It’s a common misconception....

It was just another Wednesday night. Yoga at six, veggie pasta at seven, Pew Commission’s Executive Summary on Industrial Farm Animal Production in America at eight… you know… the norm.

I was seated at my ridiculously small kitchen table scrolling through my future fuel for the GoGreen blog fire, and I stumbled upon some little bits of slaughterhouse trivia, if you will, that I thought useful enough to share. Perhaps useful isn’t the right word, persuasive maybe? Compelling? How about revolting?

Now, we all know that vegetarianism is green. Well, greener than any IFAP based way of obtaining nutrients (pssst. that is what we are calling Industrial Farm Animal Production from here on out). But I’m sure most of us don’t have all the facts to rightfully hold our own when that steak-loving friend gets defensive, or when our parents are convinced we will die from lack of protein, which by the way, is actually surprisingly hard to do here in the US. It’s a common misconception that we need massive amounts of animal-protein to survive, for the record.

Aside from the obvious strains the IFAP puts on our environment (creating more waste, requiring more energy for transportation and packaging, the animals are eating all of our grains…) there are more specifics that can better explain the toll it is taking on our lives and planet.

Now, this little exec. summary I’m reading up on is CHOCK full of informative nuggets that I only hope to divulge in the near future, but for today, we are going to take a look at waste lagoons.

- cue intense music-

These small bodies of water are far from anything Brook Shields or Christopher Atkins would want to be stranded and naked near.

“A livestock lagoon is actually a small-scale waste treatment plant, containing manure which has been diluted with building washwater, rainfall, waterer wastage and surface runoff. In this earthen, pond-like structure, the waste becomes partially liquefied and stabilized by bacterial action before eventual disposal on the land. Lagoons may contain one of three types of waste-stabilizing bacteria-anaerobic (inhibited by oxygen), aerobic (requiring oxygen) or facultative (maintained with or without oxygen).” - Don D. Jones, Agricultural and Biological Engineering
 Alan L. Sutton, Animal Science Department
Purdue University



Mmmmmm…

Annual animal manure exceeds that of humans by three times. At first I thought… “Duh. Cows have three stomachs. Makes sense” But then I realized that these cows, along with whatever other animals we slaughter for snacks, are super mass produced and their numbers are not at what nature would normally have them. So you take all those extra animals we helped to make, which I’m guessing is quite a few, and factor in their fecal quantity, then imagine it as huge puddles across America. These poor, farm-turned-factory living creatures are pumped with hormones and antibiotics—which by the way, is creating more antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our world of enough diseases— and those hormones and antibiotics are contaminating our water supplies, not to mention the actual feces itself, when these lagoons overflow (and believe you and me, that is Not an uncommon occurrence.) So some of us are drinking doo-doo. De-lish!

When left uncovered, these lagoons emit tons of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide—you guessed it, green house gases!—and ya know what, “greenhouse gas emissions from all livestock operations makes up 18% of all human-caused emmissions” which actually exceeds those caused by transportation. Yea.

And you thought you were doing your part to save the planet by recycling the Oscar Meyer container your bologna came in…



As the Pew Commission best put it:

“Rather than seeking a balance between the natural productivity of the land to produce crops to feed animals and absorb wastes produced by those animals, the industrial model concentrates on growing animals as units of protein production.”



Sad, but true.

More to come.



Ashton