How Many Factory Farms in Your Backyard?

Factory farms are only good for those who have invested in them that have figured out how to privatize profits and socialize costs -- the modern day American business model.  Socialized costs take the form of low wages and no benefits for workers who live and or work near factory farms and when sick or injured they either get no health care or treatment subsidized by taxpayers and/or higher premiums for treatment at the local hospital's emergency room.  And if they dare report their injury -- as we learned in Fast Food Nation -- they are fired.  Socialized costs also come in the form of the polluted land, air and water in and around the farms from maintaining far too many animals on far too little land.  I could go on and on but othe totality of socialized costs are well documented in many of the books I mentioned on earlier blog posts such as Righteous Porkchop, Eating Animals, Waste, or newly released Factory Farms.  The information in those books should make you sick to your stomach and be an insult to your intelligence as a culinary arts educator or administrator.

To get a clear picture of the growth of factory farms in the US, the organization Food&Water Watch has launched a factory farm map that you can visit to see the extent of this modern ag phenomenon in your state.  Just visit http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/ and click on the tabs at the bottom of the map to see the number of factory farms that raise cattle, hogs, dairy, broilers, and dairy in your state.  This information should also be sobering news to students who still have that carefully protected false image of ma and pa down on the farm with the red barn filled with happy animals all surrounded with a white picket fence.  An image that thankfully can become more of a reality if we shop at our local farmers market, participate in a CSA, and more. 

To learn more about all aspects of pollution, including the BP debacle, visit: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/

As always, if you have teaching tools and techniques that you use to educate students about the ills of factory farming and what can be done or what you are doing to reverse this trend please send them along to me and I am happy to post for you on the blog, or simply comment to this post as an anonymous contributor and your contribution can be read by others in our learning community.