#cafos

And I know why. I went to a small liberal arts college (Ripon College) in Ripon, Wisconsin, a really small town that had no stoplights when I went to school there. The place was surrounded mostly by small family farms, some dairy, and by one mega farm owned by Jolly Green Giant (or maybe owned by small farmers contracting with Jolly Green Giant). You can see the difference between the family farms and the big corporate ones in transportation, equipment, smells, dominance, etc. So, the little towns and small family farmers want protection. I get it, and I support. (Even though most of them are trumpeteers.)

In terms of ecological impact and the environment, the big ones suck. The little ones are protective, so I’m supporting the little ones on this battle, regardless of politics.

Excerpt form this story from Grist:

Laketown, Wisconsin, is a rural community of 949 people, spread out among the green fields and ample lakes of the state’s northwestern corner, just over an hour outside of Minneapolis. Lisa Doerr has lived there since 2001, when she and her husband started growing hay and grass for livestock and raising horses. The town and its surrounding area, the St. Croix River Valley, are home to lots of small farmers like them; much of the food people eat here is grown locally.

“It’s not a big corporate place,” Doerr said. “There’s a lot to protect here.”

Now, Laketown is at the center of a battle over this rural character, as the town aims to limit pollution from large, industrial livestock farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Over the past few months, Laketown and two nearby towns, Trade Lake and Eureka, have passed laws regulating how CAFOs can operate, requiring them to show how they will dispose of dead animals and avoid polluting groundwater. But these policies have faced stiff pushback from the state’s powerful agricultural lobby, which has called the new regulations illegal.

In the past decade, the industrialization of agriculture has led to a sharp rise in the number of CAFOs, as large livestock operations offer cheaper meat and crowd out smaller farmers. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of animals living on factory farms grew by 14 percent, even as the overall number of operations shrank. From North Carolina to Iowa, CAFOs have been found to pollute drinking water, release noxious gases, and encourage the spread of disease due to the animals’ confined conditions. In March, a nationwide outbreak of avian flu led an egg farm in Wisconsin to kill 2.7 million chickens, creating intolerable smells for a community downwind of the site where their bodies were dumped.

Even when CAFOs legally dispose of animal waste — usually by spreading it on nearby fields as fertilizer — the sheer volume of manure can overload local streams and groundwater supplies with nitrates and bacteria, said Adam Voskuil, a Wisconsin-based attorney with the nonprofit Midwest Environmental Advocates. That’s especially problematic in states like Wisconsin, where more than 900,000 residents rely on private wells for their drinking water.

Cutting down on meat = less contribution to climate change (I'll explain CAFOS in another post)

Try a new vegetarian/vegan recipe. I LOVE vegetarian meals, they are freaking bomb. I'm not talking about a salad. I'm talking bout an actual MEAL.

It can boost your heart health bc a lot of meats we get at the grocery store is pumped out with injections and why not from the animals. Eat veggies, beans, and nuts.

It cuts down on energy. Eating meats costs more energy than vegetables because of CAFOS

(CAFOS stands for concentrated animal feeding operation)

Me: I've been vegetarian and pescetarian on and off throughout college and three years from that into the present. But while in college, I really started to study sustainable agriculture (as a geography major) and saw how everything connects. I'm choosing to go plant-based for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the highest contributor to human-induced global warming is methane offsets from agricultural production. Think CAFOs/factory farms. Because literally every natural part of this world is affected by the abnormal increases in temperature and drastic climate changes around the world (and especially in our oceans and islands), I can't justify eating animals for a small, momentary satisfaction while the rest of the earth suffers.

I'm also going plant-based for my health. I want to emphasize my choice of veganism as plant-based over just eating non-animal products. You can find vegan food at Taco Bell. Oreos are also vegan. But Taco Bell and Oreos are also, for the most part, made of processed grains and chemicals. I'm looking to get away from that as much as possible, and to nourish my body with plants.

And finally, the last leading reason for why I'm going plant-based is because I can't let animals suffer for my gain. I've seen and read enough about factory farms to know that these animals are going through a personal hell before they're slaughtered in a way that is by no means humane. I also know from taking a class in animal welfare Dick University in Scotland what the standards are for animals depending on whether they're labeled "free range" or not, and how that differs internationally. (The U.S. has far smaller confined spaces for their animals than the U.K., and free range means literally nothing in the U.S.). I've also learned about the dairy industry and how it's directly connected to the beef and veal industry. Supporting dairy is supporting beef and veal factory farms. I can't allow my temporary cravings determine whether or not an animal is boiled alive/shot in the head multiple times/thrown through a grinder alive, etc.

Since Halloween is right around the corner, here is a scary story for you that's happening in your backyard. Happy hauntings my green leaves 😈😈 MUWAHAH *violently starts coughing* sorry asthma

CAFOS stands for concentrated animal feeding operation. They are the big animal farms you see with a bunch of cows, pigs, and chickens in cages.

If you want a good halloween movie I suggest u watch movies about CAFOS. They are VERY graphic and disturbing, so watch at your own risk.

Some CAFOS movies

Food Inc

Farm to fridge

Cowspiracy

Cock fight

Right to harm

THE DEADLY FACTS ABOUT CAFOS ☠☠

Animals are injected w antibiotics and growth hormones (that u end up consuming)

Animal cruelty - mostly to baby animals

Overcrowded = a breeding ground for disease

Unsanitary (POOP AND PEE EVERYWHERE)

Release pollutants (ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane)

Land, water, waste pollution

Requires A LOT of land

Excerpt from this fact sheet published by the Center for Biological Diversity:

Animal agriculture has changed dramatically in recent decades. From the practice of concentrated animal confinement on factory farms to the massive land use required to produce feed crops for livestock and the pollution inherent in poorly regulated waste management and slaughterhouses, the current U.S. food system is unsustainable and a leading contributor to environmental degradation.

