Thanks for food, thoughts for water
The way we farm our food profoundly affects the environment
As we gather ‘round the Thanksgiving table tomorrow, what better time to take a moment and think about how we grow our food? Far too often, agriculture policies are promoting the spread of polluting practices instead of healthy food. To make this a little easier to digest, instead of talking turkey, I’ll start by going whole hog.
A recent study by Duke University found that communities near hog farms suffer from high rates of infant mortality, kidney disease and tuberculosis. They were careful not to draw direct conclusions, but the implication was clear: living with the pollution from giant pork production operations — which in North Carolina produce 10 billion gallons of waste each year — might not be so great for your health.
Two weeks after the Duke study was published, Hurricane Florence slammed into the North Carolina coast, spilling untold gallons of hog waste into floodwaters that soon coursed down city streets and into homes.
In the wake of Florence, lawmakers heard calls for increased regulation of hog waste, and pork-producing giant Smithfield even promised to install covers on many of its waste lagoons, which might reduce hurricane-induced pollution. But for the rest of this year, all 10 billion gallons of that hog poop has to go somewhere, whether the lagoons are covered or not. Typically, it is sprayed onto fields, and from there, it all too often flows into our rivers and streams.
Of course, this pollution from factory farms is not confined to North Carolina:
It hasn’t always been this way. But over recent decades, thousands of family farms that grew mixed crops and raised relatively small numbers of animals were forced out of business and replaced by feedlot operations with thousands of animals each.
How did we become a nation of factory farms? Part of the answer is cheap feed, subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
The federal government currently disperses $90 billion in “crop insurance,” through which some farmers receive regular payments. Yet farmers who want a piece of the nation’s largest agricultural incentive program often cannot access payments if they grow mixed fruits or vegetables. Rather, they must grow commodity crops like corn and soy. And what is the chief use of all that taxpayer-funded grain? Feeding animals on industrial livestock operations, including those where lagoons overflowed and poisoned the North Carolina landscape.
For pigs raised on feedlots, animal feed represents about two-thirds of the total pork production cost. Subsidized feed thus represents a huge cost advantage for feedlot farms over farms that raise hogs on pasture. As a result of the crop subsidies created in the 1996 Farm Bill, for example, the four biggest U.S. hog producers saved around $9 billion on feed costs.
The health and environmental problems that flow from industrial pork production go far beyond waste lagoons. Animals kept in confined conditions are typically fed a steady diet of medically-important antibiotics even when they aren’t sick — a practice rapidly leading to the ineffectiveness of antibiotics in human medicine in the form of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. And America’s 127 million acres of crops raised for animal feed deplete our water sources and use pesticides that have been linked to cancer and developmental problems.
These problems might be easier to swallow if we didn’t have enough food to eat — and this was the price we had to pay to produce the food we needed. In 2018, however, Americans will eat around 220 pounds of meat per person, nearly a third more than we ate in 1960. We will throw out a quarter of the edible meat we produce, including a full third of the pork. Meanwhile, the foods we should be eating more of — fresh fruits and vegetables — receive negligible government support.
Now, I don’t want to leave our holiday thoughts in total doom and gloom. Truth be told, I love Thanksgiving. My mom inspired in us a passion for cooking, and to this day, I always look forward to working with her in the kitchen on Thanksgiving — especially when she tells us to “flip the bird.”
But I think we can do better. First, we need to decide that clean water in our rivers and streams is more important than eating cheap bacon every day. Then, we need to change America’s farm policy to quit subsidizing crops that feed animal farms that contaminate our water and our communities, and start helping us to eat healthier, both for us and for the planet.
As we raise our forks, Congress is still not done with the new Farm Bill — in which they’ll make some of these important decisions. If they would focus on policies that don’t poison our water while growing our food, I think we’d all be thankful.
