Is Farming Even Farming Anymore: The Changing Landscape of Farming and Farmers

Reader Contribution by Steve Judge
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One huge negative is the emergence of large industrialized livestock confinement facilities that produce eggs, chicken, pork, and beef. Because these facilities confine livestock in unnaturally over-stocked and overcrowded conditions the animals are unnaturally susceptible to the spread of diseases. To compensate for overcrowded housing the livestock are often routinely fed antibiotics. The economic pressure to quickly bring pork, chicken and beef to market encourages the managers of these facilities to administer hormones and other medications to their livestock that will cause them to grow more quickly. They are also fed unnatural diets high in concentrates, including GMO soy and corn that have been sprayed with herbicides.

The USDA and Land Grant Colleges in the U.S. have, by official policy, been encouraging the consolidation, industrialization and dehumanization of agriculture in the U.S. for generations. The goal is to increase efficiencies and reduce costs to make food cheap for consumers. Along the way they have put millions of community-based family farms out of business, ruined local rural economies, caused once viable farmland to be abandoned, and institutionalized unhealthy and cruel livestock and land management practices.

My point is this: These industrial livestock confinement facilities are not farms and the people who operate them are not farmers.These facilities are factories that produce eggs and meat on an industrial scale. The animals in these facilities are production units and have little or no opportunity to experience anything close to a natural life. Rather than enhancing the quality of life in the surrounding communities these facilities are often guilty of polluting and degrading the environment.

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