How completely insane is it to bring CAFO-style animal farms to Britain? In the face of accumulating data that intensive factory-style livestock production is cruel and polluting, the US is beginning to seriously question the wisdom of this type of farming. So, asks Pat Thomas, why on earth would the UK want to adopt a system that is proven to be damaging to the health of people, animals and the planet?

“Let me put it this way” says Miyun Park, Executive Director of Global Animal Partnership “you can smell them before you see them.”

Park has firsthand experience of the concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFO’s, that dominate American livestock production and has real sympathy with the battle currently brewing in the UK over whether or not to bring these intensive animal factories, which house thousands of animals, to the UK.

Three such facilities – an 8000-cow dairy farm at Nocton, Lincolnshire, a 3000-cow unit at South Witham, Lincolnshire and a 2800-sow pig unit at Foston Derbyshire – have been proposed, though due to strong local opposition, none have yet been approved. New plans have also been announced for a 1000-cow dairy farm at Leighton, near Welshpool in Wales where the cows would be kept inside for 250 days of the year.

Their sheer size is mind-boggling. The South Witham farm would be 50% larger than the UK largest existing herd of 2,000. The dairy farm at Nocton would be the largest in Western Europe, four times the size of the UKs’ largest herd and 66 times larger than the average UK herd of 120 animals. Once the litters of the sows are factored in, the pig farm at Foston could contain up to 20,000 animals at any one time, making it the largest in the UK.

According to Park there are numerous problems associated with CAFOS. High on the list are overcrowding, poor animal welfare, overuse of ‘routine’ antibiotics, and the potential to become breeding grounds for diseases such as swine and avian flu as well as E.Coli and Salmonella. There is also the problem of waste.

“To put it in perspective, the US Environmental Protection Agency has done some comparative figures which show that a single large feeding operation can generate as much waste as a US city. For example, a large farm with 800,000 hogs could produce over 1.6 million tons of manure per year, which is one and a half times more than the annual sanitary waste produced by the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a population of almost 1.5 million. Likewise, a beef cattle operation with 3,423 head cattle can produce more than 40,000 tons of excrement annually, more than the nearly 38,900 tons generated each year by the 57,000 residents of Galveston, Texas.”

She notes that even a smaller operation of 700 dairy cows can create about 17,800 tons of manure annually; more than the approximately 16,000 tons of waste generated each year by the 24,000 residents of Lake Tahoe, California.

To put these US population figures in to UK perspective:

• 1.5 million is the combined population of Birmingham and Liverpool
• 57,000 is the population of Dartford
• 24,000 is the population of Newton Abbott

The waste is a problem not just because it smells bad but because of its effect on the environment and human health. The US experience is also that when it rains, the runoff from the ‘lagoons’– large open lakes of excrement which lie adjacent to CAFOs – can pollute neighbouring land and poison groundwater supplies.

On hot days in the state of Iowa, home to some of America’s biggest hog farms, emissions of noxious gases from these lagoons produce a thick layer of pollution that hangs in the air. Local residents have dubbed it “shitsmog”. Like vehicle emissions, this smog can significantly raise the risk of asthma and other respiratory problems in those who breathe it in.

The businesses behind the UK’s proposed CAFOs suggest that the waste can be turned into valuable fuel (biogas) through anaerobic digestion facilities on site. But it isn’t that simple. Large scale biogas generators require a great deal of energy to run and the jury is still out on a) whether the energy generated is significantly more than the energy used to produce it; b) whether biogas from manure results in less overall pollution; and c) whether, once built, biogas generators become part of a closed corporate cycle that actually encourages even more intensified livestock production in order to ‘feed’ them with manure and make them profitable.

The decision to intensify meat production in the UK is seen as a purely economical one. On CAFO’s, where the animals rarely or never see the light of day and are fed artificial high protein feed to fatten them up fast, meat can be produced cheaply and quickly.

But weighing up the merits of any activity solely on economic grounds can distort its true impact. This seems particularly true for CAFOs. The philosophical and ethical question of whether or not animals should be killed for food may be complex and personal, but the damage caused by factory farming is much more clear-cut and well documented by science. For this reason, according to Michael Pollan, author and producer of the film Food Inc, some in America are beginning to question whether the risks outweigh the benefits.

