by Ziya Tong
Maintaining these diverse genetic lines is important for another reason: to prevent inbreeding, a hazard of artificial insemination. With sixteen thousand daughters, five hundred thousand granddaughters, and over two million great-granddaughters, a bull named Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief was once the Genghis Khan of the dairy world. Today, his genes can be found in 14 percent of all Holstein cattle. But farmers ended up breeding bulls and heifers together that were both descendants of the Chief, and Chief happened to have a faulty gene. If both animals carried a copy of it, it resulted in spontaneous abortions. For the industry, the financial loss was over $420 million.
Quality control, then, is a vital part of ensuring healthy sperm. At semen collection centres, the sperm are analyzed under a microscope to ensure that they are concentrated in good numbers, swim well, and have no physical abnormalities. Companies like Semex also use “computer assisted semen assessment systems,” which use software and high-resolution video imaging to evaluate sperm according to company parameters. But in some places quality control is still done the old-fashioned way: along with sight, the semen is evaluated by smell.
While their job profile is likely not on LinkedIn, employees of companies like Finnpig have to sniff sperm and mark it for rejection if something smells off.*8 It’s an important part of pig husbandry. Sabrina Estabrook-Russett, a veterinary student at the University of Edinburgh, detailed her experience as a farmhand, in Modern Farmer. Working for a Slovenian farmer she learned the customary method for testing the quality of semen. He told her: “We test by ALL the senses: see, touch, smell, taste….When boar young, semen sweet. When boar old, semen bitter.” Thankfully, she was spared the job of taste testing.
As a product, sperm is also offered to buyers in various selections. Sexed sperm, for example, is now a common commodity. For end-customers who want females to produce milk, it makes sense to buy XX sperm. Young males are unwanted, unless you happen to be in the veal industry. A cytometer is used to separate the male and female chromosomes by weight, and a magnetic current divides the XX from the XY sperm, so that you can buy sperm that will birth the required sex 90 percent of the time.
Some semen is even sold as “robot ready,” meaning the daughters sired have teats that are more able to endure robotic milking machines. Dairy cows are known to get production-related diseases like mastitis, which is an udder infection. To address this, companies are changing the cow instead of the technology. As the Semex press release states: “Semex’s Robot Ready™ sires will help dairymen make breeding profitable cows in automated, robotic dairies easy….We’ve identified the need to produce cows that are suited for these systems as an essential requirement for our clients that are either already utilizing, or are considering implementing, automatic robotic technologies on their dairies.”
By hijacking the biology of domestic animals, we have not only taken away their ability to have sex, we now have a hand on the dial that raises their numbers as well. From a business standpoint, there’s a financial incentive to increase the product population. Pigs, for instance, are considered “mortgage lifters,” and by increasing their offspring, you increase your profits. The rate of increase grows yearly by a factor of ten. Year one, 1 sow produces 20 pigs; year two, 10 sows produce 200 pigs; year three, 100 sows produce 2,000 pigs; at that rate of increase a farmer can be up to 2 million pigs by year six. But there are consequences: in the 1990s the average pig gave birth to 20 piglets a year. Today, with selective breeding, the rate has increased to 25 to 30 piglets, with some sows even giving birth to 40 piglets a year.*9 This rapid rise in animal production from artificial insemination and embryo sales has changed the process of reproduction, and as a result has dramatically increased the biomass of domesticated animals on the planet.
Today, there are over one billion domesticated pigs on Earth, one and a half billion domesticated cows,*10 and, according to annual slaughter numbers by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, almost sixty-six billion chickens. What this means, as George Musser, an editor at Scientific American, put it, is that “almost every vertebrate animal on earth is either a human or a farm animal.” Including horses, sheep, goats, and our pets, 65 percent of Earth’s biomass is domestic animals, 32 percent is human beings, and only 3 percent is animals living in the wild.
The human population, currently at 7.5 billion, is rising at a rate of 1.2 percent per year. Livestock numbers are double that, at 2.4 percent per year. With our population expected to reach 10 billion by the middle of the twenty-first century, we will need to support not only 120 million metric tons of additional human beings, but 400 million additional metric tons of farmed animals. By 2050, the physical space required to raise food solely for livestock is expected to rise from three-quarters of all current agricultural land to half of all land in existence that is farmable, period.
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A JELLYFISH AND A CUCUMBER are both 95 percent water. Humans are about 60 percent. What all terrestrial plants and animals have in common is that water is a part of our bodies; it makes up our food, and it quenches our thirst. We know we cannot live without it. But how much do we know about where it comes from?
Water, of course, is high above us in the skies. That’s because clouds, in essence, are floating rivers. And while they look lighter than air, they do have a weight. The water content of the average cumulus cloud, for instance, is about 1.1 million pounds (495,000 litres) of water, or the weight of a hundred elephants. Clouds may be everywhere, but they are fickle in where and when they release their rain. The water we tend to rely on—for industrial, manufacturing, agricultural, and residential purposes—comes from two primary sources: aquifers deep underground, and snow and ice melt from glaciers. Both sources are disappearing.
