When you purchase meat from your local supermarket do you know where it came from or how it had been raised? Have you ever wondered why sustainable agriculture is better than industrial agriculture? Most meat sold in the marketplace today has been raised in an animal feeding operation called a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) or otherwise known as a factory farm where the animal may have endured questionable treatment and conditions. There are a numerous number of arguments against CAFO’s that fall into these four general categories, economic, environmental issues, inhumane conditions and public health concerns. "Cheap is in the eyes of the accountant," said Daniel Imhoff, a researcher who wrote the book CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (2010). People do not realize that the hidden cost of cheap meat production is the loss of the rural family farm (Imhoff, 2010). The number of family farms in the United States has steeply declined from 6 million in 1935 to only 2 million in 2012 (United States Department of Agriculture, 2012). The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that family …show more content…
The business plan for factory farming includes moving animals indoors and feeding them grain while being confined in small crates or cages to conserve space and maintain fewer staff members and using artificial insemination to achieve the best possible animal (The economics of, n.d.). Most meat and dairy products are now delivered on vast mechanically automated farms because milk production had to be doubled while meat consumption tripled in order to keep up with the demand (Hribar, 2010). As the farming business grew bigger it also caused some adverse effects in the wake of its