Meatonomics (22 page)

Mull over another example from a few years earlier. In 2003, the GAO responded to an inquiry from US Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) regarding CAFO-related water pollution. Harkin's concern might have stemmed from the 2002 study published in the
Journal of the American Water Resources Association
estimating that at least half of his home state's 729 regulated manure lagoons (and perhaps the same portion of its five thousand unregulated lagoons) routinely leaked more than the legal limit.
⁶¹
Or maybe what troubled him was the 2002 study by the US Geological Survey that detected animal antibiotics in four out of five waterways sampled near CAFOs in thirty states, including Iowa.
⁶²

In its response to Harkin, the GAO noted two fatal deficiencies in the EPA's CAFO program. First, because the agency's rules provide extensive exemptions, only two out of five CAFOs in the country are subject to EPA oversight.
⁶³
Second, the agency has delegated its permitting functions to states but is ineffective at overseeing the states' activity. As a result, half the states audited by the GAO do not follow proper permitting procedures, and three states allow CAFOs to operate without permits—“leaving these facilities and their wastes,” in the words of the GAO, “essentially unregulated by the [EPA's] CAFO program.”
⁶⁴

It might seem unfair to single out meat and dairy producers for the microscope of ecological analysis. The reality is most modern farming methods are hard on the environment, regardless whether the product is meat, crops to feed animals, or fruits and vegetables for human consumption. Virtually all agriculture destroys topsoil and adds pesticides and fertilizers to the environment. However, we must
keep in mind that, as the UN notes, “more than half of the world's crops are used to feed animals, not people.”
⁶⁵

In the United States, the top three crops are corn, soybeans, and hay. Farm animals eat 70 percent of the soybeans, 80 percent of the corn, and virtually all of the hay.
⁶⁶
Consequently, since our nation's farming effort is mainly focused on raising animals or crops to feed them, problems like land degradation and pesticide pollution arise mostly because of our insatiable demand for meat, not vegetables. As James McWilliams observes, “Every environmental problem related to contemporary agriculture . . . ends up having its deepest roots in meat production.”
⁶⁷

Sure, growing vegetables hurts the environment too—but not nearly as much. That's because it takes five times as much land to feed an omnivore as an herbivore.
⁶⁸
In Brazil, the world's leading beef exporter, the demand for land to raise beef cattle causes systematic destruction of the world's largest rain forest on an enormous scale. In 2010, the year with the
lowest
level of rainforest destruction in decades, Brazil clear-cut 1.6 million acres of rain forest.
⁶⁹
That's a swath of jungle twice the size of Yosemite National Park. The economic forces driving this destruction are predominantly beef related: two-thirds of cleared rainforest is used for purposes related to cattle ranching.
⁷⁰
To put it in basic math, two of the three acres of Brazilian rainforest cleared each minute are used to produce meat.

It takes more land to produce meat than vegetables because of the large volume of plant matter needed to raise animals. According to Cornell ecology professor emeritus David Pimentel, livestock must be fed 6 pounds of plant protein to produce 1 pound of animal protein.
⁷¹
Considering the various benefits of plants over meat, this strange alchemy is a little like turning 6 pounds of gold into 1 pound of lead.

Moreover, this lopsided input-output ratio might be exacerbating world hunger. Pimentel has estimated that if grain fed to livestock in the United States alone were instead fed to people, 840 million additional people could be fed—that's nine out of ten of the planet's undernourished.
⁷²
An American eating a hamburger, in other words, uses enough grain to feed six hungry people. And paradoxically, while
one in seven people on the planet routinely goes hungry, Americans eat animal foods at record levels—ensuring that two-thirds of our own population stays overweight.

Americans eat three times the meat per person as the rest of the world, but unfortunately for the rest of the world, they're catching up. As that trend continues, one day the world will be massively short of land to produce enough meat to satisfy global demand. Because of the tremendous amounts of real estate needed to grow feed for livestock, we'd need two-thirds more land than exists on the planet to feed the world meat at the extraordinary pace at which Americans consume it.
⁷³
Accordingly, while industrial agriculture will always threaten the environment, it's clear that the main problem lies in the production of meat—not vegetables.

America's high production of animal foods is causing a head-on collision between demand for these items and the reality of scarce resources like land, water, and fossil fuels. This isn't a future threat; it's happening in real time, right now. The evidence is everywhere we turn, in every environmental medium. The most popular ideas proposed to address the problem—like eco-rotation, organic production, and local consumption—simply don't work. As discussed, it takes up to one hundred times more water, eleven times more fossil fuels, and five times more land to produce animal protein than equal amounts of plant protein. In short, the meatonomic system is not sustainable.

The EPA reports that each week, more than thirty square miles of productive US farmland are turned into homes or office buildings and lost to farming for good.
⁷⁴
Because this regular loss of farmland makes it harder—and costlier—for producers to raise animals, they must devise ever more efficient production methods and locations. These include such environmental undesirables as clear-cutting forest and increasing factory farm output. Meanwhile, nearly 1 billion people remain hungry but might be fed if the 6 pounds of plant protein fed to animals for each pound of animal protein were redirected. Something's got to give. “To be perfectly blunt,” writes McWilliams
in
Just Food
, “if the world keeps eating meat at current rates, there's simply no way to achieve truly sustainable food production.”
⁷⁵

The world's population is expected to grow from 7 to 10 billion in the next forty years.
⁷⁶
The UN warned recently that worldwide production of animal foods is damaging the planet and, as human population and consumption levels continue to rise, will do even more harm in the future. The solution, according to the UN, is “a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”
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The menu is straightforward: less meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. The UN, by the way, is only the latest in a long series of commentators to advocate for vegetarianism to save the environment.

