Industrial agriculture raises the country’s meat and dairy products in what can only be called animal factories. The living conditions of the animals has been well documented. The animal’s waste and where it ends up is documented in this New York Times article about a rural area near large dairy farms in Idaho. If you live near a large dairy, livestock feedlot or poultry factory, this article suggests you don’t drink the water from wells in those areas unless you like bacteria, nitrates and pharmaceutical drugs.
For a graphic video of the animal waste problem plaguing the areas around factory farms click HERE.
Photo credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times
Hydroponics Dictionary


{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
There is only one way, and meat eaters won’t like it. But at some point there won’t be enough space to fulfil the demand any more and you will have the choice of laboratory grown meat, or going vegan. The quality of meat today is already low enough for me to render it out of my list of healthy food. I can’t see me eating franken-meat, too. Would you really like to keep on eating meat, knowing it got risen from a tissue sample in a nutrient solution?
As we approach x-mas time, I dug out this one: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/dec/24/christmas.famine
This is indeed a problem. I believe we can still have meat, however, it has to be produced with more fragmented farms with much more reasonable conditions. On top of that these methods are going to drive the price way up, to that of a luxury item. Kobe beef is a good example (although on the extreme end of this, those cows get bettter treatment then most humans) Its dishartening to me to realize what little effort we have put into funding the very systems that have enabled explosive population growth. Food should be THE very top priority