The Pros And Cons Of Factory Farming

Over the past decade, federal laws and regulations have encouraged factory farming to expand. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) or simply Factory Farms are no new modern invention, they have been around for decades and some of the first regulations on CAFOs started in the 1970s. However, recent in-depth findings have put a spotlight on the abuse and neglect of the government and large corporations such as Purdue, Tyson and Smithfield. A CAFO, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is a farm in which animals are raised in confinement that is over 1000 “animal units” confined for over 45 days a year. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has then created three categories of CAFOs, ordering them according to capacity:

Later that year Congress passed the Clean Water Act in order to keep the discharge of pollutants at bay and part of the Act was to include a program, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), that set limitation guidelines and standards. 25 years later, in 2003, the CDC changed their regulations regarding the NPDES permit. The CDC concluded that all CAFOs, no matter what disposal system you were previously working with or the amount of discharge, needed to apply for a NPDES permit. This plan was safe and effective because it forced corporations to obey the law and, if they had too much waste, talk about a course of treatment in the coming years. However, it was not in place for long when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the Waterkeeper Alliance et al. vs. EPA case that not all CAFOs must be required to apply for the NPDES permit (American Bar Association 2004). As a result of this ruling, the CDC updated its standards in 2008 to say that only CAFOs with the intent of discharge must apply. Rick Dove, a small farmer on the Neuse River in North Carolina, took a direct hit from this new regulation. He woke up one day to have thousands of dead fish washed up on shore after after a large corporation pig farm was discharging pollutants into the river as well as using them to fertilize other crops (Kirby 2010). Rick, not unlike thousands of other people who had discovered corrupt corporations, were unable to speak out about their findings due to congress passing the AG Gag law in 2011. Prygoski, a professor at Michigan State College of Law states that the AG Gag law “punishes undercover investigators, employees, or other onlookers for recording images or sounds at an industrialized farming operation and subsequently distributing those recordings to the public”. Congress passed this