Where is industrial agriculture practiced

Sustainable farmers and ranchers raise their animals in ways that allow them to graze or forage, move outdoors freely and express natural behaviors, without the stress and illness common in factory farms known as CAFOs Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

They focus their practices on diminishing as much as possible if not eliminating the pain and suffering that animals experience as they live and are killed through the production process. Pain relief is used for necessary procedures like castration and no unnecessary alterations, like horn removal or tail docking, are used. Concern for the experience of the animals extends through to the slaughtering process.

Years ago, independent farms were the backbone of the rural economy, as farmers spent money at local businesses, from the feed store and implement dealer to the coffee shop. As farming has consolidated, with some farms getting much bigger and the rest closing down, the downtown businesses that relied on them have shuttered as well.

This trend has been exacerbated by vertical integration of agribusiness, so that one company owns the entire supply chain, rather than supporting many independent businesses. Because sustainable farms are smaller than their consolidated industrial counterparts, they still purchase goods from local vendors, when they can find them.

It is important to note that workers on sustainable farms too often get left out of this equation. For a host of reasons, costs of production are generally higher on these farms than those of large farm operations. They must pass these costs along to the consumer, but there is a limit to what consumers will pay. Even with higher prices, many farms are operating at the narrowest of margins — sometimes the farmers are not even paying themselves a salary.

How to pay their workers a living wage is a complicated financial question many sustainable farmers wrestle with. Industrial operators are not much better in terms of workers, however. These days, industrial operations like a large CAFO or a meat processing plant attempting to open in a rural community will make promises about jobs; the reality rarely lives up to the hype. Jobs at these operations are inevitably low-wage and without benefits or long-term security, and carry high risks of personal injury.

Further, the jobs frequently do not even go to community residents, as operators have found that they can pay migrant workers or immigrants far less for the same work. All too often, this ends up with a community bitter about the tax burden from the influx of new residents, the smell or noise from the facility and the broken job promises, and an immigrant labor force who is underpaid and exploited. The only winner is the corporate operator. This is despite the fact that agricultural production today already produces 2, daily calories for every person on earth — enough to feed the population of 10 billion we expect by Additionally, research has shown that various kinds of sustainable agriculture do achieve yields in the range of those obtained by chemical-dependent methods.

Depending on the circumstances and crop, sustainable yields have been shown to be equivalent, slightly greater particularly in drought conditions, which is increasingly important as the climate changes , or 15 to 20 percent lower than those of chemical agriculture. A different kind of federal agriculture policy could help farmers and taxpayers, and curb many of the worst impacts of industrialization.

A policy based on supply management, which creates a grain reserve a common sense protection against low yield years and a floor price for farmers, would not incentivize fencerow-to-fencerow planting, making it easier for farmers to take marginal lands land not worth farming because it would not make enough money out of production. The IAASTD calls into question the idea that this universal principle of technological progress in a free-market economy is the ideal concept for sustainable food production and the organisation of agriculture.

Firstly, fertile soils - the most important basis of agriculture and a resource that can rarely be multiplied - are seldom distributed fairly. Almost nowhere in the world does access to land follow classical market rules of supply and demand. The distribution of soils is shaped by the historical legacy of feudalism, colonialism and patriarchal inheritance rights and has always been the result of very particular machinations and struggles for power, which are rarely transparent, fair and non-violent.

Approximately 3. Roughly 2 billion people In , an estimated million people were officially employed in the agricultural sector: Of these, The agricultural sector accounted for Although the share of total employment in agriculture has declined over the past decade, the total number of workers in agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa has grown. There are more than million farms in the world. Of the In , they worked just 6. In contrast, large farms hectares and above , representing just 3.

In the financial year , around 1. Smallholders can be highly productive. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high-external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers.

As of this writing, nine states have banned the use of gestation crates , or steel boxes in which pregnant pigs can neither turn around nor lie down. Eight states have outlawed veal crates, while five states have passed laws to limit the use of battery cages , which cram chickens in groups of 5 to 10 each into tiny spaces. Human agriculture has existed for about 12, years, and industrial farming is less than a century old. Many academics have pointed out that the growth of industrial agriculture was not entirely a response to demand for more food from less land; there are many options to increase productivity without mistreating the environment or livestock.

