Some may object that it's unfair to focus on the meat and dairy industries in assessing externalized medical costs. After all, every industry generates medical externalities, so why single out animal foods? Miners have high injury rates. Software programmers get carpal tunnel syndrome. Just as we do for the animal food industry, taxpayers and consumers help pay medical costs through taxes and insurance premiums for these other sectors.
But unlike these other examples, the animal food industry's hidden medical costs are unique and worthy of special attention. The external medical bills generated by meat and dairy are dramatically greater than those of any other industry. The hidden health care costs created by the next-highest sector, the tobacco industry, are $100 billion dollars less than those of animal foods. Moreover, the animal food industry's taxpayer subsidies of $38 billion make it one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the country.
Consider just how this diabolical dynamic works. Taxpayers provide the funding essential to keep most animal food producers profitable—and in some cases, to keep them in business. In turn, those same producers impose massive medical costs on us. In other words, first we pay factory farm operators to hurt us, and then we pay doctors to treat the injury. That blistering combination puts this industry in a special category all its own.
What can we do? The evidence shows that without question, Americans eat far too much meat and that this high consumption hurts our health and costs us money. One solution seems simple: eat less meat—or give it up altogether. This idea might once have seemed inconvenient, unpalatable, or extreme. But with the proliferation of plant-based foods and the rising number of high-profile vegans like former President Bill Clinton, business magnate Steve Wynn, real estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman, and Ford Chairman Bill Ford, that's no longer the case.
Food for Thought
Animal foods' retail prices have fallen significantly in the past century (on an inflation-adjusted basis), driven largely by producers' cost-cutting practices. Compared to 1935, ham is cheaper by 48 percent and chicken by 74 percent. Just as basic economic theory predicts, these falling prices have helped boost consumption. Per capita chicken consumption, for example, has increased sixfold during this period.
With these supply-driven forces spurring us to buy more animal foods than we would otherwise, Americans' extraordinary rate of animal food consumption is killing us in record numbers. We eat three times the meat per capita as others on the planet do, and as a result, we have nearly three times the cancer rate and twice the rates of obesity and diabetes.
Diseases caused by animal food consumption generate massive financial costs related to treatment and lost productivity. At roughly $314 billion, the health care costs of animal food consumption refute the notion that the methods and levels of industrial animal food production are efficient. In fact, these costs tell of a bloated, overproducing industry that benefits from market failure and a resulting ability to sell its goods in artificially high quantities.
7
The Sustainability Challenge
The oldest river in North America, and the second oldest in the world after the Nile, is the ironically named New River. Cutting through the Appalachians like a winding road, the muddy, three-hundred-mile waterway meanders from North Carolina up through Virginia and West Virginia. Its sloping banks are lush with chestnut, white oak, sugar maple, currant, gooseberry, rhododendron, honeysuckle, and lily of the valley. Humans first settled at the water's edge more than ten thousand years ago, and as recently as the 1800s, native tribes including Shawnee and Cherokee fished and hunted in the area. But on a humid, early-summer day a couple of decades ago, as modern-day anglers waded the river's banks and recreational rafters screamed down stretches of whitewater, something happened that would change the New River for years.
On June 21, 1995, a factory farm's eight-acre pond of pig waste burst its retaining wall and dumped 25 million gallons of liquid manure into the New River. According to the New York Times, “Knee-deep red, soupy waste rushed over roads and tobacco and soybean fields and into two nearby tributaries of the New River until the waste lagoon, which is twelve feet deep and held waste from more than ten thousand hogs, was virtually empty.”1 It was the worst hazardous waste spill in North Carolina's history and one of the worst ever in the United States. After the spill, extraordinary levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the New River caused persistent, toxic algal blooms and a massive hypoxic region—a dead zone in which oxygen levels were too low for the waterway's bass, trout, muskie, walleye, catfish, sunfish, and bluegill to breathe. The incident killed 10 million fish and closed 500 square miles of wetlands to shellfishing.2
While the manure spill at New River was unusually large, smaller-scale spills are surprisingly routine in the United States. A study published five years after the New River disaster counted a thousand manure spills in ten states over just a three-year period.3 Animal waste regularly contains nitrogen and phosphorus, and of course, fecal bacteria like E. coli and salmonella. It often includes antibiotics and steroids. When these substances enter our water, as they do on a regular basis, they damage ecosystems and threaten the health of people and animals.
With 18,800 factory farms in the United States, routine water pollution is just one of a number of environmental side effects caused by Americans' insatiable demand for animal foods. Air pollution, land degradation, and climate change also figure prominently. Concerned commentators have proposed a variety of solutions to these problems, such as rotational farming, organic production, and local consumption. This chapter starts by exploring the viability and sustainability of these approaches. And because ecological problems impose hidden costs on taxpayers, the chapter's second half looks at factory farming's financial effects on the environment.