“It’s ironic” he says “that just as the US is finally beginning to wake up to the environmental and public health hazards of factory farming, they are spreading to other parts of the word. Antiobiotic-resistant diseases such as MRSA has been linked to CAFO production, as has water pollution, genetic mutation of downstream amphibians and economic hardship for the farmers involved, who get trapped into predatory contracts and inescapable levels of debt by building these facilities.

“But the larger ecological absurdity is that putting animals into CAFOs takes an elegant ecological solution – animals on farms recycling nutrients for the crops while the crops feed the animals – and neatly divides that solution into two new problems: a waste problem in the CAFO and a nutrient deficiency on the farm.”

Pollan touches on something that rarely gets mentioned: the impact on the local community. Whilst the proposed UK facilities boast they will create jobs and revitalise the community, this simply isn’t the US experience. Says Miyun Park: “These are not farms, they are industrial production facilities, and as such they highly automated, and compared to more diversified farms require fewer humans to work in them.”

According to Park the likely financial rewards for the corporate owners of CAFO facilities are not mirrored in the local community. “More often than not these facilities direct money out of the community, through their buying practices, for instance for animal feed, and the services they use. They also devalue local land. In fact, in 2003, due to the negative impact on communities, as well as the health risks the American Public Health Association, the largest public health association in the world, passed a resolution urging State and Local governments and health agencies to impose a precautionary moratorium on new CAFOs “until additional scientific data on the attendant risks to public health have been collected and uncertainties resolved.”

She notes also that when the Appraisal Institute, an international association of professional real estate appraisers, studied the impact of CAFOs in July 2001 it found that the use and enjoyment of the nearby area, as well as the resale value of properties, declined by significantly, in some cases by 50-90%.

These, of course, are local effects. But the impacts of CAFOs extend far beyond the local community.  CAFOs demand massive amounts of soya – a key ingredient in high protein animal feed. Most of this comes from huge soya plantations in Latin America. To grow all this animal feed vast areas of biodiverse land have to be cleared and replaced with monocultures of soya, some of which are genetically modified and all of which are water intensive and make liberal use of pesticides and fertilisers which further damage the surrounding ecosystem.

According to Friends of the Earth senior campaigner Vicki Hird:

“If current rates continue, soya farming and cattle ranching will destroy 40% of the Amazon rainforest by 2050.  And it’s not just wildlife at threat from deforestation – forest communities are being pushed off their land and carbon emissions are contributing to climate change.”

Our increasing demand for cheap meat and dairy, says Hird, is presenting us with a choice about the future of farming that goes beyond animal welfare:

“Our current industrial farming system is wreaking environmental destruction and creating more greenhouse gas emissions than all the transport on the planet. These mega livestock unit applications demonstrate the lengths to which farmers in Europe and the UK have to go in order to make a living. The choice isn’t between industrial farming and ‘old fashioned agriculture’, but between environmental destruction and a modern, planet-friendly farming system based on local food needs.

When it comes to CAFO’s in the UK, it seems we really do need to start thinking globally and acting locally.

Pat Thomas

What can you do?

Support the Friends of the Earth Sustainable Livestock Bill

Support the Compassion in World Farming campaign against intensive dairy farming

This article was first published here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

Rumours of the death of print journalism may be premature. Ask me what’s making me feel hopeful this week and it has to be the way that print journalism seems to be rising phoenix-like from the ashes, and showing how valuable and important it is in a free society, says Pat Thomas.

As a journalist and editor I’ve had the unhappy experience of working with people who believe that print is dead. They’ve misunderstood, or maybe they never understood, how powerful longform and investigative journalism can be in provoking change, provoking thought, provoking outrage in some cases. There is a belief that we don’t need newspapers or magazines anymore because all the information people need is already somewhere on the internet.

In this respect, so I am told, the world wide web is setting us free. And while I am a big user of the web, and I appreciate the public access aspect of it and the speedy connections with other people and countries, the fact is that information on its own is completely worthless. Doesn’t matter how explosive the information potentially is, a handful of seemingly disconnected facts scattered around the millions of websites that are available to us, lost amongst the dross of me-too postings on twitter and facebook, have the power to change absolutely nothing. It is total nonsense to assume that just because something is in the public domain that the public will somehow be interested or able to graze the net and get what it needs. I sometimes think that the increasing amounts of data on the net are the electronic equivalent of junk food. Lots of data/calories but little actual intellectual/nutritional substance.

