factory farms // Current TV

"Behind the Mustache" | The Brutality of Factory Farms: An Inside Look | John Robbins

John Robbins Author of The New Good Life, Diet For A New America, and many other... more

EthicalVegan
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Help End Farm Animal Abuse

Not only is meat hard on the environment, a lot of conventional meat and dairy... more

glueandglitter
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Why Factory Farms May Finally Be Held Responsible for Their Polluting Waste

In a groundbreaking legal settlement, the EPA has agreed to identify and investigate... more

EthicalVegan
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Robert Cheeke Speaks on Veganism at UCLA Celebrity Panel Discussion - May 20th 2010

Excerpts of Robert Cheeke's talk, in regard to going vegan.

EthicalVegan
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Goldman Sachs investing in factory farms: exporting environmental catastrophe to China

Listening to members of the Senate subcommittee on investigations interrogate Goldman... more

JanforGore
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3 years ago
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Disturbing Reality of Dairy Land

A new Mercy For Animals investigation is pulling back the curtains on the largest... more

heavenlytouch
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3 years ago
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45 comments

The Meat of The Matter - Parts 1 and 2

Too bad the cartoon itself is so lame, but the message is very, VERY strong. This... more

EthicalVegan
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Monsanto's killing fields of Latin America

This is criminal. Where is the American media?

JanforGore
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Factory Farmed Meat Can Trigger a Global Pandemic That Wipes Out Sixty Percent of Those Infected

The chicken and pork industries have wrought unprecedented changes in bird and swine flu. Billions could die in a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen. -- Greger very clearly delineates how a virus begins, mutates, and becomes dangerous. As with so many problems we are seeing lately -- environmental or health -- factory farmed meat seems to be a big part of the cause. -- -- Studies have shown that measures as simple as providing straw for pigs so they don't have the immune-crippling stress of living on bare concrete their whole lives can significantly cut down on swine flu transmission rates. Such a minimal act--providing straw--yet we often deny these animals even this modicum of mercy, both to their detriment and, potentially, to ours as well. --- --- The American Public Health Association, the largest organization of public health professionals in the world, has called for a moratorium on factory farms. In fact the APHA journal, the American Journal of Public Health, published an editorial going beyond just calling for an end to factory farms. --- --- It questioned the prudence of raising so many animals in the first place: "It is curious...that changing the way humans treat animals--most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten -- is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure. -- Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic. It would be even more likely to prevent unknown future diseases that, in the absence of this change, may result from farming animals intensively and from killing them for food. Yet humanity does not consider this option.... --- Those who consume animals not only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet.... -- It is time for humans to remove their heads from the sand and recognize the risk to themselves that can arise from their maltreatment of other species."

(click on the link to access the link to the full article)The chicken and pork industries have wrought unprecedented changes in bird and swine... more

Vierotchka
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First Visit to a Chicken Farm - Video By Michael Specter (The New Yorker)

New Yorker writer Michael Specter, on his first visit to a chicken farm: "I... more

EthicalVegan
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Help Get Undercover TV On The Air In Your Town

Help Get IDA's Undercover TV On The Air In Your Town! Undercover TV is an... more

julesrs007
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Factory Farming Today - Undercover Video

Factory farming today... an undercover video.

EthicalVegan
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Voice for Animals: Factory Farming | Video

Extraordinary video. Voice for Animals Humane Society in Edmonton Canada has... more

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Factory Farming - Cows

FACTORY FARMING: Cows Factory farming is about treating animals like commodities,... more

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Pig Factory Farm

Fattening up for slaughter...

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First Do No Harm - Connecting the Dots Between The Environment and Health Care Reform

Making the case for why environmentalism and health care are mutually supportive... more

jdecock
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Swine CAFOS and novel H1N1 flu

With cases documented in more than 170 countries, the global swine flu pandemic that erupted in spring 2009 remains a serious public health problem. Caused by a strain of H1N1 influenza virus, which is normally found in pigs, the flu now known as novel H1N1 has so far been less severe than regular seasonal flu in terms of deaths and hospitalizations. Yet given its remarkable capacity for human-to-human transmission and a widespread lack of immunity among potentially exposed people, it’s likely the number of cases will rise during the flu season later this fall and winter, according to many public health experts. Given that possibility, enormous resources are being mobilized to address novel H1N1, with an emphasis on vaccine development, education, and efforts to its limit its movements among human communities.

Yet one potential source of the original outbreak—swine farming in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—has received comparatively little attention by public health officials. CAFOs house animals by the thousands in crowded indoor facilities. But the same economy-of-scale efficiencies that allow CAFOs to produce affordable meat for so many consumers also facilitate the mutation of viral pathogens into novel strains that can be passed on to farm workers and veterinarians, according to Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.