Not surprisingly, as with the other consequences of meatonomics, the factory farming practices that cause ecological damage are largely about the money. Critics “have been hard on hog farms,” said Charles Carter Jr., whose company built the lagoon that broke and spilled into the New River. “People are just trying to make a living.”4 But when farmers and lawmakers say that livestock-related environmental harms are merely the inevitable result of trying to earn a living or feed the nation, they forget they are responsible for fostering the extraordinary and unnecessary level of consumer demand that drives these problems in the first place.
Farming and Nature
Occasionally, when I talk to someone about factory farming, I get an indignant rebuke. “I spent my childhood on a farm,” the speaker admonishes me, “and it's not like that at all.” She then goes on to describe the green, sunny pastures and happy, grazing animals of her youth. Sure, it was like that once. But those small, pastoral farms that some remember from the 1950s, '60s, or '70s, where animals slept in barns and spent their days outside, are almost all gone. They've mostly been turned into housing subdivisions or planted with monocrops like soy or corn to feed farm animals. Today, American farms are radically different.
Even before corporate players came to dominate American agriculture, farming was never especially natural or environmentally friendly. As plant geneticist Nina Fedoroff has noted, “agriculture is more devastating ecologically than anything else we could do except pouring concrete on the land.”5 That said, industrial agriculture has eliminated even the tenuous and limited balance that formerly existed in traditional animal farming. Livestock were once attached to land, where they ate plants and returned waste to the soil as fertilizer. But agribusiness executives discovered that decoupling animals from real estate allows greater scalability and productivity. With the link between land and animal lost, gone even is the modest symmetry formerly found in recycling manure and crop residues back into the system.
As practiced in the industrialized world, animal agriculture today is one of the least natural of all human endeavors. Factory farming now ranks with mining, oil production, and electricity generation as one of the most ecologically damaging industries on the planet.6 In fact, in
a much-quoted study, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that among all industrial sectors, livestock production is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”7
Sustainability Solutions
With mountains of evidence showing that animal agriculture is polluting and warming the planet, well-meaning commentators have offered a number of ideas to shrink animal foods' ecological footprint. The recipe for sustainability in animal agriculture is variably said to favor small farms over big, organic over conventional, or local over remote. A look at some of these ideas helps answer the big question: can animal foods be produced sustainably to meet demand? (For purposes of this discussion, sustainability means the animal food system's capacity to endure without diminishing future generations' wealth, welfare, or utility derived from environmental resources.)
At the outset, note that measuring the environmental effects of human behavior is sometimes harder than you'd think. Take the conventional wisdom that says paper cups are more eco-friendly than Styrofoam. In fact, a paper cup requires thirty-six times more electricity and twelve times more water to produce than a Styrofoam one.8 Styrofoam can take centuries to decompose, depending on the presence of moisture, sunlight, heat, and other factors. However, although not as persistent, a paper cup can still take decades to biodegrade because of coatings used to improve its ability to hold liquids. So which is better for the environment? “The truth” said Oscar Wilde, “is rarely pure and never simple.”
“Sustainable” Meat Production?
Consider one of the best-known proposals to make meat production sustainable. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan discusses ecological rotation as an alternative to factory farming. Pollan profiles Polyface Farm, a 550-acre organic farm in Virginia that raises animals by moving them around the farm on a regular basis in portable enclosures. The cattle are moved to fresh grass each day, and the chickens follow several days later to scatter the cow manure and eat the insects it nurtures. The farm produces 140,000 pounds of meat yearly, enough to feed seven hundred Americans at our average annual consumption level of 200 pounds per person.9 Polyface Farm also supports the local food movement by refusing to ship meat beyond a four-hour driving radius. The farm's meat production methods are clearly more environmentally sustainable than most and, except for their practice of slitting the throats of alert chickens, generally more humane. And it's certainly an interesting novelty for a small cadre of well-intentioned consumers and restaurateurs in Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia, looking for local, organic meat.
But for a nation of more than 300 million meat-eaters, four out of five of whom live in cities, farms like Polyface are unlikely to ever become more than a novelty. For starters, Polyface produces only enough meat to feed a large college dormitory. Even if there were more than a handful of Polyface-like farms in the country, the quantity of food they could produce compared to factory farms would remain minuscule. The reality is that unless something is done to dramatically reduce the nation's current, extraordinary demand, the only alternative is to continue to industrially produce virtually all the meat, fish, eggs, and dairy that Americans consume.
Returning to Polyface Farm and other efforts like it, the big problem with the prominent attention they receive, both in The Omnivore's Dilemma and elsewhere, is that this focus exaggerates their relevance. Many think Polyface is representative of organic farming. It's not, by a long shot. Even if organic animal farming were particularly eco-friendly—which, as we'll see, it isn't—Polyface is far from an everyday example of the genre. That's because unlike the happy, grazing animals at Polyface, the vast majority of organic animals are raised in CAFOs largely indistinguishable from inorganic factory farms. For example, organic animals must—in theory—be given access to the outdoors. However, such access is largely meaningless both for organic pigs, who don't graze and are routinely fitted with nose rings to discourage rooting (by making it painful), and for organic chickens, who by nature don't dare venture outside the dark warehouses where they are raised. Pollan observed, for example, that during his visits to free-range chicken farms, he never actually saw a bird go outside.10 In practice, the organic label signifies only the absence of synthetic pesticides in feed and chemicals in meat—it certainly doesn't mean the meat was sustainably or humanely produced.