Most of the 9 billion farmed animals in the United States are confined in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which churn out meat, poultry, egg and dairy products at an unmanageable rate. The most extreme confinement practices — battery cages, gestation crates and veal crates — have been outlawed in a dozen states. Yet they largely continue as standard practices and are linked with poor animal welfare, risks to food and worker safety, air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and threats to endangered species.

The Rise of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)

Since the 1950s U.S. meat and dairy production has more than doubled, while the number of operations has decreased by 80 percent. As a result greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector have rapidly increased, with carbon dioxide emissions increasing by 16.2 percent, methane emissions by 14.4 percent and nitrous oxide by 7.3 percent in the past 30 years. Methane and nitrous oxide have as much as 36 and 298 times greater global warming potential, respectively, of CO2 over a 100-year period.

The most common environmental threats from these facilities include:

Contamination of air, water, and land from nutrients, pathogens, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and ammonia;

Overconsumption of groundwater resources;

Harm to endangered or threatened species and habitats;

Release of greenhouse gas emissions.

Along with the rise of CAFOs, emissions related to manure management have increased by 66 percent since 1990. Factory farms produced an estimated 13 times as much waste as the entire U.S. population in 2012. Unlike human waste, livestock waste is typically untreated and poorly managed.

Excerpt from this Earthjustice story:

It's been nearly four months since Hurricane Florence battered the North Carolina coast, dumping 9 trillion gallons of water on the state in the span of four days. In Duplin County, home to the nation's largest concentration of industrial hog operations, the storm's deluge laid bare problems that persist in good weather and in bad.

Hurricanes are becoming more commonplace in the southeastern U.S.—since 1999, at least four hurricanes and tropical storms have brought enough precipitation to North Carolina to qualify as "100-year" storms. There is barely time to rebuild and recover before the next storm hits.

The flooding caused by these hurricanes exacerbates problems caused by the failure of industrial hog operations, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), to adequately store or maintain the massive amounts of waste produced by the 2.2 million hogs in Duplin County alone.

Each year, CAFOs in Duplin County produce twice as much urine and feces as the entire New York City metro area. Much of that waste is stored in thousands of hog "lagoons"—open-air pits clustered in the area hardest hit by Hurricane Florence.

When it rains too much, these poop-filled pits—which carry E. coli, salmonella, cryptosporidium, and other harmful bacteria – overflow into surrounding rivers and streams, or sustain catastrophic structural damage.

As a result of Hurricane Florence, 49 lagoons were reported to be damaged structurally, actively discharging material, or inundated with surface water, while another 60 nearly flooded, according to the state's Department of Environmental Quality.

Excerpt from this story from Sierra Club:

Livestock operations have been harvesting methane for over 20 years, but until recently, the gas was used mostly to generate heat and electricity for the farms themselves. Now, state and federal incentives are prompting a rapid build-out of digesters across the country so they can generate “renewable natural gas.” According to the US EPA, 290 dairy digesters were online as of January 2023. Though these operations are promoted as a climate change solution, they hog enormous volumes of water and create noise, odors, dust, and air and water pollution in the communities that host them. They’re also feeding consolidation, making it harder for smaller dairies, including those with truly sustainable practices, to survive.

As reported in High Country News, mega-dairies in Arizona are sucking up so much groundwater that residential wells are going dry, and in Minnesota, huge operations are driving small dairies out of business. In the dairy capital of Wisconsin, where mega-dairies have rapidly displaced smaller operations, nitrates and E. coli have contaminated drinking water wells. Just last month, a Wisconsin court ruled against dairy industry interests in a suit that would have undermined a state water protection program that regulates animal waste.

California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) is driving the manure gold rush. Though it’s a state program, any producer that sells transportation fuel in California can participate. The state assigns every transportation fuel a carbon intensity score, which is a measure of the greenhouse gas emissions created per unit of fuel. High-carbon fossil fuels earn scores close to 100; solar-powered electricity has a score of zero. Every producer must stay below the state’s carbon-intensity target, which gets lower every year. To meet the threshold, producers of high-carbon fuels can buy credits for low-carbon fuels on the open market. 

Biogas products from dairy digesters typically earn negative scores, some as low as -790. Producers are allowed to account for the emissions avoided by capturing the methane—a potent greenhouse gas—instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. “Because of that extreme negative carbon intensity, it creates this perverse incentive structure that makes it the most lucrative fuel on the market,” says Lobdell. These operations do nothing to address methane released through enteric fermentation—i.e., the gas released when cows burp—and a new analysis by Food & Water Watch shows that digesters leak substantial amounts of methane.

Nevertheless, California has turned to dairy biogas to help meet its ambitious carbon-reduction targets. The state’s Department of Agriculture offers grants that cover up to half of the (substantial) cost of building out digesters. Once they’re up and running, operations can sell credits through California’s LCFS market and the federal Renewable Fuel Standard program simultaneously. The California Department of Food and Agriculture has funded 140 anaerobic digester projects within the state, and a new report from the Center for Food Safety shows that the cost to taxpayers is much higher than state regulators claim.