Episode 4
Full text and sources:
A few years ago, a friend and I were driving from LA up to San Francisco for a weekend trip. The first part of our drive had been filled with beautiful ocean views and hills speckled with wildflowers. But as we got more north, we entered the regions devoted to concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFO’s. I’ll never forget it: before we even saw the cows, we saw a horrifying brownish-greyish haze that soon enveloped our car. The smell was putrid and before long we were screaming, clawing at the Air Conditioning dials but it was too late, there was no escape from breathing in the feces-filled air. I remember looking at the cows and feeling sad for them and for the people that had to live near this all the time.
I didn’t grow up in California but I lived there during the worst drought in its recorded history, when Governor Jerry Brown urged Californians to reduce their water consumption and almost enacted mandatory water restrictions. The bone-dry landscape ignited fires that could engulf entire counties. I knew friends and family that lost their homes in Sonoma and Napa counties, and I even had to evacuate myself when a wildfire in Orange County came THIS close to hopping a highway and putting my house at risk. I remember packing up my prom dress because PRIORITIES amiright.
But when the governor talked about cutting our water usage, I don’t think it’s fair that the onus was put on every day people to take shorter showers when by FAR the largest user of water is factory farms like the one I drove through! Urban water use is only 20% of the over-all state water consumption, agriculture is 80%! Think of how much water a small city of cows drinks in a day, then tack on hose water used to clean them, the water required to keep grass growing in their pastures and finally, ALL the water that went into growing alfalfa to make their feed and you can see how animal agriculture is the single largest waster of water in California.
Maybe you’ve heard recently about the importance of healthy soils in guarding against drought and flooding, growing nutritious food, and even drawing down and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Regenerative agriculture or carbon farming are such exciting prospects, you should really look into them. Experts on soil talk about how manure is the healthiest fertilizer there is, it feeds soil microbes. But on factory farms, all the animals are given a constant dose of antibiotics to ward off diseases, so applying their manure to the ground is effectively waging chemical warfare with the healthy bacteria in our soil. That poop cloud we drove through was because farmers still haven’t figured out what to do with all their cows’ manure so they spray it into the air like the world’s most disgusting water park.
Factory farms are terrible for our environment both in terms of natural resource input and pollution output. I chose to go vegan to boycott industrialized animal agriculture, and I hope you’ll join me in drastically reducing your meat and dairy consumption. If you do eat meat, get it from small local producers that practice rotational grazing. In fact, this goes for all your food, try to shop at farmers markets where the food didn’t travel far, and you can ask the producer how it was grown. We’ve already seen the power of consumer choice work its magic on getting nearly all eggs to be cage-free, now I say it’s time to cancel CAFO’s. There’s actually been some talk recently about banning new CAFO’s from being built in certain states, and some of the democratic presidential candidates said they would support so I’m really excited about that.
You could say I’m devoting my life to addressing food policy because I’m terrified. And it would be true. A degraded environment that can no longer produce enough food for our population will kill us faster than any other negative result of climate change. But you could also say I’m devoting my life to food policy because it is the only thing that gives me hope. There is so much potential for our food system to not only slow but actually REVERSE climate change, if we do it right. So, let’s do it right.
Thanks for listening to this special edition of bite-sized food policy, it’s my entry to The Scoop Journalism Contest put on my Earth Day Network, if you don’t know them, check em out they’re super cool. They’re mobilizing the world’s largest environmental movement, and they really understand how interconnected food production is with climate change. Tune in for some new episodes coming soon!
Sources:
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-drought-Gov-Jerry-Brown-urges-20-5152625.php
https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-Use.pdf
https://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/factory-farming-and-the-environment/
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/time-series/4/pdsi/all/1/1895-2019?
trend=true&trend_base=10&begtrendyear=1895&endtrendyear=2019