Factory farming has taken over American agriculture; unfortunately, this is not an improvement to the agricultural system. Instead it causes harm to human health and is hurting the environment. In the past century, there has been a significant change in the way food is produced. Farming is no longer the classic family run farm with green pastures and the familiar red barn. It is now an industrialized operation with livestock being mass-produced. Due to the use of growth hormones in livestock, and water contaminated by runoff, factory farming is a key factor in the decline of human health in developed countries. 

The question is how did this shift in farming practice come about? To fully grasp this change, it is necessary to look as far back as when America was first colonized. When the European settlers came to American, they discovered it was filled with an abundance of wildlife including fish, swine, and birds. It was uncommon in Europe to encounter such abundant sources of meat and, consequently, non-royals normally only ate meat once a week (Ogle 4). With the settlers’ newfound ease of access to food sources, Americans’ obsession with meat was born. Having animals, such as cows or pigs, became equivalent to having wealth in the new America. “In Maryland in the late 1600s, one cow and a calf carried as much monetary value as six or seven hundred pounds of tobacco.” (Ogle 2) This was great for small family farms because it took minimal labor to raise an animal versus the large workforce needed to grow tobacco or rice. In fact, the term “livestock” was coined during this time period in America. In Europe, “stock” typically meant wealth or money, but in America the animals were their wealth so they started calling their animals “livestock.” 

As time passed, Americans figured out how to keep more and more livestock moving from having one or two cows to a whole heard. In the 1900s, America’s meat production industry began to flourish, especially in the Midwest.  The animals were not only being raised for a food source but people had come up with new profitable uses for their byproducts. They were using almost every part of the animal such as the lard for lamps and soap, the hair for brushes and mattresses, and the skin for leather. With better shipping methods, such as the rise of railroads, it became much easier to transport the livestock and the goods made from them making it even more profitable than it had been in the past. This not only benefited the farmers but the railroad companies who were profiting from the shipment of livestock. Naturally, this encouraged Americans to try and produce more livestock than ever before. 

Until 1906, the meat packing industry was unregulated which allowed more profits to the producer but potential dangers and health hazards to the consumers. A key factor that caused the call for regulation was Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle. It exposed the unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry. This book caused the American people to be fearful of what they ate and led to a call for action from the government. This resulted in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was the first real form of regulation regarding food production.  Even after the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, Americans still did not trust the meat packing industry (or “beef trust” as it began to be known). In fact in the early 1900s, Americans were distrustful of large corporations. Theodore Roosevelt was president at the time and he was famous for being a trustbuster. One of the biggest trusts he would address was the beef trust. He went after them because people were blaming the packers for high meat prices which he said violated antitrust laws. This led Roosevelt to encourage Congress to create the Bureau of Corporations. The bureau’s first job was to have a full investigation into the meat packing industry. Roosevelt ended up not having a very big impact on the meat packing industry but one large company, “Armour, Swift, and Morris”, did break up, not so much because of Roosevelt, but because they realized they would be more profitable on their own. Armour and Swift went on to open up the largest meat packing facilities at the time in South Africa. American farmers could not meet the demand for cattle so they decided to use cattle from South Africa to help meet the demand. They also focused on cutting costs in their meat processing facilities. Americans realized that, as much as they hated big companies, they hated paying high prices for food even more. So, Armour and Swift got away with having their huge facilities in other countries.

Food prices had risen at a constant rate since the start of the 1900s. As seen throughout history, people are not happy when food prices rise so Armour and Swift’s outsourcing, of their companies to South Africa, received minimal backlash. It really does seem that people care about the price of the food more than where it comes from. This is not only evident in the early 1900s, but also in modern day food production as well. The cause of those rising food prices in the early 1900s was due to the mass consumption of meat and the meat industry’s inability to keep up with the demand for it. The demand for meat became even greater with the start of WWI causing prices to rise even higher. The public was so angry that Congress was forced to hold hearings on food prices. They did not realize there was nothing to be done about it because the demand was simply too high and, with the war, they could not meet the need, which in turn caused prices to rise. The public was so outraged that there were food price riots in many cities. It is this public outrage that encouraged factory farms, which became a way of producing cheap meat. Once again, Americans did not care about where their food came from, or how it was produced, as long as it was cheap.  

Another change in the meat packing industry occurred with the discovery of vitamins which encouraged people to eat more of the once overlooked vegetables. Newspaper reporters began writing stories about how you need to eat more greens to live and grow which started to cause a shift in the way people ate. One of the notable cases, caused by the media at the time, occurred in 1926 when school cafeterias stopped serving frankfurters because they were “unwholesome”. The schools said that they were too heavy causing students to not want to eat their vegetables. (Ogle 98) This idea, that frankfurters were unwholesome, caught on to the point where they were not eaten by kids at school and also not eaten by families at home. The idea that frankfurters were unwholesome had a very harmful effect on the meat packing industry. So much so that the industry launched a campaign to counter it by publishing pro-meat articles in newspapers and magazines. They began utilizing the radio and the news stations and turned out over 3 million pieces of literature on it including pamphlets, advertisements, and posters (Maureen 88). This was one of the first nationwide advertising campaigns that closely resembled a modern day advertising campaign. Advertising and propaganda played a key role in the growth of factory farms.

