Photo Credit © Jenny Pfeiffer

CAFO Reader — Best Practices

KNOW WHERE YOUR FOOD COMES FROM

Nowhere in any other human industry does one find the breadth of environmental impacts found in animal food production. Yet this is just one component of what could be called the “Mother of all Crises: the Extinction Crisis.” As you eat each meal, try to understand and visualize how your food is produced and how it contributes to the present state of the world.

• Land use - What types of habitats were originally converted to produce the food you are eating?
• Beauty - How has natural beauty been compromised as a result of your food choices?
• Chemically saturated feed - Have fields been drenched with fertilizers and pesticides to produce feed for your meat, milk, or eggs?
• Massive monocultures - Did the feed for your animal products come from corn, soy, and hay monocultures or from managed pastures?
• Heavy carbon footprint - How much oil goes into feeding, transporting, and processing the food you are eating? What about the greenhouse gas emissions involved?
• Social costs - What happens to our culture as farms become factories and farmers become low-wage contractors or disappear altogether because we want abundant cheap food?
• Health costs - What are the medical and economic impacts of a diet heavy in saturated animal fats?
• Animal welfare - What does it mean if we support corporations that treat animals like inanimate production units?
• True costs - Can you make food choices that are healthier for people, the land, and our future?

Environmentalism begins at the breakfast table. Maybe you can develop an eater’s manifesto of your own.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Refine, reduce, and replace animal products.
• Consider eating smaller amounts of animal food products. Carefully seek out grass-fed and grass-finished beef and dairy products and pasture-raised pork, poultry, and egg products for those you do buy.
• Learn about vegetarian cooking. Consider “Meatless Mondays,” as advocated for by the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future, or avoid factory-farmed animal products altogether by switching to a plant-based diet.
• Purchase meat, eggs, and dairy products from local farmers on the farm or at farmers’ markets, or by buying a share from a local farmer as part of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program or local buyers’ group.
• Read labels. Does the product contain artificial growth hormones or genetically engineered ingredients? Eggs that are merely labeled “cage-free” or “free-range” but not certified by a third party may not necessarily be ensuring the hens’ welfare.
• Choose meats from animals that were not given “non-therapeutic” antibiotics—indicated by labels such as “USDA Certified Organic” or “no antibiotic use.” Look for the Humane Farm Animal Care label. Foods with this label come from humane sources that are inspected annually. Select certified organic meats, eggs, and dairy and those clearly labeled as using only vegetarian animal feed.
• Honor where your food comes from. Consider spending a little more on better sources and better qualities of meat and animal products, a little less often. Learn as much as you can about bringing the most flavor out of your cooking. Be creative with leftovers.
• Don’t support companies that don’t care about animal rights.
• Ask your local grocers and restaurants to offer humanely raised foods and fresh, locally grown products from small producers.

WHAT POLICY MAKERS CAN DO

What we all do in our personal lives matters, but more important, the livestock sector must be required to pay the true costs of production and to become financially accountable for any harm it causes.

Decentralization of production through smaller, locally adapted operations is the only way to spread wastes appropriately across the landscape. Subsidies for cheap grain, water, grazing leases, and other means of production must be replaced by mechanisms and incentives to reward producers and landowners for environmental protection and stewardship.

The following policy steps are essential to bringing the CAFO production system into environmental, ethical, and economic compliance, as recommended by leading organizations and scientific panels.

• Phase out the use of antimicrobials for non-therapeutic (i.e., growth-promoting) purposes in food animals to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance to important human medicines.
• Regulate or phase out the most egregious, intensive, and inhumane forms of animal factory confinement, such as battery cages (for laying hens); gestation crates (for sows); restrictive farrowing crates (for sows); veal crates (for male dairy calves); tethering; force feeding of geese and ducks; tail docking of dairy cattle as well as hogs; and forced molting of laying hens by feed removal.
• Phase out the construction of new CAFOs and the expansion of existing facilities.
• Establish and enforce strong pollution laws and water use permits, as well as pollution reporting requirements for CAFO producers to protect all citizens from the adverse environmental and health hazards of improperly handled waste.
• Reduce the number and scope of exemptions for agriculture operations from existing or proposed environmental and animal cruelty laws.
• Impose strict regulations on the hazardous substances contained in manure.
• End air emission monitoring study programs that essentially allow factory farms to violate air quality standards. Develop new regulations that would reduce emissions of ammonia and other air pollutants from CAFOs, and ensure that CAFO operators cannot avoid such regulations by encouraging ammonia volatilization.
• Address the concentration of corporate power in livestock markets by strict enforcement of antitrust and anti-competitive practice and by enacting other measures to increase competition in the livestock industry.
• Create and fund programs that revive animal husbandry practices and training.
• Protect all domestic livestock—including poultry—under state, national, and universal codes of conduct for animal welfare.
• Reform policies that encourage the overproduction of corn, soybeans, and other commodities, which has resulted in cheap feed for animals in CAFOs. Replace feed crop subsidies with programs that strengthen conservation and support prices when supplies are high (rather than allowing prices to fall below the costs of production).
• Allow local governments to regulate CAFOs through their health or zoning laws.
• Reduce the use of U.S. Farm Bill conservation dollars that fund CAFO waste management under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and shift support toward sound animal farming practices.
• Revise slaughterhouse regulations to facilitate larger numbers of smaller processors, including eliminating requirements not appropriate for smaller facilities.
• Take public health measures such as providing adequate numbers of federal inspectors or empowering and training state inspectors.
• Substantially increase funding for research to improve alternative livestock production methods—especially those that are pasture-based—that are beneficial to the environment, public health, and rural communities.

Special thanks to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Food and Water Watch for contributing to these recommendations.

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