Cafo Research Paper

Words: 1052
Pages: 5

America is a nation of meat eaters, consuming up to 25.5 billion pounds of meat a year. In 2015 majority of the population in our country does not actually know where their meat comes from, we can just walk into our local super market and walk out with a plethora of meat products for a relatively cheap price. All of our meat products are nicely packaged with a nice, green, sunny farm right on the front of the packaging. Is that really what our farms look like now? Not exactly, if you went to the farm your animal came from you would walk into a factory setting. No green grass, just muddy pins with sometimes up to a thousand animals in them. Chicken coops are now large factory size buildings with no natural light and chickens literally walking …show more content…
The mass amount if manure being produced cannot effectively be disposed of in an environmentally safe way. The disposal process can cause runoffs and leaching of waste into surface and groundwater. In some areas the drinking water has been contaminated by the manure and suffered from ammonia being released into the atmosphere. Other areas have been contaminated by lagoons overflowing into the surrounding community. CAFO systems are also a large contributor to ammonia being released into the air. It has been reported that up to 70% of Nitrogen from CAFO manure is released into the atmosphere. Airborne Ammonia is a respiratory irritant, mixed with other particulates and can cause a respiratory disease. Complying with the clean water act it would take 1.6 billion dollars to dispose of the manure produced by CAFO systems properly. The communities surrounding these factory farms suffer the most. The smell of feces, contaminated drinking water, Airborne ammonia causing respiratory illnesses. Animals raised in CAFO systems are given large amounts of antibiotics. These animals are frequently sick due to living conditions, resulting in antibiotic resisting pathogens. Some of the bacteria found in CAFO livestock includeing samanela and e coli, can cause food borne diseases in humans. These pathagens can cause millions infected and sometimes causing death. The animals are also injected with growth hormones, a chicken can mature and double its size in 45 days, half the time when matured naturally. Animals injected with these hormons grow so large they have difficulty walking and excising resulting in more