What can one person do? As one step, you might try consuming less milk and cheese. That's a logical option for the ecologically minded since, as we've seen, the nation's dairy farms are responsible for a large share of harmful methane emissions. And with animals generating one-fifth of the methane in the United States, the farting cow is no laughing matter.
⁷⁸

• Animal agriculture drives massive, routine environmental damage that costs Americans more than $37 billion yearly. This sector's ecological impact is on par with the most destructive of industries, including mining and electricity generation, and its role in causing global warming exceeds that of even transportation or oil production. The externalized expenses of animal food production include costs related to soil erosion ($15.4 billion), climate change ($9.4 billion), pesticide and fertilizer damage ($7.5 billion), real estate devaluation ($2.5 billion), and manure remediation ($2.4 billion).
  
• A number of solutions are proposed to the environmental problems caused by animal production, but invariably, they come up short. Local foodists urge us to buy products raised nearby, but the data show that the carbon effects of transportation are often the least of our worries. Organic advocates
  say animals should be raised without chemicals, but in fact, organic production has as many environmental problems as benefits. And while eco-rotation evangelists argue that animals can be cycled around a farm in a sustainable way, the evidence shows that such systems require feed inputs at unsustainable levels and are not scalable to meet Americans' extraordinary demand. And as a reminder of the regulatory-capture theme that dominates meatonomics, industry influence at the US EPA has significantly diminished that agency's ability to control the damage caused by animal farming.
  
• Americans respond to the producer-driven forces of meatonomics by consuming 200 pounds of meat and 620 pounds of dairy per person each year, levels requiring that virtually all of our animal foods come from factories. At this pace, the environmental damage caused by animal agriculture can only worsen. Thus, any solution to this chronic environmental problem must begin by dramatically reducing our consumption of these items.
  

Do fish feel pain? The issue has been hotly debated for years. One naysayer is former University of Wyoming professor James Rose. “A fish doesn't appear to have the neurological capacity to experience the unpleasant psychological aspect of pain,” Rose wrote in 2000. “Thus, the struggles of a fish don't signify suffering.”
¹
Whether it's fish, cows, or chickens, this perspective that animals used for food don't suffer—at least not enough to worry about—is at the root of most modern animal farming practices. Thus, one North Carolina pig farmer said the hyper-confined pigs in his factory farm “love it. . . . They don't mind at all.”
²

Increasingly, however, consumers sense something is wrong with this dismissive attitude. People are informed and concerned about animal farming methods, and in surveys assessing shoppers' attitudes toward factory farming, a majority of respondents prefer practices that are more humane.
³
Beyond the weighty ethical questions, thanks to recent research, we can also now quantify and monetize consumer sentiment toward animal farming. For example, agricultural economists F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk show in their 2011 book,
Compassion by the Pound
, that consumers are actually willing to spend their own, real money—in average amounts ranging from $23 to $57 per thousand animals—to improve farm animals' lives.

Factory farming often exacts a toll on animals in the form of pain and stress, and because humans care about how animals are treated, we suffer too. In this chapter (and the closely linked
Appendix D
), you'll find recent research into the physiological and emotional effects that industrial production methods have on animals used for food, including fish, pigs, chickens, and dairy cows. You'll also find an estimate of the financial costs that producers impose on society by persisting in those methods despite a general consumer preference
for change. A key caveat: I don't believe a simple cost estimate can meaningfully represent the massive scope of routine, lifelong suffering endured today by virtually all US farm animals (that is, the 99 percent of farm animals raised in factory farms). Nevertheless, because economists
do
recognize a human cost in known animal suffering, and this book is about economics, it's helpful to try to quantify this sum in an objective way.

To repeat a familiar refrain,
it's about the money.
Animal food producers don't think of themselves as a cruel or sadistic bunch. They're just trying to maximize profits, and in the animal food business, you do that by minimizing the amount spent on each animal's comfort. This turns the focus to animals as production units, rather than as living beings with physiological and emotional needs. Practices some consider cruel are just a side effect of industrial production. Ron Torell, for example, is a self-proclaimed “long-standing educator and advocate of animal agriculture” who writes a column for the Nevada Cattlemen's Association monthly newsletter. In a 2011 column, Torell advises beef producers to slaughter “poor producing economic units”—that is, low-yielding females—as soon as possible. Torell further cautions against letting “pet cows avoid the terminal trip to McDonald's. It makes no economic sense why these cows are given a free pass based on sentiment, color pattern or simply an experience the owners had with the pet when it was a calf.”
⁴
Such a dollars-and-cents mentality informs most animal handling practices in the industry.

Some may question the appropriateness of this topic. For starters, cruelty is a value-laden, subjective concept, and what's cruel to one person or animal may not be to another. Some think it cruel to keep cats indoors while their natural urge is to be outside in the sunshine, exploring and playing. Others think it cruel to let cats outside, where they might kill birds or rodents, become lunch for a coyote, or get hit by a car. (I live with two cats and wrestle with this issue myself.) To avoid such value judgments, as used in this chapter,
cruel
means those practices which published research finds cause animals measurable pain or stress.

Some may find descriptions of cruelty disturbing. But because farm animal cruelty costs American society at least $21 billion yearly
in externalized empathy costs, it's important to understand where these costs come from. As recent research on marine life is particularly timely and important, several pages of this chapter discuss fishing and fish farming. On the other hand, there is less material on decades-old practices like raising hens and pigs in battery cages and gestation crates, as most readers are likely familiar with them. (That said, for the uninitiated, a detailed summary of these methods can be found in
Appendix D
.)