Agriculture Is One of the Most Polluting and Dangerous Industries

By Will Allen, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted May 11, 2009.

The USDA and each state should collect pesticide and fertilizer use data as California has for pesticides. Without real data, claims of increased or decreased use are groundless. Having the data will enable us to set real goals for chemical use reduction as European countries have. Then, and only then, will we be able to see if usage is declining or increasing and how many of the most toxic chemicals are used on our food and in our communities.

Besides collecting actual use data, we must evaluate all the farm and industrial chemicals as they are doing in the E.U. with REACH (Registration, Evaluation, And Authorization of Chemicals). Such data would greatly supplement the evaluations by Cal EPA and U.S.EPA, which are good, but significantly incomplete because they grandfathered in many chemicals that required no testing. REACH is currently evaluating even the grandfathered chemicals!

Even though our existing analyses are incomplete, the data from both CalEPA and U.S.EPA are sufficient to begin to phase out dozens of the most toxic pesticides. Many chemicals are so toxic that we need a goal of a 50% reduction every five years. We must begin these reductions because cancer and birth defect clusters are now common in most U.S. farm communities and people are being exposed to multiple pesticide residues on their fresh and processed food and on their clothing.

Confinement Animals/Excess Antibiotics and Hormones: I have pointed out in The War on Bugs and in other articles that our confinement animal operations (where most of our meat comes from) are a serious health and safety threat. And, as we have all come to realize, they are very poorly regulated. Overuse of hormones and antibiotics has left us with antibiotic resistant meat, large quantities of antibiotics in rivers and drinking water, and even antibiotic resistant pork farmers and consumers. Beef cows are often injected with hormones, milk cows with genetically modified growth hormones. The U.S. meat supply is so dangerously unhealthy that large amounts of it are regularly recalled (about 200,000,000 pounds of beef in 2008) and some of the more suspicious or contaminated meat has been allowed by the FDA to be irradiated since the 1990s. Nuked meat?

We raised 11 billion meat, milk, and egg-laying animals in the U.S. in 2008. By 2008, we produced nearly 69 million pigs, 95% in confinement. We raised 300 million commercial laying hens in battery cages, Ten billion meat chickens, and half a billion turkeys were confined in abusive close quarter conditions. About 33 million beef cows and 9.7 million dairy cows spent their dreary days in disgusting feedlots and dairy barns. These facilities and their meat products are rife with disease that the public is advised to combat by thorough cooking. In December, 2008 Consumer Reports found that 83% of the 525 meat chickens they studied had salmonella or campylobacter. With deadly diseases on all but 17 chickens out of 100, customers are asking: What about the salmonella on my drain board or my hands? No wonder there is so much food borne illness!

These enormous populations of animals also produce a lot of manure, and massive amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. The largest amount of nitrous oxide comes from fertilizer used on farmland that produces feed for confined animals. High methane emissions come from mountains of animal manure and digestive gasses, and a lesser though significant amount, from unsustainable grazing. Seventy to eighty percent of our farm production and acreage is used to produce the aforementioned 11 billion beef cows, pigs, poultry, milk cows, sheep, and goats. Fertilizer use in the U.S. is variable depending on the needs of the crop and the natural fertility of the land. Corn and cotton farmers, who grow the corn and cottonseed to feed these confined animals, use 200 to 300 pounds of nitrogen per acre and about 100 pounds of phosphorous.  This is much more nitrogen and phosphorous than the crops can use in a single season, but the farmers are advised to use "enough" to get the highest possible yields. So, most of the nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer that the plants don't need and can't use are flushed into rivers, lakes and the ocean.

I could continue further with this litany of unregulated farm problems, but these are the major issues. We are living in a very polluted and dangerous food world, partly because of the unregulated excesses of U.S. industrial farming. If we are going to bring down our high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and birth defects we have to change our food choices and how that food is raised. Besides creating profound health and safety problems, industrial farming is a huge unregulated contributor to global warming and an enormous user of energy. We must regulate and significantly reduce the U.S. farm use of fuels, pesticides, and fertilizer. These are not choices! These are necessities! If we are going to seriously tackle climate change and fix our health system, we have to change our form of agriculture.

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Will Allen is the author of The War on Bugs. He has been farming organically since 1972 in Oregon, California, and Vermont, where he now co-manages Cedar Circle Farm.

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