Factory Farms: Harmful to People, Animals, and Nature

Factory farms. They are both harmful to people and animals. They pollute the air and water sources in many ways while also abusing the animals that they have there. Factory farms are farms that are similar to factories. They produce a high amount of low quality food in a short amount of time. Many animals are held in an area close together with little room for natural behavior. This also causes much waste to be condensed in one area so that it pollutes the air with a foul odor, emitting airborne dung particles, greenhouse gasses, and contaminating water recourses with toxins that can be deadly. And that is where most of America’s beef, poultry, milk, and eggs come from.

Factory farms also have negative affects on small farm communities. Many towns like I was born and raised in depend on family ran farms. They supply a food source and many jobs for the people living in the town. But thanks to factory farms, family farmers are being forced out of business. Every week 330 farmers leave their land because of major factory farming corporations. This causes rural economies and towns to slowly fall and areas to industrialize.

Factory farms may have animals such as chickens, cows, and pigs. As I previously mentioned, these animals are usually all packed into a small metal room with no access to vegetation or natural light. This causes many animals to die from sickness or be smothered and trampled. A “downed animal” is an animal that is so diseased or injured that they cannot stand or move on their own. These animals are not put to sleep or medically helped in any way. That would cost the company money and not make them money. While an animal can be dragged, pushed or prodded onto into the slaughterhouse, money can be made.

Pigs are confined in small metal or concrete cages without any bedding on the ground, sometimes these are individual, small cages that allow no room for movement. Other times they are slightly larger cages that house many pigs, but still allow almost no room for movement. The stress of this unnatural environment sometimes causes pigs to bite off the tails of other pigs. This is where animal mutilation comes in the picture. Some factory farm employees cut off the tails of pigs so that they may not bite one another’s tails off. This is a quite painful procedure for the animal and no numbing medication is used in the process. Chickens are also sometimes mutilated in the same painful manner, but instead their beak is removed. This is so the chickens cannot peck at one another or any of the factory farm operators. Naturally chickens would not harm one another or a person without being in a stressful environment or situation.

Now imagine being one of these poor animals. You have tumors on your legs from the steroids that cripple you. You are locked in a cage so small that you cannot move. This cage is within a dim room filled with hundreds of others just like you. Feces are not properly disposed of and coat the ground you lay on thickly. This situation does not sound very nice, does it?

Well maybe this scenario will fit you better. You’re a factory farmer operator. Everyday you get up before sunrise and drive down to the industrial buildings that thousands of farm animals inhabit. You have a low wage and mean nothing to the corporation you work for. You push and prod injured animals into a slaughterhouse where their fate will be sealed. If you don’t like this scenario either then you ought to be happy with this one.

You’re an average American. Every day you eat of course. And every day you fill your body with harmful chemicals found in products that are produced in factory farms. These chemicals and useless additives in the food you eat cause your calorie intake and carbohydrate intake to be sky-high. They also cause may cause you to be more tired than you should be. If you like the sound of that, well good because that’s you.

Factory farms feed animals low quality food with steroids in them to make the animal grow larger. For example: More cow equals more food. More food equals more money. To speed up both growth and milk production in cows, factory farms use hormones. Both the FDA approves this procedure and USDA even though it makes the food and milk produced less nutritious and full of hormones that do over time harm humans’ health.

If you’d like to rebel against factory farms, and better your health then there are several things that you can do. When grocery shopping, make sure to have them pick up eggs that have the label “free-range” or “cage-free” eggs. These eggs are not from factory farm chickens. You can also pick up “free-range” poultry and meat. For milk, pick up a carton of organic. Most normal grocery stores will have these products. Although, I prefer going to wild oats for grocery shopping because they have much more of a selection of factory farm free products. Better yet visit the local farmers market. If you don’t know what a farmers market is, it’s a market that is usually held outside, in public spaces, where farmers can sell produce to the public. This completely eliminates your supporting factory farms.

Factory farms pollute, put people out of jobs, and harm many animals while producing low-quality food. They also industrialize areas and ship their products using non-fuel efficient vehicles. These things contribute to pollution and the poor heath of Americans’. In conclusion, no good comes out of factory farming. Excluding the profit that goes to the large corporations that probably already have millions, anyway.