To begin, let’s start at the top, at the mountain peaks. All that glacial water is the origin of our rivers and streams. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “runoff from snowpack alone provides 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for 70 million people in the American West.”*11 That is why the photos of vanishing glaciers should be so alarming. In a warming world, without that annual snowpack cover turning into ice and then water, the runoff is not being replenished.
The rate at which this is happening is staggering. In British Columbia, glaciers are losing twenty-two billion cubic metres of water annually. That’s like twenty-two thousand Empire State Buildings’ worth of water vanishing from the mountain peaks every single year. In High Asia, mountaineer David Breashears has been documenting the loss of “frozen reservoirs.” As the co-founder of the Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP), he and fellow mountaineers use archival photos to retrace the steps of mountain climbers taken over the past century to examine before-and-after photographs of the retreating glaciers. He writes,
We should be uneasy. The loss of these frozen reservoirs of water will have a huge impact, as the glaciers provide seasonal flows to nearly every major river system in Asia. From the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra in South Asia, to the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China, hundreds of millions of people are partially dependent on this vast arc of high-altitude glaciers for water. As the glaciers recede and release stored water, flows will temporarily increase. But once these ice reservoirs are spent, the water supply for a sprawling, overpopulated continent will be threatened, and the impacts on water resources and food security could be dire.
In 2016, the Center for Investigative Reporting began reviewing classified cables sent between US diplomats that had been released by WikiLeaks. The cables “showed mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world.” Privately, the world’s largest food company, Nestlé, has calculated that if everyone on Earth ate like the average American, the planet would have run out of fresh water fifteen years ago. Now, as populous countries like India and China play economic catch-up, their demand for meat has soared, and this, in combination with the trend of shrinking glaciers and dwindling aquifers, l
ooks to be leading to a “potentially catastrophic” situation for Earth’s water resources.
The problem is that the threats are invisible. Depleting groundwater used for crops has been called an “out-of-sight” crisis. Ancient rainwaters that have welled up in underground aquifers for thousands of years are being pumped out at unprecedented rates. And once this water is gone, it will take thousands of years to replace. We tend to think of water as coming from rain or melted snow and ice, but in fact we largely rely on this “fossil” water for modern agriculture. As Tom Philpott of Mother Jones magazine has observed, “To live off surface water is to live off your paycheck….To rely on groundwater, though, is to live off of savings.”
Right now, globally, a third of groundwater is in distress. And this groundwater blind spot looms under some of the world’s most populous cities. There is however a way to see what’s happening underground—rather surprisingly, it’s by using satellites. NASA’s GRACE-FO mission uses two satellites in the same orbit that follow each other. By constantly measuring the distance between themselves, they can detect changes in the gravity field they are sweeping over. And because oscillations of groundwater change the gravity field, the data generated can be used by scientists to “see” the volume of water that lies beneath. What they’ve discovered is that in some regions like California’s Central Valley, a volume of water depletion that used to take decades is now occurring over three years.
Our species uses about 4,600 cubic kilometres of water every year, double the volume of all the planet’s rivers. According to the UN, by 2050 five billion of us will suffer water shortages; by 2025, just a few years from now, 1.8 billion of us will experience “absolute water scarcity.” As a result, the cost of water is going up. A 2017 study by scientists at Michigan State University found that water is about to get a lot more expensive. They estimated that a full third of the US population would be unable to afford their water bills in five years.
Naturally, there is always surface water. Passing weather fronts bring the rain. And rain is free. But the water cycle is changing. As global temperatures increase year over year, warm air is causing more evaporation, leading to droughts in some areas and catastrophic floods in others. The cities that plan to use buildings and infrastructure to collect rainwater may well be the ones with drinking water in the years ahead.
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WATER MAY BE SCARCE for humans, but it has always been plentiful for fish. Fish populations however, face a different menace. In recent years, they have come across an unrivalled predator, one whose hunting ability has become so refined it outpaces marine species’ ability to repopulate. I’m talking of course about us.
In 1920, we developed a new and unusual way to fish: from the sky. As an article in Aerial Age Weekly noted at the time, the practice was seen in Virginia, where “each morning at 5 o’clock a flying boat carrying a pilot, radio operator and fish spotter leaves the station to aid fishing craft.” By 1940, this “new use for airplanes” allowed fish spotters to track whole schools of fish from an altitude of about six hundred to eight hundred feet. By the 1970s, spotter planes were commonly used by commercial fleets. Large catches became dependent upon this new way of seeing the fish. Unsurprisingly, a study submitted to the National Marine Fisheries Service in the United States found that 92 percent of fishing vessels that used aircraft had greater catch success.
