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Farm Factories

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Farm Factories “It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat while growing one pound of wheat takes only 25 gallons”(Go Veg, Wasted Resource). The number of people who want to help the environment is growing but many of them do not know how to give a helping hand. There are many things out there that can be done to help the planet from self destruction, but one of the best ways would be to consider a life of vegetarianism. Farm factories are having many negative impacts on our planet. Farm factories impact the environment from the use of land, water and even the way waste is handle. Many of the waters are being contaminated by animal waste because many factories chose to dispose of it in small bodies of water. Waters across the country are now being threatened by the expose of to much waste. The waste that is being release into the water contains phosphorus and nitrogen. When water is exposed to too much of these two nutrients it sometimes robs water from oxygen. When oxygen is robed from water it can lead to the death of many sea animals. Waste can also contain salt and heavy metal that is harmful to the food chain. Since the water is contaminated and that same water moves up the food chain and does further damage to not just animals but also humans. Many farm factories have “lagoons”, which is the area they dump there waste but a lot of this lagoon water is release into ground water. Many of the farm factories use their own ground water for their own use, such as for cooling, cleaning and to provide drinking water. There are many people who try to save water by shorting their showers but by not eating one pound of meat you save more water then by not showering for an entire year. Every minute there is a total of seven football fields of land that are being bulldozed. Let alone more then 260 million acres of the U.S forest have been cut down to create more room for cropland. More land is being bulldozed then what is being grown and that will only bring more negative affects to the environment. Most of the land that is being demolished is being use to grow crops or to make room to breed more animals. Most of these crops are being used by farm factories to feed the animals. Feeding animals is fine but they are only wasting perfectly good food to feed an animal that will become food it self. Instead of feeding the crop to animal’s people should start to eat the crop themselves because this way there is no need to produce so many crops. If we were to grow fewer crops this would mean that we would not have to clear out so much land. The most common grain that is being grown in what use to be the forest is soy. Soy is a very rich protein and it is used in foods, oils but 85% of the soy grown is being used to feed animals that are living in farm factories. The demand on soy is growing very rapidly in the past years. Its demand has nearly doubled to 210 million in the past twenty years. Since the demand started to grow so fast there was not enough land to grow all the soy so the fields started to expand and many of them are extending deeper into forest. Since 2003 over, 70,000km² of the Amazon forest has been destroyed to create soy fields. All the forest land that is being cut down to create more room for farm factories or food for there animals is also taking away homes from many wild animals that once lived there. Sometimes it even leads to the extinctions of animals. It does not stop there, many wild plants that grow in forest are getting even harder to find. Sometimes they move the animals and plants to new land so they won’t be lost when the land is being cut down. The animals and plants that are moved from there home land have a hard time adapting to the new environment.
The years of 1998-2007 ranks the top five warmest years of the United States record. The meat industry is one of the top sources of the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming. Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. The meat industry is the leading source of methane. Methane is another word for animal waste. “Just alone the United States produces 1.4 billion tons of animal waste each year” (Eating for the Environment). Methane is twenty times more powerful then carbon dioxide at trapping in heat. Temperatures are reaching there highest in many places and this is all adding up to more natural disasters such as flooding, drought, and an increase in storms. Now that the weather is getting warmer in many places the polar ice is melting and soon the sea level will rise. The surface of the oceans water will begin to get hot and this will cause animals to die. If the water is to start warming up it will cause diseases to spread from animals and soon they could be passed to humans. With global warming not only will sea animals have trouble adapting to the new temperatures but we will too. Our habitat will also change rapidly and we will not know how to adapt to the new environment fast enough if the temperatures keep rising at this speed. The patterns in rainfall will change in this could increase the chances of floods and rainfalls in many areas. Heat waves will become stronger and this will bring illness and death to us.
“A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined”(Meat and the Environment). Many people are trying to help reduce global warming by driving more fuel-efficient cars and using energy-saving light bulbs, but by going vegetarian you will help out more and have a bigger impact on fighting against global warming. Eating one pound of meat releases the same amount of greenhouse gas as driving an SUV for forty miles. It is shown that by going vegan it is 50% more effective then by driving a hybrid. Maybe you can’t be vegetarian but if Americans would simply skip one meal of chicken per week it would be the same as taking half a millions cars off the roads. There are also other alternatives that are better for the planet and for you such as eating organic or anti-biotic food. When a meat, egg and dairy product is organic it means that the animal was not giving anything to make it grow faster. When fruits and vegetables are organic it simply means that it was grown naturally without fertilizer or anything that would enhance it to grow.

Work Cited
Eating for the Environment. 27 Jan. 2009.
<http://www.hsus.org/farm/resources/pubs/gve/for_the_environment.html>
Facts about say production and the Basel Criteria. 8 Feb. 2009. <http://assests.panda.org/download/factsheets_soy_eng.pdf>
“Global Warming.” The World Book Encyclopedia. 2004.
Meat and the Environment 29 Jan. 2009. <http://goveg.org/enviornment.asp>
Pollution from the Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health 29 Jan. 2009.
<http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/nspihs.asp>

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