t need to pay the local ranchers much.  The price to the consumer keeps increasing though the unit cost to the big packing houses declines as do the prices to the independent ranchers and CAFOs.  This issue is the concentrated and monopolized market for highly processed food by big business and the social impact they have on the industry and local communities in general. The organic food, farmers market, and sustainable agriculture movements seem to have some goog answers.

  Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 25, 2006 at 6:44 AM

  The author, Mark Winne, does a fair job of covering the environmental issues, and articles like this are, of course, always welcome.  But the article does suffer from some shortcomings.  To name a few, it
  (1) ignores the moral issue of exploiting animals for our purposes,
  (2) pays slight attention to the shamefully cruel nature of the business of raising non-human animals for consumption (or entertainment, clothing, experimentation, and so on),
  (3) ignores the health effects on humans of eating meat vs. a plant-based diet,
  (4) ignores the fact that methane is the leading contributing factor towards global warming (see, for example: http://www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm),
  (5) fails to mention that the use of grain to feed livestock is dreadfully inefficient and robs the poor of substance in order to feed the rich a steady diet of animal products, and
  (6) doesn’t discuss the wide variety of animal product substitutes available to us today. 
  Because of these shortcomings, I’m not sure that the article will have a large impact on individuals’ food buying decisions, which is a necessary ingredient for reform of these horrific practices.  But it does sensitize readers to the subject, and that’s always a good start.

  Posted by nyvegan on Mar 27, 2006 at 12:55 AM

  nyvegan,

  Your observations are quite on the mark!  This is an issue about which I am gravely concerned as well! The environmental impact of factory farming is only one major concern among which are the inefficiency use of grain for food energy which as you point out consists of a transfer of resources from the poor to the rich as well as the ethical treatment of farm animals.

  I do think that the entire issues turns less on our consumption habits or attitudes than on the role of agribusiness in the globalization of capital.  The article touches on the concentration of livestock production for the national market the small number of farms producing the majority of poultry, pork, and beef.  The free range, or organic ranchers, are all but squeezed out of the market.  Most of the farms that produce meat for the big packing houses are an increasingly concentrated number of factory farms who are locked into long term contracts to insure those farms a steady market for their livestock.  To get the contracts the ranchers take a per head cut in the “gate price” of the livestock over the term of the contract. Downward price pressure is further applied by the increase in the size of corporate owned herds which the “big four” often purchase from each other in order to artificially depress the gate prices. This causes the ranchers to overbreed and over use steroids to offset the decline in income from livestock price cuts which aggravates the negative impact of factory farming.  The big four see an increase in their profit margins increasingly at the expense of the ranchers and consumers.  About ten years ago a number of ranchers filed a class action suit against the illegal monopoly pricing practices of the big packing houses based on the 1921 Packinghouse and Stockyards Act which was to protect ranchers from the monopoly power of the big packers. To date it is still tied up in the 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. 

  The issue seems to be the increased monopolization of our national food production system.  Much of this is tied in with the highly profitable fast food market which sells poor quality junk but are a steady market for factory farm production.  A good example is KFC and other chicken joints that buy on contract from factory farms that use steriods in the mass breeding of chickens.  The same is true of beef. These practices would be far less harmful to consumers and small producers if our meat consumption dropped to healthier levels and most consumers switched to organically produced products.

  Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 27, 2006 at 8:35 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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