Macie Barnhill
Outline
The environmental impacts comparing eating habits is drastic. The relationship between animal agriculture and climate change is even more drastic. The point we are aiming to reach is that there are more sustainable practices that can help preserve our environment as much as possible. By changing your eating habits you can lower greenhouse gases, eat in a more humane way and less food would have to be produced in order to feed the food you are now eating. Looking at the graph below you can see how the different diet types of veganism, vegetarianism, and diets — including meat– equivalent to their respective CO2 emission. The graph also sheds light onto the different kinds of farming in each field with organic farming always have less affects than conventional farming.
Environmental Impact
In 2012, five percent of Americans said they followed a vegetarian diet while three percent followed a vegan diet (Reinhart year 2018). Leaving the rest of America with meat eating diets including beef, chicken, pig and fish. The political ecology of animal agriculture is always coming back to the environment. The policies in place to protect the world and the economic power behind this industry that shapes social views. How these social, political and economic factors dealing with animal agriculture play a role in shaping our changing environment.
“Livestock contribute about 18 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, surprisingly more than transport. Steinfeld et al. claim that when land use and changes such as deforestation are factored in, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of anthropogenically -produced CO2, and a disturbing amount of even more harmful greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide, methane, and ammonia” (Scholten pg 185).
Our social habits have led us to demand these products which in turn pollute the earth. Methane is one of the most powerful gases that can trap heat on earth. It is produced by the cows gut and is released when they poot or burp. Which passing gas is a very natural process for them as it is for us. The issue is that we as human beings in a social sense demand this to be produced in mass for our consumption. In return it is being advertised as something so great and yummy and not as a factor that is in aid of climate change. A reduction in greenhouse gases could be seen with the switch to plant based diets.
On top of the methane that cows produce, you will find phosphorus and nitrogen in their manure. In smaller farms this manure is reused for fertilizer on the farmland but with factory farms it is different because of scale. Factory farms have many more animals which means more manure. Although it is still generally spread over land, it is too much for the soil to fully absorb. Without being absorbed into the soil it is easily susceptible to runoff into local streams. According to the EPA, they do routine checks to ensure that manure from the facility is not reaching US waters and following the clean water act. Which in 2008 factory farms were said to be a point source for water pollutants into US waterways and considered apart of the Clean Water Act. Although when you look into numbers and statistics on such policies it is hard to find anything. Georgina Gustin has an answer for why this is, in North Carolina federal authorities and the public have little access to this information concerning CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). We do not even have a good insight on where all these factories are located therefore making regulations on CAFOs close to nonexistent when it comes to air and water quality (Gustin, year 2016). Due to these poor state regulations and legal pushback from these large industries we are unaware of the number of CAFOs and the possible contamination they are causing to the waterways (and air). The animal agriculture industries are power places that feed millions of people, it is hard to regulate on practices that are efficient to humans. With this we will find more pollutants in water and air as well as their quality decreasing.
Cows alone on average can eat up to 27 pounds of forage a day (wheat, corn, soy, etc.) and even more if they are lactating cows (Rasby year 2013). In order to feed these cows we must have the crops to do so, leading to even more cropland and deforestation to do so. That is just for cows, so imagine feeding all of the animals involved in animal agriculture. Deforestation is also one of the largest sectors contributing to global warming for arable land, further deteriorating our soils. As soils become non arable for crops to grow we have to find more, instead of adopting sustainable agriculture techniques to save the present ones. This is how deforestation is brought into the picture, by the need for more and more land to replenish of nutrients. If everyone ate a plant based diet less land would need to be used for agriculture and more land could go back to forests. This can also lead you to a question brought to hand by Deckers, “the fact that some people consume animal products causes hunger for other human beings” (Deckers pg 14). Our environment is shared among every being on earth and a lot of the food we produce for animals could be fed to hungry people. Weis suggests that this meat style diet is, “a vector of global inequality, environmental degradation, and climate injustice” (Weis, pg 81). You can see here how the issue locally enters a global scale by affecting people around the world with our own political ecology. By mass producing food to feed our other food we are wasting food on other beings in our world who are malnourished. Naturally these animals could feed and care for themselves, let’s not be selfish and take that away from them any longer.
Changing our diets from a primarily meat diet to a plant based one could help climate change, give us more arable land, clean up the waterways and help feed the hungry. Getting away from CAFOs who deplete and pollute our natural resources and support local sustainable plant based farmers. For future decisions you should look into supporting your local farmers market who generally use less chemicals and more sustainable ways of farming. Join Plant based groups around your community and become involved in educating people on the importance of the environment.
Annotated Bibliography
Fabiano, Jennifer. “How plant-based diets can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent”. Accu Weather. February 23, 2018.
Jennifer Fabiano in her 2018 article addresses the issues of greenhouse gasses and how we can reduce them with a cleaner diet and way of agriculture. To reach the main points she uses an approach that sheds light on things like how methane is produced, agriculture’s effects on land, and efficiency of food production. This is a effective approach because after explaining how things are it is easier to show how they could get better. The photo below was used in her article as well, It is a good sum up of topic headlines that Fabiano used.
Jorge Sigler, James Videle, Catherine Perry, and Amanda Gray. “Animal-based agriculture Vs. Plant-based agriculture. A multi-product data comparison”. The Humane Party. March 2017: page 5.
The Humane party is a political group that focuses on animal rights and more sustainable practices. In this piece of work my focus was on page 5, due to its rich data comparison. The Humane Party took animal and plant agriculture and compared the two industries by: pounds, mass of land, value/sales, expenses and net income. Taking a look into these numbers and realizing what industry does more good than harm. For more information on the specifics behind the data you can continue reading.
Leo Horrigan, Robert S. Lawrence, and Polly Walker. ” How Sustainable Agriculture Can Address the Environmental and Human Health Harms of Industrial Agriculture”. Environmental Health Perspectives: Vol 110 Number 5. May 2002: Page 446- 449.
I focused in on the portion of the article dedicated to the Impact of agriculture on the environment. The article picked out main points and then expanded on each, those topics being: fertilizers, pesticides, soil/land degradation, arable land, water, biodiversity, industrialized animal production and lastly climate change. One of the largest affects that stuck out to me in this was the term “lagoons”, which are open pits of animal manure. We have moved so far into production of animals we now have too much of something that use to make the crop land more fertile. This article opens up many insights on just how much animal agriculture has grown and continues. Pointing out almost all of the ways that is degrading our environment.
References
Deckers, Jan. Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products be Banned? London: Ubiquity Press, 2016.
Gustin, Georgina. Factory Farms Get Bigger, Pollution Grows, but Regulators Don’t Even Know Where They Are. Insideclimate News, 2016.
Rasby, Rick. Determining How Much Forage a Beef Cow Consumes Each Day. University of Nebraska, 2013.
Reinhard, RJ. Snapshot: Few Americans Vegan or Vegetarian. Well-being: Washington DC, 2018.
Scholten, Bruce A. U.S Organic Dairy Politics: Animals, Pasture, People, and Agribusiness. NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Weis, Tony. The meat of the global food crisis. Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013.
Plant Based Agriculture 