In 1930, America took another huge leap towards modern factory farming, when a man named Jesse Jewell created a system that produced maximum profits quickly. He turned his small business into a factory farm over the span of thirty years. What really set his business apart was the production of ready-made frozen foods that were known as convenience foods. He was the first to do this on a mass scale and this would forever change the market. Then in the 1950s, a new discovery would have one of the greatest impacts on meat production. That was the discovery that vitamin B-12, manufactured from the residue of the antibiotic Aureomycin, not only improved animal health but acted as a super accelerant. “Animals that ate it grew as much as 50 percent faster than animals fed B12 extracted from liver.”(Ogle 111) Farmers began lacing feed with antibiotics because, if an animal grows at a faster rate, it means a quicker turnover rate which leads to a bigger profit. This discovery led to the use of a multitude of antibiotics in farming which would later have some serious consequences. 

After looking back on how factory farming and the techniques involved in it came about, a pattern can be seen. Every time there is advancement or someone finds a way to become more profitable, America moves further and further away from traditional farming.  Although these practices can be more profitable, they can be detrimental to human health. The greatest way factory farming affects human health is through the use of antibiotics. Antibiotics are given to the animals not only to treat illness but also for “nontherapeutic purposes, such as disease prevention and growth promotion.” (Holtcamp 1)  The overuse of antibiotics in farming has led to strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria, sometimes called a superbug. As Lance Price said in his Ted Talk, humans and animals both have live bacteria in their gut and when they are consistently given antibiotics, the bacteria in their gut will begin to become antibiotic resistant. The new drug resistant bacteria can then easily spread through direct animal contact, fecal matter, and consumption of the animal. Not only are other animals susceptible to the drug resistant bacteria but humans are also. This makes it harder to treat illnesses in humans.

One of the most popular ways animals are given antibiotics is through medicated feed. The medicated feeds are typically given to the animals on a free choice feed system, which means the food is left out for the animals and they can eat as much or as little as they like. Therefore, there is no set dose of medication the animals are receiving. “The FDA has approved 685 drugs for medicated feed, some of which are consumed on a free-choice basis.” (Love et al. 1) In the same article it also states that the FDA reports that 13.1 million kg of antimicrobial drugs were sold or distributed for use in food-producing animals in 2009, and many of the antibiotics in industrial food animal production (IFAP) are also used to treat infections in humans. Since it is free choice, over and under administration of the medications are common which can lead to a number of issues. “Over administration can cause animal toxicity, and the presence of drug residues in meat and milk. Under administration may lead to animal treatment failure, or the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of microorganisms in food animals.” (Love et al. 1) Another issue with medicated feed is that animals normally only absorb about 25% of the antibiotics they are given while the remainder is released in waste. That waste will become runoff that can infect water sources with drugs harming the environment and humans. 

Runoff from factory farms is a huge problem that environmentalist and our public health professionals are facing today. Livestock are commonly given growth hormones so that animals grow at a significantly faster rate than normal. On factory farms, it is common that crop fields will be treated with livestock manure as a fertilizer. “ Ninety-six percent of cattle in U.S. factory farms receive steroid hormone treatments.” (Biswas et al. 1) That means that the vast majority of manure being used in crop fields also contain hormones. When it rains, surface runoff from the crop fields can transport the hormone into water resources harming aquatic life and potentially making the water toxic. 

There is a simple solution to this issue clearly depicted in Price’s Ted Talk and in Holtcamp’s article; if animals were not packed into their pins “beak to beak” and “tail to nose”, they would not need to have antibiotics to live. The close confinement they are forced to live in causes bacteria and disease to run rampant. Animals spend most of their lives standing ankle deep in each others’ manure. Also, this kind of farming causes aggression in the animals and it is not uncommon to see chickens killing each other in an industrial coop. Price talks about an interview with his friend Kye, a former conventional pig farmer, who has switched to a more natural practice. He said that when they used to use the antibiotics and tightly pack the animals in, it was dangerous and the pigs were aggressive. Price goes on to recount a visit to his friend’s farm, once they switched to more natural practices, and he said that a pig came up and leaned against Kye’s leg like a dog would. That would have never happened before when it was a factory farm. Stephanie Storm gives us further insight into the hostile environment commercial chickens are kept in. Her article is about a video that was released from inside Costco’s “cage-free” barns. Dude to public pressure, many companies are starting to switch to cage-free coups for chickens but that does not always mean that it is safer. An animal advocacy group went inside the cage-free chicken coups and what they saw did not match what people think of when they hear cage-free. Thousands of chickens were crammed into one barn beak to beak. “There were birds rotting on the floor, and there was one dead bird that seemed to have lost her head,” said Wayne Hsiung, a member of the advocacy group. That does not paint a healthy sterile picture. 

In recent years, organic farming has caught on meaning that animals are raised without antibiotics and are not kept in overcrowded cages. Organic poultry is one of the fastest growing organic food markets, which is encouraging many farmers to switch practices, due to the demand. Another reason for farmers to make the switch is that a new study indicates organic practices may help reduce the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. (HoltCamp 1) However, there are some people who do not agree with switching to organic and think factory farming is the best way. Curt Zingula actually argues in his article in The Gazette that factory farms are crucial due to the population increase. He thinks that they are the only way to be able to produce enough food. As we can see throughout history, people have always wanted mass quantities of food for cheap prices. That does not mean, however, that it has to come from factory farms. If all the farmers switched to sustainable farming practices, there would be enough food to feed the growing population. 

There are a multitude of reasons why factory farming should no longer be used as a viable farming option. It causes antibiotic resistant bacteria to spread making it harder to treat human illness. Livestock would not need the antibiotics if they were not in a factory farm environment. The runoff from their waste is polluting water sources with hormones. If the trend of switching to organic farming practices continues, there will be no need to have factory farms. People have to stand up for change and be willing to pay a little more for higher quality items.  Factory farming has taken over American agriculture causing harm to human health and hurting the environment. However, with a concerted effort to demand the use of organic and humane farming practices, this crisis could end during this generation. 
