Industrial farming environmental impact
Once upon a time, the journey your food took to get to your plate was beautifully simple. A farmer would grow it, harvest it, and sell it to a hungry customer. Or perhaps a chicken or cow would make the ultimate sacrifice so a family could have meat on their table.
The soil was rich, the crops were pure, and everything, by default, was organic — because there was no other way to do it.
But there were a couple of problems. First, this method of honest farming couldn’t keep up with the demand of a rapidly growing world population. In addition, people started getting greedy: What if we could find ways to cut corners and produce more food, faster, for cheaper?
Thus, we had industrial farming, and that’s when everything changed. Unfortunately, it seems we vastly underestimated the negative impact of industrial farming on the environment and on us.
But let’s back up for a moment.
What is Industrial Farming?
Industrial farming — also called factory farming and industrial agriculture — is the large-scale production of crops and livestock. Drastically increasing the output often leads to extremely unfavorable conditions, such as compromised crop yields and unhealthy animals, so chemical fertilizers, pesticides, genetic modification, and antibiotics are utilized to try to compensate.
The result has indeed been more food, with less manual effort, at reduced costs — at least, monetarily. Industrial farming has depleted the land, destroyed the soil, led to horrific abuse of animals, and caused seemingly irreparable damage to our planet and, as a byproduct, our health.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, and we could write many, many blog posts on all the problems industrial agriculture has caused. However, in this post, we’re focusing on its contribution to pollution.
What is the Environmental Impact of Industrial Farming?
So, how exactly is industrial farming polluting the air and water?
Livestock Manure With Nowhere to Go
Before animals end up on your plate, they’re packed into small spaces considered “farms.” What are they doing there? Eating and… pooping. The USDA Agricultural Research Service says that every year, livestock in the United States produces manure to the tune of 1.4 billion tons.
“So what? We all produce waste,” you might be thinking, and you’re obviously right. But here’s the problem: Livestock waste isn’t treated like human waste, which travels via a sewer system and ends up in a treatment plant.
What happens to livestock manure, then? There could be a couple of outcomes.
It can be stored and then spread across the land as fertilizer. This means that it ends up in the crops, soil, and water. You might eventually eat the food created from those crops and drink that water, which means you’re consuming manure.
And when that land can’t hold any more manure? Crops and soil can only absorb so much. Once they’ve passed that point, runoff is created, which simply means that the manure travels before ultimately finding the same destination: land or water that could eventually find its way to you.
The second possibility? Manure that isn’t used as fertilizer immediately becomes runoff.
Unsurprisingly, it’s polluting the air, too. In fact, livestock waste is the biggest contributor to ammonia emissions. And ammonia emissions are responsible for particular matter (PM), which is extremely dangerous to our health.
Pesticides, Insecticides, and Fertilizers Causing More Harm Than Good?
The environmental impact of industrial farming goes far beyond animal waste.
Yes, we need pesticides and fertilizers — sometimes, under the right conditions, and with the correct application. But that very often doesn’t happen. A significant amount of pesticides used on some of the biggest factory farms are incredibly hazardous to the planet and to us.
In 2018 alone, approximately 235 million pounds of pesticides were used — but here’s the interesting part. This wasn’t for the crops that we ended up eating. It was for crops used to feed animals on factory farms in the United States. Industrial farms opt for cheap crops like corn and soy, spray them with toxic pesticides, feed these crops to livestock so that they can raise and butcher more and more animals, and ultimately improve the bottom line.
But remember, the pesticides in the crops end up in the animals, the land, the water, the air, and eventually, you.
We are barely scratching the surface, but hopefully, we’ve made the point clear: There is no escaping the environmental impact that industrial farming has. Manure, pesticides, antibiotics — they permeate everything. They don’t magically disappear, and there’s no covering them up.
Whether you realize it or not, they are in and around you, in some form, every minute of every day.
Taking Action to Protect the Air and Water in Your Home
Unfortunately, until industrial farming practices drastically change, the best we can do is protect ourselves from the contaminants that enter our homes. But how can we do that?
Air and water purification technology have advanced tremendously in recent years, capable of removing nearly all of the contaminants polluting the air you breathe and the tap water that you drink.
HEPA filtration has taken air purification to the next level and can capture 99.97% of particles as tiny as 0.3 microns in diameter. The activated carbon filter in air purifiers targets chemicals, odors, and gases. UV-C light further neutralizes dangerous particles.
For your drinking water, turn to reverse osmosis (RO) water filtration — so powerful and effective that it lets through only water molecules and nothing else.
The real solution is addressing the problem at the source, but until that happens, we must be our own advocates and address it in our homes. Learn more about Sans air purification and water filtration.