I don't write many diaries. It's not the style of writing in which I excel, and I find that the issues I'm highly concerned with are more thoroughly covered, and more expertly analyzed by others. Plus, after I read and comment I have very little time to actually, like, work.
With those caveats, and although this topic has been covered (see below), it's such an important issue that I'm sticking this up. Really, really important - and timely too. So please: skip my half-assed diary and just click the link to the story below. I promise that no matter what your political niche, it connects.
In 1999 I learned more than I ever wanted to know about industrial hog production when a corporate-backed attempt to permit what would have been the state's largest farrowing operation threatened my family's 4th generation tree farm. The small family farmers and neighbors in the township joined together to fight it, and despite the lack of state and local regulations the permit was eventually denied.
Most aren't so lucky.
The recent outbreaks of e.coli reveal that the threats, environmental and health, are not limited to those who have the misfortune of residing close to a CAFO. Several diarists, notably OrangeClouds, whose "vegetables of mass destruction" series is linked here
http://www.dailykos.com/... have documented the many issues surrounding industrial meat production and the damaging effects it has.
And now, in time for circulation to family members who might still be tempted by the below sustainable market prices of 79 cents per pound for a holiday ham, Rolling Stone has published the following:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.
Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.
A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
Please: go read the article. It's five pages, it's well written, and it sums up the horrors some of us have faced and all of us should be concerned with.
When you're done, email the article to your friends and family. If you're so inclined and able, find a grassroots organization working to restrict or eliminate CAFOs in your state (for PA, please see http://www.pennfuture.org/... please add others below) and contribute what you can.
And please, this holiday, support your local farmers, support your neighbors, support our environment and boycott mass produced pork.
UPDATE: Wow - I expected the 9 comments or so that the other 2 diaries I've written had garnered - but I'm thrilled that this topic has hit the top of the rec list. To me, it's an issue that connects so many of the political causes and concerns that are discussed here and offers so many points of direct, local action.
I want to draw attention to this comment, b/c it sums up where I'm at - though certainly the vegetarians and vegans have made outstanding contributions below:
*You don't have to cut out pork. *
Please keep eating pork, just find a small farm and purchase it directly. Most of the really good farms are too small and poor to be "ceritified organic"...that just means it costs more money.
Better yet, find a small farm, and go help the farmer butcher during the winter. It is such a great family activity...The youngest members of the family can help stamp the white packages.
by hornrimsylvia
(thanks, hornrimsylvia!)