Opinion Editorial
Draft 1
Slaughterhouse 55: An Environmental Appeal
The meat industry is a villain relentlessly attacking the environment on multiple plains. Every year seventy-billion animals are born to be eaten by humans. Animal farming disproportionately contributes to global warming, deforestation, water contamination, and the depletion of natural resources.
Livestock have many of the same basic needs as humans, for in fact we too are animals. It starts with food; animals need nourishment. One third of our harvested grain is fed to livestock. Proportionally, the land used for crops fed to humans amounts to four million acres while feeding our animals takes up fourteen times that- adding to a whopping fifty-six million acres of land. Such an investment is not even paying off. The animals are not being fed according to their needs. You may have heard that cows are responsible for much of the methane, the most potent greenhouse gas, in our atmosphere. It is not the animals, however, but what they are fed. The feed, conglomerations of corn and soybeans do not result in optimal digestion, giving way to excess bovine stomach gas- which release of methane into the atmosphere. The tallying numbers tell us that forty-four percent of the methane released into the atmosphere by human manipulation is traced to animals of the factories.
Read more at: https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-environment/
Animals must also drink. Disparity is stark when comparing the price of milk and meat in dollars versus gallons of water. One gallon of milk takes six hundred and eighty-three gallons of water to produce. Similarly, a pound of beef uses two thousand four hundred gallons of water. Aside from absorbing an excessive amount of water in production, the industry also contaminates existing water bodies.
Read more at: https://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/factory-farming-and-the-environment/
Of course, nutritional intake ends with excretion. Our employed animals produce eight times the amount of sewage than we do, totaling to around 500 million tons of manure every year. Some of the manure is used as fertilizer, but according to an investigation by the Human Society, there is “…more manure than can be assimilated by available land…”. Excess manure is arbitrarily deposited on vacant land lots untreated. PETA even makes the following accusation, “Factory Farms dodge water pollution limits by spraying liquid manure into the air creating mists that are carried away by the wind.” This practice poses major threats to public health. It enables contaminants such as antibiotics, heavy metals, nitrogen, phosphorous, and fatal pathogens to seep into waterways. Simultaneously, piles of manure enable toxins to evaporate into the air. Nitrogen poses a particular threat because it evaporates as ammonia into the atmosphere and causes eutrophication in water bodies. Of course, this is the product of negligence and apathy on the part of the factory owners but it is in response to the demands of production they struggle to meet.
Read more at: https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/hsus-report-industrialized-animal-agriculture-environment.pdf
https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/food/animal-agricultures-impact-on-climate-change/
Livestock need their space. In addition to the land harnessed to grow livestock feed, the animal farming industry is spread over one third of the occupiable land on our shrinking planet. When the forest becomes pasture, there is no going back. Grazing over the land physically alters the lands ability to continue its natural processes. Continuous pressure and occupation of these pastures can have any of the following consequences, “…soil erosion, degradation of vegetation, carbon release from organic matter decomposition, loss of biodiversity owing to habitat changes and impaired water cycles,” according to the seminal book on factory farming, Livestock’s Long Shadow released by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Practical examples could be anything from soil compression in a dry climate preventing the ground from absorbing and storing its usual quota of water, offsetting the natural water cycle maintained, or animals’ hooves continuously pulling out indigenous grasses till they cease to grow. Actually, “…In the United States, with the world’s fourth largest land area, livestock are responsible for an estimated 55 percent of erosion and sediment.” We are designating land to fulfill our short term “needs” instead of understanding its impact on our long-term needs. Instead producing animals, we should be letting our ecosystems flourish in a natural way to promote biodiversity instead of threatening it.
“Grazing Cows.” Photo by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Though the environmental impact of factory farming occurs on a global scale even a single individual has the potential to impact the issue. The average American eats 124kg of meat per year. Give that up, and you can save nearly 219,000 gallons of water in a year. Factory farming are playing the game of supply and demand. The greater demands we elicit, the more the factory farms exploit the animals as commodities, expand their facilities, and environmental impact worsens. Continuing the typical American diet we are indirectly robbing the world of its biodiversity, robbing ourselves of clean air, wasting the limited resources that we have and rendering much soil infertile for future generations. The consequences of factory farming cannot be undone. A warm world cannot be cooled, and, and methane eradicated. We can’t breathe out the manure we breathe in. Extinct species do not resurrect themselves and ecosystems do not regenerate on land that has been violated. We can however prevent the course of environmental destruction through our diets, all it takes is a little less meat.
