Factory Farms

Cargill and McDonald’s rely on livestock factories to maximize profits. These factories cram as many cows, pigs and chickens into as small an area as possible, and, to keep the animals from dying, they pump them full of antibiotics. In the case of dairy cows, they pump them full of hormones to maximize their milk output. Once the meat, eggs, and milk are in our grocery stores and fast food restaurants, we ingest whatever the animals ingested, even harmful chemicals.[1] In other words, we are what they eat. 

• See the Center for Food Safety’s page on growth hormones to find out how much “cow steroids” are in our cheese.
• Does the use of antibiotics on factory farms result in human antibiotic resistance? Sierra Club has a comprehensive fact sheet on the abuse of antibiotics on factory farms.

Chickens from factory farms live only six weeks, and few of them ever set foot on grass. Due to malnutrition, heart disease is now rampant among young poultry hens. Some hens spend the entirety of their short lives confined in “battery cages,” where they are forced to lay eggs until their bones verge on breaking from calcium depletion.[2]

Chickens aren’t the only animals that have been turned into expendable commodities by the food industry. It is widely recognized that the use of antibiotics and growth hormones in cows is intended to compensate for the poor health conditions and unnatural production stress of beef and dairy farming.

• Martha Rosenberg from Common Dreams reports on the egg industry trade group’s fight to keep animal cruelty legal.
• Read a summary of Farm Sanctuary’s research report on the perils of factory dairy farming.
• An iconic 2002 Rap Sheet by the Sierra Club calls out some of the most abusive corporations in the factory farm industry.

The average steer produces fifty pounds of excrement each day.[3] All this poop has to go somewhere, but it’s tough to properly dispose of it all when you’ve got thousands of cattle. This superabundance of manure often ends up in ground water, which has caused E. coli outbreaks. Prolonged exposure to excessive manure can also lead to severe health risks.

• Check out the Natural Resources Defense Council’s fact sheet on the pollution and public health effects of factory farming.
• A new report in Mother Jones Magazine accumulates the mounting evidence of the environmental hazards of meet and poultry factory farming.

Since every animal is shaped a little bit differently, most of the meatpacking process has to be done by hand. Workers stand at stations in an assembly line and make the same cut thousands of times a day. One slip of the knife can mean serious injury. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) is not regulating safety properly, and many workers lack adequate health insurance.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch, an international human rights watchdog group that documents human rights abuses, determined that the meatpacking industry in the United States fails so miserably to protect workers from injury that it violates basic human rights. This marked the first time that Human Rights Watch singled out an entire industry for blame.

• Read the full Human Rights Watch report here.
• A 2008 study in the Journal of Agromedicine reports that nearly 23% of workers in an average meatpacking plant suffer traumatic injuries in a single year.
• Historian Roger Horowitz charges in Labor Notes that the meatpacking industry is deliberately underreporting worker injury rates.