Fresh Water & Factory Farming

What to eat? A seemingly simple choice, one most of us make multiple times a day. Yet, in this daily decision, how often do we consider the hidden consequences our choice of food has? Most of us don’t routinely pause to contemplate what impact the item we are choosing from a menu or grocery store shelf has on say, our water table - a pressing local concern. The truth is, with many challenging local (and global) issues, fresh water supply being one, this simple choice has an enormous impact. Because of the practices used in factory farming, this is especially true when it comes to eating meat (most of the meat eaten globally comes from factory farms). Factory farms are one of the largest threats to the health of our waterways and freshwater supply.

Forget limiting your shower time to five minutes (although every bit of water counts), instead pass on the burger tonight. The Farm Sanctuary claims you can conserve the same amount of water you would from not showering for 6 months by not eating a pound of beef. Here’s why. Water is profusely used, wasted, and polluted on factory farms. Thousands of gallons of water are funnelled to irrigate field after field of feed grown specifically for the animals confined in these large feedlots. In fact, fresh water depletion in the western states is connected primarily to agriculture, about 70% is used to raise livestock. Interesting, isn’t it, that pressure is put on individuals to not wash our bodies and cars or water our gardens as much during a drought, but that there aren’t more strict regulations around water use in big agricultural operations?

Copious amounts of water are also needed to wash and flush away excrement while the animals are held alive in captivity, and then again to clean up and process the animals during their slaughter. Because of this, animal agriculture is responsible for more freshwater pollution than all other industries combined! Once the water is used to clean up all the feces and other waste products, it can’t be cycled back into the water system because it’s far too polluted with bacteria, hormones, and antibiotics. As a solution, the industrial farms either store the contaminated water in giant cesspools that often leak into neighboring watersheds, or they spray it onto fields as “fertilizer”. The problem is, when rain comes it washes the contaminants from the fields into the waterways where it can cause parasitic infections, large fishkills, and “deadzones” in aquatic habitats.

In addition to harming the health of fish and other aquatic life, many diseases can be transmitted to humans from waterways polluted with manure and waste from factory farms. In fact, this wastewater can contain as many as 130 human pathogens! As mentioned above, hormones used to pump up the animals being carried by manure into waterways, impacting fish life and eventually moving up the food chain to us. Antibiotics that are routinely used on the animals create super strains of resistant bacteria, again, passed on to us as these bacteria are linked to foodborne illnesses.

After all of this, which is really only skimming the surface of the issues with factory farming, I have to admit I eat meat on rare occasions. However, I go out of my way to make sure the meat comes from pasture raised animals with organic standards. This usually means the animal is raised in more humane ways by people that are taking the health of our water, air, and bodies into consideration. To me, this is a more sane way to produce food.

The biggest issue I see with these operations is the actual disconnect we have during these times with what we are nourishing ourselves with and where it comes from. It is from this place that I feel most of the true disease of the situation comes. How is it that many of us have lost touch with the importance of what we feed ourselves with? If more of us were curious about what we are putting into our bodies, if more of us knew of the conditions in which the animals in these mega feedlots lived, and the impact they have on the health of our bodies and planet, would we keep choosing to buy meat from such places? I truly hope not. This is why education around this topic is so important and is luckily much more readily available than ever before.