Holy Cow!
Controversial proposals for the first UK ‘superdairy’ at Nocton, in Lincolnshire areabout to be re-submitted to the planning authorities.
In the face of accumulating data that intensive factory-style livestock production is cruel and polluting, the US is beginning to question the wisdom of this type of farming. Pat Thomas asks, why on earth would the UK want to adopt a system that is proven to be damaging to the health of people, animals and the planet?
“Let me put it this way” says Miyun Park, Executive Director of Global Animal Partnership “you can smell them before you see them.”
Park has firsthand experience of the concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFO’s, that dominate American livestock production and has real sympathy with the battle currently brewing in the UK over whether or not to bring these intensive animal factories, which house thousands of animals, to the UK.
Three such facilities – an 8000-cow dairy farm at Nocton, Lincolnshire, a 3000-cow unit at South Witham, Lincolnshire and a 2800-sow pig unit at Foston Derbyshire – have been proposed, though due to strong local opposition, none have yet been approved. New plans have also been announced for a 1000-cow dairy farm at Leighton, near Welshpool in Wales where the cows would be kept inside for 250 days of the year.
Their sheer size is mind-boggling. The South Witham farm would be 50% larger than the UK largest existing herd of 2,000. The dairy farm at Nocton would be the largest in Western Europe, four times the size of the UKs’ largest herd and 66 times larger than the average UK herd of 120 animals. Once the litters of the sows are factored in, the pig farm at Foston could contain up to 20,000 animals at any one time, making it the largest in the UK.
According to Park there are numerous problems associated with CAFOS. High on the list are overcrowding, poor animal welfare, overuse of ‘routine’ antibiotics, and the potential to become breeding grounds for diseases such as swine and avian flu as well as E.Coli and Salmonella. There is also the problem of waste.
“To put it in perspective, the US Environmental Protection Agency has done some comparative figures which show that a single large feeding operation can generate as much waste as a US city. For example, a large farm with 800,000 hogs could produce over 1.6 million tons of manure per year, which is one and a half times more than the annual sanitary waste produced by the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a population of almost 1.5 million. Likewise, a beef cattle operation with 3,423 head cattle can produce more than 40,000 tons of excrement annually, more than the nearly 38,900 tons generated each year by the 57,000 residents of Galveston, Texas.”
She notes that even a smaller operation of 700 dairy cows can create about 17,800 tons of manure annually; more than the approximately 16,000 tons of waste generated each year by the 24,000 residents of Lake Tahoe, California.
To put these US population figures in to UK perspective:
● 1.5 million is the combined population of Birmingham and Liverpool
● 57,000 is the population of Dartford
● 24,000 is the population of Newton Abbott
The waste is a problem not just because it smells bad but because of its effect on the environment and human health. The US experience is also that when it rains, the runoff from the ‘lagoons’– large open lakes of excrement which lie adjacent to CAFOs – can pollute neighbouring land and poison groundwater supplies.
On hot days in the state of Iowa, home to some of America’s biggest hog farms, emissions of noxious gases from these lagoons produce a thick layer of pollution that hangs in the air. Local residents have dubbed it “shitsmog”. Like vehicle emissions, this smog can significantly raise the risk of asthma and other respiratory problems in those who breathe it in.
The businesses behind the UK’s proposed CAFOs suggest that the waste can be turned into valuable fuel (biogas) through anaerobic digestion facilities on site. But it isn’t that simple. Large scale biogas generators require a great deal of energy to run and the jury is still out on a) whether the energy generated is significantly more than the energy used to produce it; b) whether biogas from manure results in less overall pollution; and c) whether, once built, biogas generators become part of a closed corporate cycle that actually encourages even more intensified livestock production in order to ‘feed’ them with manure and make them profitable.
The decision to intensify meat production in the UK is seen as a purely economical one. On CAFO’s, where the animals rarely or never see the light of day and are fed artificial high protein feed to fatten them up fast, meat can be produced cheaply and quickly.
But weighing up the merits of any activity solely on economic grounds can distort its true impact. This seems particularly true for CAFOs. The philosophical and ethical question of whether or not animals should be killed for food may be complex and personal, but the damage caused by factory farming is much more clear-cut and well documented by science. For this reason, according to Michael Pollan, author and producer of the film Food Inc, some in America are beginning to question whether the risks outweigh the benefits.
“It’s ironic” he says “that just as the US is finally beginning to wake up to the environmental and public health hazards of factory farming, they are spreading to other parts of the word. Antiobiotic-resistant diseases such as MRSA has been linked to CAFO production, as has water pollution, genetic mutation of downstream amphibians and economic hardship for the farmers involved, who get trapped into predatory contracts and inescapable levels of debt by building these facilities.
“But the larger ecological absurdity is that putting animals into CAFOs takes an elegant ecological solution – animals on farms recycling nutrients for the crops while the crops feed the animals – and neatly divides that solution into two new problems: a waste problem in the CAFO and a nutrient deficiency on the farm.”
Pollan touches on something that rarely gets mentioned: the impact on the local community. Whilst the proposed UK facilities boast they will create jobs and revitalise the community, this simply isn’t the US experience. Says Miyun Park: “These are not farms, they are industrial production facilities, and as such they highly automated, and compared to more diversified farms require fewer humans to work in them.”
According to Park the likely financial rewards for the corporate owners of CAFO facilities are not mirrored in the local community. “More often than not these facilities direct money out of the community, through their buying practices, for instance for animal feed, and the services they use. They also devalue local land. In fact, in 2003, due to the negative impact on communities, as well as the health risks the American Public Health Association, the largest public health association in the world, passed a resolution urging State and Local governments and health agencies to impose a precautionary moratorium on new CAFOs “until additional scientific data on the attendant risks to public health have been collected and uncertainties resolved.”
She notes also that when the Appraisal Institute, an international association of professional real estate appraisers, studied the impact of CAFOs in July 2001 it found that the use and enjoyment of the nearby area, as well as the resale value of properties, declined by significantly, in some cases by 50-90%.
These, of course, are local effects. But the impacts of CAFOs extend far beyond the local community. CAFOs demand massive amounts of soya – a key ingredient in high protein animal feed. Most of this comes from huge soya plantations in Latin America. To grow all this animal feed vast areas of biodiverse land have to be cleared and replaced with monocultures of soya, some of which are genetically modified and all of which are water intensive and make liberal use of pesticides and fertilisers which further damage the surrounding ecosystem.
According to Friends of the Earth senior campaigner Vicki Hird:
“If current rates continue, soya farming and cattle ranching will destroy 40% of the Amazon rainforest by 2050. And it’s not just wildlife at threat from deforestation – forest communities are being pushed off their land and carbon emissions are contributing to climate change.”
Our increasing demand for cheap meat and dairy, says Hird, is presenting us with a choice about the future of farming that goes beyond animal welfare:
“Our current industrial farming system is wreaking environmental destruction and creating more greenhouse gas emissions than all the transport on the planet. These mega livestock unit applications demonstrate the lengths to which farmers in Europe and the UK have to go in order to make a living. The choice isn’t between industrial farming and ‘old fashioned agriculture’, but between environmental destruction and a modern, planet-friendly farming system based on local food needs.
When it comes to CAFO’s in the UK, it seems we really do need to start thinking globally and acting locally.
What can you do?
Support the Friends of the Earth Sustainable Livestock Bill.
Support the Compassion in World Farming campaign against intensive dairy farming.
Note: This is an extended version of an article that appears in the September 2010 edition of the Friends of the Earth magazine Earthmatters.
© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without the author’s permission.