Pondering Polyface
Even a close look at Polyface's ecological-rotation practice suggests that the system's reputation as a model of sustainability comes up short. For starters, Polyface is not self-sufficient, as all of its animals except cattle receive supplemental feed grown off-site. Adam Merberg, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in mathematics, has calculated the calories in the supplemental grain fed to Polyface's chickens.11 Merberg's numbers indicate that for all the Polyface eggs and chickens produced, more than three times as much food energy goes in as comes out. In other words, it's three steps back for every one step forward. That's not a great paradigm of sustainability. At 3:1, Polyface Farm's ratio of energy input to output for chickens is only slightly better than the 4:1 average in US chicken production.12 As Americans increasingly shift from eating red meat to poultry, this is a major limitation in the Polyface model.13
Another problem with Polyface is its limited production capacity. For example, take the meat-eating demands of Southern California, population 23 million. Unless something is done to significantly lower their consumption, feeding these Californians the 14 million pounds of flesh they eat daily would require an additional thirty-three thousand farms the size of Polyface and an extra twenty-eight thousand square miles of farmland to contain them. That's more than the total area in seven of Southern California's eight counties.14 This farmland simply does not exist in Southern California. Most of the region is surrounded by ocean or desert, except for the Central Valley to the north—which is already dedicated to providing one-eighth of the nation's agricultural output.15 Even if part of the Central Valley could be converted to eco-rotation farms for meat production, most of that land is needed for crop production, and in any event, the entire area is just a fraction of the total that would be needed just to meet local demand. Further, if we were to try to feed the entire nation using the Polyface model, we'd need another 450,000 farms on an extra 390,000 square miles—an area almost twice the size of Texas. To quote Richard Oppenlander, author of the book Comfortably Unaware, the vast amounts of land needed for pasture farming make it “absurd” to think that the system can be sustainable.16
As much as we might hope Polyface Farm is the cure-all for the ills that stem from farming animals, it cannot serve as the model for animal agriculture. The small operation may work well in its local setting to serve a few hundred regional consumers, but the model isn't scalable to satisfy America's extraordinary consumption of meat—particularly in light of the country's mostly urban population. In fact, the mathematician Merberg reports that when he asked Polyface's founder Joel Salatin about the farm's lopsided input/output ratio during a live question-and-answer session in California, Salatin confirmed that Polyface is not sustainably self-sufficient.17 Salatin, self-appointed evangelist of the rotational farming movement, is one of the most progressive, capable, and well-informed farmers on the planet. And if he can't find a way to make rotational farming self-sufficient and sustainable, it's unlikely anyone can.
Manic for Organic
Organic agriculture shuns manmade pesticides and fertilizers, and conventional wisdom says that makes it eco-friendly. That's one reason why organic foods represent the fastest-growing food category in the United States, with sales jumping from $1 billion to $26.7 billion over the past two decades.18 But is organic food really as good for the environment as we'd like to think? Despite Prince Charles's claim that organic farming provides “major benefits for wildlife and the wider environment,” a 2006 British government report found no evidence that the environmental impact of organic farming is better than that of conv
entional methods.19
In fact, because of large differences in land needs and growth characteristics between organic and inorganic animals, it's hard to draw conclusions about the environmental benefits of one production method over the other. As table 7.1 shows, considerably more land is required to produce organic animal foods than inorganic—in some cases more than double. This higher land use is associated with higher emissions of ammonia, phosphate equivalents, carbon dioxide equivalents, and other harmful substances. Further, denied growth-promoting antibiotics, organic animals grow more slowly—which leads to higher energy use for organic poultry and eggs. Thus, as table 7.2 shows, when the overall effects of organic and inorganic animal production are compared, the results are notably mixed.
TABLE 7.1 Land Use Needs of Organic and Inorganic Animal Food Production (in acres)20
TABLE 7.2 Organic or Inorganic Production—Which Is Better for the Environment?21
We can see that poultry and eggs are mostly more eco-friendly when raised inorganically, while it's generally more eco-friendly to raise pigs organically. As for cattle, factors like methane emissions and water use make the comparison more complicated.
Take methane. Besides figuring prominently in many a fart joke, it's a highly potent greenhouse gas (although in its natural state, it's actually odorless). A single pound of it has the same heat-trapping properties as 21 pounds of carbon dioxide.22 Organic cattle must be grazed for part of their lives, which means that unlike feedlot cattle, they eat grass. However, cattle rely more on intestinal bacteria when digesting grass than grain, and this makes them more flatulent—and methane productive—when eating grass. The result is that grass-fed, organic cattle generate four times the methane that grain-fed, inorganic cattle do.23
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