Five days before my senior year of high school began, I set out on a field trip with my AP Biology class, driving north from our high school to the nearby Squam Lake science center. By the time we arrived nearly an hour later, we were ready to get in the water, pouring off the bus and onto the center’s pontoon boats as quickly as possible. As the boats pulled away from their docks, we began to assemble our Secchi disks and dissolved oxygen (D.O.) sensors to begin the task we drove to the lake with: to check the clarity and D.O. levels of various lake locations. Just looking at the periphery of the lake, we saw only murky water, clouded with vegetation and sediment. Our readings confirmed this observation: the lake’s D.O. content was lower than is healthy.
We looked to the nearby mountains, on which we could see houses and fields. Houses and fields produce sewage and fertilizer, containing excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus. As the human habitation of those mountains increased, our guide said, sewage and fertilizer concentrations on the mountains increased as well. Looking towards the mountains, it was easy to imagine a summer thunderstorm washing mountainous soil downhill and into Squam Lake, introducing industrial quantities of these elements into a previously undisturbed ecosystem and spurring the explosion of algal populations which consume mass amounts of the lake’s D.O. through a process termed eutrophication. Our guide confirmed that D.O. in the lake has been decreasing over the course of the last decade or so. This is bad news for the lake’s ecosystem, and an issue which the researchers at Squam Lake are particularly worried about. A quick look at the plant growth we’d noticed along the shoreline provided manifest evidence for what they feared: once an incredibly biodiverse ecosystem, Squam Lake was beginning to quiet, one of many aquatic ecosystems suffering from the pressures of eutrophication.
Unfortunately, stories like this are becoming increasingly common. Though this process can occur naturally, it is massively accelerated by human activity. The major culprit? Industrial agriculture. Fertilizer and manure runoff, especially industrial quantities of it, inevitably ends up in water systems, causing devastating eutrophication events such as algal blooms. Though the impacts of industrial agriculture in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption are well-known, this additional dimension of environmental degradation is often left out of popular narratives.One particularly pertinent example of environmental degradation from industrialized agriculture may be found in an overview of some of the effects of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. CAFOs, more commonly known as factory farms, are agricultural enterprises where hundreds or thousands of animals bred for agricultural use are housed tightly together. The waste generated by these operations can have staggering impacts on its surroundings. When CAFOs are cleaned out, their contents – blood, urine, feces, afterbirth, newborn corpses – are hosed into a sort of “manure slurry,” and piped into large pits behind the confined area. Here, anaerobic bacteria break down the organic matter, turning it a Pepto-Bismol pink. During the breakdown, gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane are emitted. Periodically, this waste is sprayed over nearby fields to act as “fertilizer,” yet much of what is in these “fertilizers” is far more harmful than it is beneficial. These lagoons contain many substances which are detrimental to both people and planet, including excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, heavy metals such as copper, and viruses and bacteria including salmonella, MRSA, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and e. Coli. Although these lagoons are supposed to keep such harmful substances contained, they often overflow. The unusual introduction of so much nitrogen and phosphorus at once caused by flooding leads to many immediate and severe environmental impacts, including fish kills, beach closures, and shellfish contamination. Additionally, unsupervised burials of livestock may further contaminate groundwater.
Though the impacts of industrial agriculture in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption are well-known, this additional dimension of environmental degradation is often left out of popular narratives.
Additionally, CAFOs and the waste which they produce impact more than just the surrounding natural environment. These facilities have been affirmatively identified as a public health crisis, causing increases in nausea, blood pressure, and respiratory issues such as asthma. Additionally, there are adverse health impacts for both children and adults associated with being unable to stand outside for more than a few minutes, let alone be active, due to the overpowering smell, runny nose, and watery eyes which the fecal “mist” in the air causes. The impacts of these operations are disproportionately felt by low-income communities of color, where many CAFOs are systemically placed in a horrible instance of environmental racism.
In addition to being socially unjust as well as environmentally damaging, CAFOs are often devastating for the farmers who operate them. CAFO farmers have described the experience of running a contracted farm as “feeling like a serf on [your] own land”. Generally, struggling farmers are lured into contracts with agricultural giants, such as Smithfield Foods or Perdue Farms with the promise of great profits to be made after the houses which store the animals are constructed and paid off. Usually, this doesn’t happen, and many farmers end up entering deep debt as they don’t own anything other than the houses and the waste – the corporations own and supply the animals and their feed, and tightly regulate how the animals must be handled and raised, as well as the construction of the houses. Many farmers only finish paying their houses off after leaving their contract with the corporation, finding a new income source, and ceasing spending on their houses.
When looking cumulatively at the full impact of CAFOs in this manner, the far-reaching problems which they cause are evident. CAFOs are damaging not only to the animals forced to live within them, but to the surrounding people and ecosystems, as they are exposed to unjust levels of nutrients, heavy metals, and pathogens. These operations are truly unsustainable in every sense of the word, underscoring the fact that the negative impacts of industrial agriculture do not begin and end with greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. The full story goes much deeper.
Susannah Budd is a junior Geology major at Pomona from Bow, New Hampshire. She is especially interested in agriculture, food systems, and sustainable soil science.