Providing that substance is a journalist’s job. It is an art, a craft, a calling even. You will hear a lot these days about the deskilling of society – it’s a particular bugbear of the Transition Town movement. But this deskilling is not just about manual skills like fixing a leaky pipe or making your own clothes or jam, there is a loss of research skills, a kind of intellectual lethargy that comes with being over-fed with data.

Some people have gone as far as to say that journalism has failed in its duty as the fourth estate to keep politicians and big businesses in check and instead has become their advocate, and that in this new era the online world is now the fifth estate, the great leveller.

Well the media has failed lately – no doubt about that. But so has the online community which provides a largely random experience of news and data, devoid of context. This of course isn’t helped by the rule that says you must never write anything longer than 800 words on a blog post or in web article. A rule, by the way, which largely works in favour of the sleazy, the dishonest, the liars, the corporate and political sleight of hand that is always trying to pull one over on the public.

So what a joy, first a few weeks ago, to see General Stanley McChrystal, the most senior US military commander in Afghanistan, brought down by a 9000 word article in Rolling Stone. The longform journalism of the piece brought colour and life to an insane and disorganised war, highlighted the military’s lack of loyalty to and faith in and respect for the commander in Chief President Obama and his staff. It made it clear that with huge internal rifts like that no one could claim to be ‘in charge’ of operations and the likely outcome, to paraphrase McChrystal, is that this war will never look taste or smell like a win.

Then in the last week or so the Washington Post, itself becoming a victim of the ‘print is dead’ mentality, published a fantastic piece, or rather set of pieces, the result of two years of investigative work on the failings of US intelligence community post 9/11. Virtually all the data on which the story was based was in the public record. It took experienced journalists to put it into context and help readers understand how it all fit together and why it was important.

Somebody had to crunch the numbers, to explain why the security services have become a lawless paranoid nation-within-a-nation – with some 850,000 people, more than 1½ times the population of Washington DC, having top security clearance. It’s a costly enterprise full of duplication of effort and waste, publishing some 50,000 intelligence reports a year – so many that most are routinely ignored. The counter-terrorism world is populated by private companies more beholding to shareholders than to the public and as a result has become incapable of fulfilling its primary function effectively, and as a result incapable of protecting the likes of you and me.

And this bonanza has continued with the WikiLeaks information dump. OK not quite a journalistic endeavour, but an impressively organised helping hand for any journalist who has the gumption to dig into it. Critics have argued that the WikiLeaks documents showed us nothing new. We know that there have been civilian casualties, we know that the Government has worked tirelessly to cover these up. But this criticism sounds like sour grapes to me.

Dig through the documents even a little bit and you find inconsistencies that drive you crazy: how is it possible to storm into a village and have a 100% kill rate of so called hostiles and yet claim no civilian casualties? It isn’t. And taken as a whole, what the 91,000 pages of documents seem to amount to is a self deluding daily diary that attempts to rewrite the reality of the war to make it more palatable. Wherever you live if your country is involved in the continuum that is the Iran/Iraq/Afghan war your taxes are being used to fund this exercise. In the US that amounts to $1 trillion so far – that’s the cost of killing 100,000 civilians in those countries (the official estimate times it by 3 or 4 and you may get close to the real numbers).

I had a publisher say to me once: “It’s only 1000 words, how hard can it be to write 1000 words?!”. Too which I say it depends on the words. And the writer. I’m one of those journalists who would have routinely had 20,000 words of backing evidence to support my 1000 or so words, which is why I was able for so long to be directly critical of major corporations and household brands, to expose the human health hazards of chemical pollution and never once be sued. I call it being thorough and being thorough takes time, passion and intelligence and self belief – qualities we need a whole lot more of in our profession.

The challenge today for any media, but particularly for journalists, is very clear: how do we make information matter?  How do we stop the terabites of information taking up space on the web from becoming just so much background noise. And I am greatly looking forward to the future when the penny drops on those arrogant, ignorant publishers – the ones who deify short-termism – that print is not dead, it is just evolving. It’s in the process of reinventing or maybe rediscovering itself as a vital independent fourth estate, in partnership rather than in competition with the electronic media, and as a force that is good for something so much more than tittle-tattle and celebrity gossip, with the power to punch through secrecy and deception. And of course this is going to come with inevitable vociferous debates on ethics, the law, and the public right to know. So there’s interesting times ahead and I say bring it on – and watch this space.

This article is a transcript from the audioblog ecoreflections360, which provides extended commentary on those stories that I found most meaningful and interesting amongst those which I have tweeted during the previous week. You can listen here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.