Katie Bielecki
Prof. Rob Frank
English 109
5 November 2008
A Greener Diet for a Greener Earth
	To feed America’s growing appetite for meat products, the livestock industry has been forced to “mass produce” animals, creating devastating environmental consequences. This consumer demand has led to the creation of huge, industrial factory farms in which thousands of animals are raised in intense confinement that creates enormous amounts of waste and other forms of pollution. A typical feedlot holds about 100,000 animals packed together (Boyan 1); “at times the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle… that goes on for acres” (Schlosser 165). Another troubling aspect of the factory farm industry is that the majority of agricultural crops grown in the United States are used as livestock feed, which is a waste of limited natural resources such as water and land. Vegetarianism is the simplest and most efficient solution to this problem, as it does not contribute to the unsustainable practices of factory farming. 
	Consumers in the “industrial world” eat an average of over 175 pounds of meat per person, per year (Halweil 1). Over 9 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered every year in the United States, which averages almost thirty chickens for every person in the country (Schlosser 178). If current trends continue, experts’ predictions reveal that by the year 2050, meat production will be twice the amount of current production, which, in 2007, was estimated at 275 million tons worldwide (Halweil 1). 
	Before the 1970s, the majority of animals raised for meat lived on smaller, independent farms. With the rise of the fast food industry, consumer demand skyrocketed and people began 
looking for a more profitable way to raise animals. Huge factory farms soon began to take over the meat industry and pushed many independent farms out of business (Schlosser 161-2). Most small farms had a minimal environmental impact and were mutually beneficial between farmers and livestock; animals could graze in grassy pastures and were fed scraps of unusable crops, and the animals’ manure would be used as valuable fertilizer on fields. With fewer animals being raised in one area, pollution was controlled much more easily than on a factory farm (Gussow 4). 
	Feedlots focus on profit; therefore, the goal is to get animals to market size as quickly as possible. This involves huge amounts of feed, protein supplements, growth hormones, and other drugs. Naturally, a steer would take five years of grazing to reach market size, but now this is possible with only six months of grazing followed by fourteen months in a feedlot (Dawn 149). In order for animals to grow quickly and survive in such a confined area on a factory farm, they must be fed large amounts of antibiotics. In the United States, seventy percent of all antimicrobial drugs are consumed by livestock (Halweil 2). It is believed that the antibiotics fed to animals are the main reason for antibiotic resistance in humans as the drugs pass through the food chain (Boyan 1). 
	Factory farms produce immense amounts of manure: approximately two billion tons a year, which is ten times the amount produced by the human population (Singer 168). Because so much waste is produced in one small geographic area, it exceeds its use as fertilizer, as there aren’t nearly enough fields located close-by to dispose of waste this way. Instead, it is sent to manure storage structures, which include tanks, ponds, and lagoons (USDA 1). These euphemistically labeled “lagoons” can be as large as twenty acres and up to fifteen feet deep (Schlosser 166). Unlike human sewage, livestock waste is not treated before storage, which 

makes it very unsanitary and dangerous to the environment (Raven 311). Accidents and spills are very possible, with devastating impacts on the environment. One such spill occurred in June 1995 when “an 8-acre cesspool breached and spilled 22 million gallons of waste from the Oceanview Hog Farm into North Carolina’s New River Basin” (Jacobson 94). The state’s largest-ever spill resulted in waste pouring into rivers, killing thousands of fish and other native species (Jacobson 94). Natural chemicals found in manure, such as nitrogen, methane, and ammonia, in addition to the concentrated antibiotics, are likely to contaminate groundwater and pollute surface water, which poses a serious risk to public health (Halweil 2). However, with such an overwhelming amount of waste generated, companies recognize and admit that if they were to properly treat all of it, fixing the problem would soon bankrupt the company, so they do nothing about it (Dawn 277).  	
	That’s not the only form of waste in the meat industry. In the United States, seventy percent of the grain we produce is fed to cattle, chickens, and pigs (Gussow 5). In all of North America’s crop production, about ninety five percent of oats and eighty percent of corn grown are destined to livestock feed (Fox 1). To demonstrate how much food is needed for mass amounts of animals, at a feedlot of only 37,000 cattle, twenty five tons of corn need to be dumped every hour (Boyan 1). In the United States alone, over 264 million tons of grain are fed to livestock animals every year, which is enough grain to feed about 800 million human vegetarians (Fox 1). It is a waste of resources to use these crops to fatten cattle, when they could otherwise be used to feed people (Gussow 2). 
	In addition, the excessive amount of water required for meat production puts a huge strain on natural resources since so much is needed to irrigate livestock feed and to process and 

