The Pros And Cons Of Factory Farming

During the 1970’s, the top five meat packing companies controlled only about a quarter of the meat packing industry and thousands of slaughterhouses produced most of the meat being sold. Today, there are only four meat packers that control over eighty percent of the market, and most of the meat being sold in our stores is produced by only 13 slaughterhouses (Kenner). Most of the plant and animal products that are available for us to buy in grocery stores haven’t been raised on farms; they have been produced by factories. Many of these factories are not unlike the Smithfield Hog Processing Plant, where 32,000 hogs are killed every single day (Kenner). Over the course of the last thirty to forty years, we have seen countless companies be bought
After all, a larger number of people demand a larger amount of food. Factory farming is a good way to sustain a large amount of people with food, and is a way to meet the demands of variety and cheapness that will become increasingly important with population growth, but unfortunately it is not sustainable. If we keep leeching soil of its nutrients and keep allowing huge slaughterhouses to dump pollution around the country, the environment that we depend on to live in will experience detrimental effects (Kenner). We cannot keep increasing the size of our farms to meet the increasing size of our population and expect to keep the system working for a long period of time. Farmland will become unable to cultivate, more and more forests will have to be destroyed in order to make way for new farms. Also, more pollution and pesticides will keep entering the natural environment. If we increase the number of farms and decrease their size, grow a variety of foods on the land, and become less dependent on outsourced foods, we can develop a much more sustainable farming system. We might have to adjust to not having a plethora of fruit in the middle of winter, but that is a price we might have to
In order to meet this demand, farmers decrease their standards for food quality and replace them with standards of consistent output. If they don’t produce enough food and a low enough price, leading company purchasers will no longer do business with them. This puts pressure on meat farmers to put animal rights and health aside. As many animals as possible are crammed in as little space as possible, and animal satisfaction and overall health decrease dramatically. Diseases are spread from animal to animal much faster, and the need for antibiotics goes up. According to Food Inc., McDonald’s buys more beef than any other company in the United States. When companies with as low of standards as McDonald’s decide the quality of meat that is to be produced, meat of that quality becomes the overwhelming majority of what is available in grocery stores (Kenner). One consumer no longer has input on what kind of quality they want to see in a product, and it is left up to the big spenders to