Rather, systemic incentives have helped lock in common practices of factory farming and monoculture. The U. Farm Bill basically ensures massive production of corn , typically the genetically modified version on monoculture fields. Congress has managed to make a bad system worse by reducing funding for good programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program, one of the few pro-environment features of our federal incentive system.

Regenerative farmers are leading a new movement to reduce the use of fertilizers and pesticides through improved soil health and diverse crop rotations. Low-confinement systems of animal production not only benefit the health and well-being of livestock but also offer significant environmental benefits.

Unconfined animals graze, reducing the need for massive corn farms and resulting in the production of less greenhouse gas. Manure management is also improved, as grazing animals increase soil health and reduce the need to concentrate animal waste in holding pools that can overflow into drinking water systems and lead to aquatic dead zones.

Organic agriculture has expanded enormously in recent years. Farmers are responding to that demand. There was a 56 percent increase in the number of certified organic farms nationwide between and This is all happening in a system that disincentivizes progressive farming approaches by reinforcing monoculture farming via a flawed crop insurance program that renders the land more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

In addition, our government continues to license cheap but environmentally damaging pesticides that wipe out complex ecosystems. Imagine the potential effect of better policies, including increased research on organic farming techniques to protect people and our planet, giving farmers of color more access to land and credit, and a crop insurance program that does not encourage monocultures but supports crop rotation and good soil health practices instead. You can take steps to reduce industrial farming.

Buy organic and avoid meat produced on CAFOs. Purchase from regenerative farms —or even create a mini farm in your own backyard. Incorporate more plant-based food s into your diet. Above all, stay informed and spread the message. In Central California, small ranches and farms are growing their connections—to the land, to the past, and to each other. A tribal-led plan to build a meat-processing facility on the Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana will help invigorate the local economy, safeguard cultural traditions, and protect community health and the environment.

It will take the highest levels of international cooperation, but by working to curb wildlife trade and conserve vast swaths of disappearing habitat, we can minimize the interspecies interactions that spread viruses. From fertilizer runoff to methane emissions, large-scale industrial agriculture pollution takes a toll on the environment.

With the manure of one mega-dairy already contaminating the water supply and another operation on the drawing board, Central Sands residents have had enough. Farmer Russ Kremer caught a drug-resistant infection from his own pigs.

Now he's raising them right. Cover crops, an age-old farming strategy, can help boost soil health, protect water sources, and create fields that are more resilient to climate change. Ugly, foul-smelling and sometimes toxic, algal blooms are becoming more common in freshwater ecosystems like rivers, lakes, ponds, and reservoirs. For a healthier backyard garden, you need to invite nature in.

Try a few strategies featured in the documentary "The Biggest Little Farm. Food insecurity, biodiversity collapse, and skyrocketing global temps loom. But a new U.

The scale on which agricultural projects take place has ballooned since the s. Today, the hallmarks of industrial crop production are the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and machinery; huge fields that are anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of acres in size; a distinct lack of crop diversity or crop rotation; a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Industrial crops are not just vast acres of corn and soybeans in the Midwest, grown for animal feed , ethanol and processed food.

In truth, most crops in the US, from apples to zucchini, are grown with industrialized practices, treated more as outdoor factories than as part of an ecosystem. What we have instead are depleted soils on one hand and toxically excessive animal wastes on the other — both problems generated by commercial agriculture. The major problem with industrialized farming is that it is unsustainable: it relies heavily on finite resources, including fossil fuels and rapidly-depleting water tables, and it negatively impacts the environment, which affects everything everywhere with real costs at all levels.

Learn even more about the environmental impacts of pesticides and fertilizers in industrial crop production. Nitrogen is a key building block of life and a critical nutrient for plants and animals. Bacteria on the roots of legumes like peas and beans naturally fix atmospheric nitrogen into nutrients that can be taken up by other plants. Until , cultivating legumes, spreading manure and crop residues, as well as mining deposits of bird droppings were the primary ways to access nitrogen for farming.

The increase in world population since has closely tracked the huge increase in fertilizer production; by one estimate, a world without nitrogen fertilizer could sustain only 3. But just as with man-made carbon dioxide, the dramatic increase in nitrogen has caused major problems. The excess fertilizer leeches into surface and groundwater. In Iowa and across the Midwest, swimming and other recreational activities are no longer allowed in many lakes and rivers.

Dead zones have become common in water bodies across the US. In , the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico — created by runoff from manure and other agricultural fertilizer in the Mississippi floodplain — was more than 5, square miles: this is the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.