produce the meat itself. Although the amount of water necessary for beef production has declined with improvements in technology, it’s still estimated that it requires about 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef (Boyan 1). The production of one pound of pork requires 430 gallons of water (Gussow 5). Compare this to wheat production, in which 60 gallons are required to produce one pound, and it’s easy to see which is more environmentally sustainable (Fox 1). In addition to the water required to process meat for human consumption, great amounts of water must also be used to irrigate crops for livestock feed.  It is estimated that “animal farming and agriculture are responsible for seventy percent of freshwater consumption on the planet” (Baroni 285).  Fourteen trillion gallons are used every year to water crops specifically grown to feed livestock, and this is over half of the entire water consumption in the United States (Jacobson 90). Animals living in feedlots require an additional one trillion gallons of water annually to drink and to cool themselves, as they are not supplied with shade trees or ponds (Dawn 149). According to the US Geological Survey, “domestic uses - all showers taken, toilets flushed, cars washed, glasses drunk, and lawns watered - consume less than one-tenth as much water as agriculture” (Jacobson 88). These are water uses that people are already concerned about and attempt to limit, but fail to consider how much water is needed to raise the animals they eat. 
	In the United States, the majority of factory farms are located in the western and Midwestern states where water is scarce. To enable agriculture in these regions, we depend on pumping water from underground aquifers, which are large groundwater deposits. The Ogallala Aquifer, a crucial source of water for farmers and other residents in this region, is being rapidly depleted faster than it can replenish itself. It is considered a nonrenewable resource because the majority of the water it contains has been there for thousands of years and can only be replenished through the slow natural process of precipitation and soil absorption, which can take hundreds or even thousands of years to renew (Raven 311). The water level has dropped more than one hundred feet in some areas, creating the need to pump water from even deeper in the earth. This process is much more expensive for farmers, who sometimes go out of business for this reason (Raven 311). The depletion is occurring by about thirteen trillion gallons a year (Boyan 1), and scientists predict that eventually all of the groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer will drop to such a low level that it will be uneconomical to pump (Raven 311). While the depletion cannot be blamed on livestock alone, this limited water source could be sustained for a much longer period of time if it were designated to producing crops that people can eat, instead of feeding them to animals first. 
	The United States Department of Agriculture offers several “solutions” to the problems created by factory farming, which include diet manipulation, chemical additives, and lagoon covers (USDA 3). Even if these solutions were implemented, it seems unlikely that they would solve all of the pollution problems created by factory farms. Diet manipulation and chemical 
additives are unnatural and create even more pollution by adding more contaminants to the environment. And covering manure lagoons only hides the problem and “does not address such issues as odor, ammonia emissions and other pollutants that have long been a problem on factory farms” (Dawn 277). 
	A real solution to the problem of environmental degradation caused by factory farms is for more people to become vegetarians or to reduce the amount of meat they consume. Vegetarianism is an overall more efficient way to acquire nutrients because of energy conversion 
between plants and animals. Vegetarians receive protein and other nutrients directly from plants, which is much more efficient than feeding those plants to an animal and then eating that animal. This saves crucial, limited natural resources including water, land, and edible plants; plus, vegetarianism does not add any additional pollutants to the environment. Peter Singer believes that “by becoming a vegetarian, we can assume that our diet, together with that of the many others who are already avoiding meat, will have some impact on the number of animals raised in factory farms and slaughtered for food. This assumption is reasonable because the number of animals raised and slaughtered depends on the profitability of this process, and this profit depends in part on the demand for the product.” With a decreased dependence and demand for meat products, fewer animals would be raised for the purpose of feeding humans, which in turn, would result in less environmental problems and unnatural solutions. 

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