For the fish, this technique has been devastating. With our eyes in the skies, they simply have no escape. In the Mediterranean at least, aerial spotting for bluefin tuna has been banned. After fishing fleets from Spain, France, Italy, Japan, and Libya came in using sonar and aircraft, the fish, encircled by the high-tech fleets and reeled in, really didn’t have a chance and their populations plummeted. But that’s the key thing. With fish being harder to catch because they are less plentiful, we need all the resources that we can to catch what’s left. But our vision of what a normal population is changes. This is what scientists call the “shifting baseline.” In the case of Pacific bluefin tuna, Kazuto Doi, a Japanese fisherman notes that, “Twenty years ago, we used to see the tuna swimming under our boats in schools that went on for two miles…we never see that now.” That’s because the Pacific bluefin population is now a mere 4 percent of historic levels. According to the UN, “nearly 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are now fully exploited, overexploited or depleted.” An essential part of the diet for billions of people around the world is disappearing and most of us don’t even notice. In fact, our demand for fish is increasing.
To cope with the demand, we not only catch wild fish species but also farm fish as well. That too has deleterious effects. Crammed into cages, fish can become diseased, covered in lice, or deformed. Fish health inspectors examining farmed salmon in Scotland, regularly find evidence of “bloody lesions, eye damage, deformed organs, plagues of flesh-eating sea lice” and more. According to the lobby group Scottish Salmon Watch, “The mortality rate on Scottish salmon farms is 26.7%.” In other words, the process of farming itself kills fifteen to twenty million of the reared fish.
Then there is the fish that we catch that we don’t intend to eat at all. Marine bycatch, or “fish waste”—the fish hauled in that are too small or are not the target species or sex—is sold on to factory farms as animal feed. Far from being a mere by-product of the fishing industry, fishmeal—made from small, wild-caught, bony fish—accounts for a whopping 60 percent of the global catch, making it easily the biggest part of the fishing industry, but one that the average consumer knows the least about. Every year, 5.4 million metric tons of these “trash” fish are caught, ground down into a powder form, and sold primarily as a supplement in factory farm feed, as a cheap source of protein.
In an increasingly overfished ocean, however, fishing fleets often move into illegal grounds. In Thailand’s marine parks, tropical fish are commonly harvested and ground into fish flour to feed tiger prawns. These are the same prawns we find on our dinner plates in Europe and North America. The film Grinding Nemo documents trawlers netting up to fifty different species in the parks. Fishmeal is being ground up from colourful reef fish, sea horses, and endangered baby sharks, among other things. As the small fish vanish, this reverberates up the food chain; the juvenile fish don’t grow to be adults, and fish that are typically hunted by larger marine predators are removed entirely, leaving those predators with precious little to eat.
Peru is the largest fishmeal-producing country in the world. And a third of the country’s catch goes to raising Norwegian farmed salmon. To produce one kilogram of farmed salmon requires two to five kilograms of feed made from small fish. In Peru, fish that could be feeding locals is instead being exported.*12 Similarly, in West Africa, fishmeal plants have begun popping up along the coasts of Senegal and Mauritania. In Senegal, monster trawlers have slashed the fish biomass from one million metric tons to four hundred thousand. Beyond the horizon of our sight, our local supermarket chickens are being fattened up with fish from Africa. For West Africans who once lived along a coast with one of the richest fisheries, it’s getting harder to buy and eat fish from their own waters, because their fish are being shipped overseas to feed our chickens.
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IN THE 1960s, 80 percent of chickens were sold to the public as the whole, recognizable animal. Which is also why, at the time, chicken was not a popular meat. Dressing, cooking, and carving a whole bird was time consuming, so chicken was primarily reserved for Sunday dinners or special occasions. All of this changed however when Robert Baker, a professor of food science and marketing at Cornell University, developed the first machine for stripping meat from a chicken carcass.
Known as the Thomas Edison of the chicken industry, Baker also helped invent the deboning machine, and his pioneering work on binding agents allowed the flesh and gristle to stick together, creating a new commercial market for processed meat. This “fun” meat could be formed into kid-friendly shapes, like stars or hearts or
even dinosaurs.
The transformation of chicken from whole bird to more commercially saleable parts—like drumsticks, wings, thighs, and breast meat—and processed shapes hugely expanded sales. The $4-billion-a-year industry of the 1960s was revolutionized. Demand for chicken meat soared, and today over sixty billion chickens are slaughtered every single year, the vast majority of which, 75 percent, come from factory farms.
Along with a sustained marketing blitz, chickens were no longer just birds but brands and commodities. And with increasing demand, meat processing plants had to ramp up supply. To do this, the slaughter line became increasingly automated, and animal disassembly sped up. Today, this is the last stop for a commercially raised hen: the bird’s life reaches its end not at the hands of a human but with the blade of a machine.
With that, we have opened up a truly gruesome blind spot. Let us bravely proceed.
On the kill floor of a slaughterhouse, the “live hangers” are the workers who hang chickens upside down in stainless steel shackles. The line moves quickly. To keep pace, a worker will need to hang up to twenty birds a minute on average. Then the machine takes over. Like a cross between a horror film and a theme park ride, the birds are cranked along a rail and over to a water bath, where they are stunned as their heads are electrocuted underwater.