So much of agriculture takes place at vast distances from eaters that it is fairly safe to say most Americans don’t really know where their food comes from. This is especially true with the CAFO industry, which for decades has granted journalists, activists, and the concerned public only occasional access to the confinement operations where meat, egg, and dairy production takes place. CAFO lobbyists have aggressively resisted any attempts at transparency regulations that would require full disclosure about where and how animals are raised and exactly what is contained in the end products. How safe or humane can factory-farmed foods be if producers don’t want us to know the details of their production?
On the heels of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan’s groundbreaking New York Times essay “Power Steer” launched a revolution in food journalism by exposing the inner workings of the feedlot industry. Pollan purchased a steer from a stockyard, and followed its short life cycle: from a cow-calf ranching operation, to a midwestern feedlot, and finally to a Kansas slaughterhouse killing floor. He offers readers a reality check on what we actually feed the industrial animals we eat. Young beef cows typically start their lives grazing on pastures and eating grass, a diet they naturally ruminate. But to speed the fattening process and fill the industrial food pipelines with beef products, industrial feedlots implant cows with growth hormones and substitute feed corn for pasture. The corn-intensive diet and hormones cause the cows to gain weight rapidly but also make them sick. To prevent outbreaks of disease caused by their overly acidified stomachs and the crammed and filthy conditions of the feedlot, cows are routinely administered antibiotics. Hormone residues end up in the meat, and antibiotics leach into the environment through manure, setting off a chain reaction with the microbial world. In the end, Pollan questions whether we can possibly be healthier for the chemical and corn-fed bulk of the all-American power steer.
In 1950, the United States had 3 million hog farms, most of them small-scale and family-run. By 2000, that number had dwindled to 80,000. Today, more than 80 percent of the nation’s hogs come from operations that raise more than 5,000 hogs a year.1 States like Iowa and North Carolina have arguably sacrificed the well-being of entire rural counties in favor of large industrial swine operations by turning a blind eye as their waterways were heavily polluted and their communities devastated by stench. As Jeff Tietz reports, one of the principal corporations driving that explosive growth was Smithfield Foods. Under its founder, Joseph Luter III, Smithfield became the most powerful hog-producing corporation in the world, slaughtering 27 million hogs per year. But the production of 6 billion pounds of “the other white meat” comes with an incredible price tag: lakes of manure so concentrated it might be classified as toxic waste.
With 30 million beef cattle and 100 million hogs slaughtered each year in the United States, it might come as a surprise that chickens dominate the modern industrial food chain. Over 9 billion “broiler” chickens are raised and slaughtered each year in the United States. On average, Americans consume 87 pounds of chicken per year—three times the amount of poultry eaten in the 1960s (per capita beef consumption is at 66 pounds and pork at 51 pounds).2 But as former slaughterhouse worker Steve Striffler explains, it’s not just the chickens themselves that suffer intolerably. The sheer speed and monotony of the task requires almost unimaginable mental and physical endurance just to survive a single shift on the disassembly line.
We may think of the CAFO as a late-twentieth-century construct. However, Anne Mendelson writes that confinement dairies emerged in the nineteenth century alongside whiskey distilleries in America’s growing urban centers. These so-called swill milk dairies were established to make a profitable commodity out of the acidic wastes of alcohol production. But the feed made the cows unhealthy, the milk ill tasting, and consumers sick too. All the while, milk was touted as essential for children and healthful for all. Demand kept rising, as did production, and eventually the primary issue became how to squeeze more milk out of a cow. The rest of the story follows the arc of industrialization. Modern dairy cows can still be fed distillers’ grains (by-products of modern ethanol production), but the latest high-output diet is driven by corn and soybeans. Following decades of genetic selection and the use of hormones, antibiotics, and industrial feed rations, dairy cows produce staggering volumes of milk, but at a very steep price. Cows are suffering numerous stomach and hoof ailments related to diet and these factorylike conditions, while independent dairy farmers are struggling to stay afloat in a market that is literally drowning in cheap milk.
The retail sector also shoulders a responsibility for shaping industrial animal production, writes longtime industry journalist Steve Bjerklie. By pressuring producers to keep costs as low as possible, food retailers squeezed most of the margins out of milk, meat, and egg production, forcing a thirty-year wave of consolidation and concentration that has ravaged rural communities and created a precarious food system. In the end, if we want an environmentally sound and fair animal products industry, we consumers are going to have to find ways to pay for it.
Even the modern aquaculture industry has adopted the pitfalls of the CAFO model—antibiotics, intensive concentrations of animals and waste, and a high-protein diet—writes Ken Stier and Emmett Hopkins. Salmon, for example, are carnivorous and need to eat wild fish to bulk up fast and remain healthy. Estimates show that it takes up to 5 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon.3 Meanwhile, fish wastes and uneaten feed smother the seafloor beneath these farms, generating bacteria that consume oxygen vital to shellfish and other bottom-dwelling sea creatures. In the end, it can be argued that many of today’s fish and shrimp farms function as floating CAFOs.