“When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains,” Gray explains. “The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs—which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals—there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.”

Gray says workers exposed routinely to livestock can pass these zoonotic infections—which transmit readily among humans and animals—on to the wider public. However, public health agencies that monitor risks from zoonotic infections routinely overlook CAFO workers, according to Ellen Silbergeld, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And animal disease sampling data collected by the food animal industry typically are not shared publicly, according to Gray, although such data could reveal how novel pathogens evolve in CAFOs and how they might move among animals, workers, and the broader community. Experts believe that without these data, society has a diminished capacity to detect and respond to new zoonotic threats before they become more widespread.

end of excerptWith cases documented in more than 170 countries, the global swine flu pandemic that... more

JanforGore
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NAIS: Who really speaks for family farmers?

My family has farmed in Missouri for over a century and I currently raise livestock and grain on 800 acres in Howard County, Mo. But folks like me always seem to get drowned out in Washington, D.C, by commodity groups purporting to represent my interests. The American Farm Bureau bills itself as the “voice of agriculture.” A seemingly innocent-sounding group called the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) calls itself “the only nationwide expression of dairy farmers.” These organizations spend millions in lobbying and donating money to politicians. In the halls of Congress, in the federal agencies, and in presidential administrations, representatives from these groups exert undue control over the agenda for food and agriculture policy.

It is near impossible to convince D.C. politicians that these corporate interests do not represent the interests of family farmers. Until now. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently concluded 13 listening sessions to hear farmers’ input on the despised National Animal Identification System (NAIS) that calls for us to electronically tag and track the movements of every one of our animals. Factory farms, however, are allowed one group lot ID for their thousands of animals. Over $130 million of taxpayer money has been wasted on this radical, corporate-driven bureaucracy that originated from the National Institute for Animal Agriculture, a group comprised of – surprise, surprise – the Farm Bureau, National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), NMPF and agribusinesses such as Cargill. Only a gigantic outcry from farmers has stopped NAIS from becoming mandatory by its proposed 2009 date.

At listening sessions across the country, including one in Missouri attended by over 300 people, nearly 80 percent to 90 percent of producers were united in their adamant disapproval of NAIS and how it would do nothing to address animal disease or food safety. The few folks in the crowd willing to go on record for their support of NAIS were uniformly from the likes of NPPC, Farm Bureau and NMPF allies. That should tell the media, Congress, USDA and the Obama administration to quit listening to these interest groups and think of them as representing family farmers!

Why do we have such a broken food system that allows for deadly E. coli in our meat and now peanut butter? Why have factory farms been allowed to proliferate like viruses in rural America? Because these interest groups have been allowed to use their false façade representing America’s “farmers” to con politicians into buying their disastrous policies, while simultaneously conning the media into thinking that they speak on behalf of those farmers. Now they have conned USDA, President Obama and members of Congress into thinking we need a mandatory NAIS program.

end of excerptMy family has farmed in Missouri for over a century and I currently raise livestock... more

JanforGore
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Life-threatening disease is the price we pay for cheap meat

Modern factory farms have created a 'perfect storm' environment for powerful viruses
A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?

At first glance, this seems wrong. All through history, viruses have mutated, and sometimes they have taken nasty forms that scythe through the human population. This is an inescapable reality we just have to live with, like earthquakes and tsunamis. But the scientific evidence increasingly suggests that we have unwittingly invented an artificial way to accelerate the evolution of these deadly viruses – and pump them out across the world. They are called factory farms. They manufacture low-cost flesh, with a side-dish of viruses to go.
Related articles

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* Mexico's epidemiology boss faults WHO
* Farmers fear pigs may get swine flu from people
* Students get anti-viral drugs after another flu outbreak
* Chemists stay open as Mexico closes
* In pictures: Swine flu

To understand how this might happen, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around 20 swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs' immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress – so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around 20 other pigs to spread and mutate in – before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off. If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market – where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It had little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted to humans.

Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.

Instead of having just 20 pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammonium from the waste they live above burns the pigs' respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs' immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making them far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natural powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in.

As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association – the oldest and largest in world – called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming." continued...Modern factory farms have created a 'perfect storm' environment for powerful... more

mae37
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3 years ago
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Food Safety Enhancement Act draws ire from farmers

And if Michael "Monsanto" Taylor states their concerns are overblown, then... more

JanforGore
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3 years ago
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2 comments

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