The Impacts of Food Choices

In her agriculture discussion, Katie Cantrell, the Executive Director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, recognizes the reality of farming today. While people like to think of farming as green pastures, peaceful bovine, and other figments of idyll, modern, industrial farming inhabits a completely different conception. Technically, factory farms today are known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — and as bleak as that term sounds, the stats are equally discouraging.

Every year in the US, there are approximately nine billion animals raised and killed for food. That's about 30 percent more animals than all humans on the planet. And conditions in these CAFOs are poor, both for the animals' well-being and for the environment as a whole. Despite what branding operations might have people believe (e.g. free range, cage-free, free run, etc.), the fact remains that 99 percent of animals consumed in the US were raised in CAFOs.