Vol. 7 | No. 2 | Fall 2008
Confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) impose costs on society much higher than the price we pay for meat and dairy products. But a new UCS report shows how public policies can shift food production toward smart alternatives that are better for humans, animals, and the environment.
By Doug Gurian-Sherman
Over the past several decades, U.S. livestock production has taken an unwise and costly turn. Until recently, food animals and crops were produced in an integrated, self-sustaining way that often had benefits for farmers and society as a whole. But the way we produce meat and dairy products has undergone a profound transformation that has disrupted this balanced system. Our choice of food and agriculture policies has promoted the rise of massive CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) that crowd many thousands of animals closely together in a small space and separate them from crop farming.
CAFOs impose high costs on our society and economy, contributing to air and water pollution, antibiotic-resistant illnesses, and poorer quality of life in rural communities.
Fortunately, the United States can make choices that will put food production on a practical and healthy track. More modern approaches to raising livestock, such as smart pasture operations (SPOs) and hog hoop barns, take advantage of both new technologies and natural efficiencies to produce better food—without many of the costs and problems associated with CAFOs. SPOs and other alternatives to CAFOs illustrate the kinds of modern, sophisticated approaches to animal agriculture that U.S. decision makers should encourage with their food-production policy choices.
In CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations, UCS examined these critical choices, including the policies that have encouraged the growth of CAFOs and imposed enormous costs on our society. Our report, released in April, is the first evaluation to combine the impacts of several types of problems created by CAFOs, including the cost of taxpayer subsidies and direct and indirect costs to society (such as environmental and health damage) that amount to billions of dollars annually. We found that more sophisticated and efficient alternatives are available for producing affordable food; adopting better agriculture policies that help promote these alternatives can begin to shift our animal production system in a modern, healthy, and sustainable direction.
CAFOs Create Avoidable Problems
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Manure: CAFOs’ Dirty Secret Properly used, manure is a valuable nutrient resource. CAFOs, however, turn this resource into a liability, generating high levels of pollutants including: Ammonia: Livestock production, especially in CAFOs, account for about 70 percent of U.S. airborne ammonia emissions—the single largest ammonia source in the country. Ammonia combines with other compounds in the atmosphere to form fine particulate pollution that exacerbates asthma and other respiratory diseases, and also contributes to acid rain. Nitrogen and phosphorus: These elements are critical to plant health but become harmful in large amounts. When nitrogen and phosphorus enter waterways, they cause algae blooms that may be toxic and deplete oxygen in the water when they die, killing fish. CAFOs contribute to “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and elsewhere. Nitrates: This nitrogen-based compound, which has been found in drinking water supplies near CAFOs, can cause serious health problems in infants and has been associated with cancer in adults. |
Although they comprise only 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, CAFOs now produce more than 50 percent of our food animals. Most of the problems of CAFOs result from their excessive size and crowded conditions. CAFOs contain at least 1,000 large animals such as beef cows, or tens of thousands of smaller animals such as chickens. Many CAFOs are even larger, with tens of thousands of beef cows or hogs, or hundreds of thousands of chickens. CAFOs can appear to operate efficiently because they have been allowed to shift costs onto society as a whole. But these “externalized” costs, along with subsidies from taxpayers, hide CAFOs’ true inefficiency.
Taxpayer-subsidized feed grain: Animals in CAFOs are fed, nearly exclusively, large amounts of corn and other grain. Until recently, prices for corn, soybeans, and other grains were artificially low due to huge taxpayer-funded subsidies for grain farmers in the federal farm bill. This indirect government support helped CAFOs to grow to extraordinary sizes and dominate the market. But some food animals are not well suited to an exclusive diet of feed grains. Cattle, for example, are healthiest when eating grass and forage; eating a grain diet for too long makes these animals sick. Moreover, grain-fed cattle can produce less nutritious beef and milk than their grass-fed counterparts, as UCS documented in the 2006 report Greener Pastures.
CAFOs have not benefited from this subsidy in recent years, when grain prices have been high. But the damage has been done: indirect grain subsidies to CAFOs between 1997 and 2005 amounted to almost $35 billion, or nearly $4 billion per year, serving to entrench the CAFO system.
Taxpayer-funded manure cleanup: CAFOs produce some 300 million tons of untreated manure each year (about twice as much waste as is generated by the entire human population of the United States). CAFOs usually store this manure in nearby “lagoons” and later apply it onto nearby fields, often in amounts that crops cannot utilize. These practices result in leakage, runoff, and spills of waste that contribute to air and water pollution (see box).
The total cost of CAFO pollution to human health and the environment is difficult to quantify, but we can get a sense of the magnitude by assessing some of the individual costs. For example, CAFOs Uncovered estimates that the cost to clean up the contaminated soil under every U.S. hog and dairy CAFO would approach $4.1 billion. In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has estimated that it would cost CAFOs at least $1.16 billion per year to transport and spread their manure on enough farmland to reduce both water and air pollution.
The disposal and cleanup costs for all of this manure would hobble CAFOs if they had to pay for it themselves. But another program authorized by the federal farm bill, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), subsidizes the cleanup of a small amount of CAFO waste. Our research suggests that U.S. CAFOs may have benefited from about $125 million in EQIP subsidies in 2007. The rest of CAFO pollution costs are shifted to the public.
Drug-resistant bacteria and increased health care costs: UCS estimates that 70 percent of all antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are given to food animals to promote growth, in addition to antibiotics used to treat diseases in highly crowded CAFOs. Often, these animals are given the same drugs used to treat human illness. This massive use of antibiotics in animals contributes to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Salmonella, various forms of E. coli, Campylobacter, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Illnesses caused by such bacteria are often more difficult to treat, leading to longer and more costly hospital stays, additional lost work and school days, and more deaths.
The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that antibiotic resistance from all sources increases U.S. health care costs by at least $4 billion annually. The total societal costs attributable to antibiotic use in animal agriculture are difficult to calculate, but are likely to add up to billions of dollars per year.
Decreased quality of life in rural communities: CAFOs are sited in rural communities that bear the brunt of the harm caused by these operations, including foul odors, contaminated drinking and groundwater and higher rates of respiratory and other diseases compared with other rural areas. These risks also depress property values in communities near CAFOs: based on data from Missouri, we estimate that property values near U.S. CAFOs have fallen a total of about $26 billion.
Smarter Choices, Better Policies
Bigger is not always better, as mounting problems related to CAFOs illustrate. But tiny farms aren’t the only alternative either. A range of scaled-down operations can utilize production efficiencies while avoiding many of the negative consequences of massive CAFOs (see the sidebar). Mid-size hog hoop barns (low-cost, easily assembled tunnel-shaped structures with natural straw bedding) and pasture-based operations, for example, are just two approaches that fit this “just-right” category of alternatives. These operations are typically healthier for the animals and can often produce comparable or even higher profits per unit, at close to the same production costs. For example, although dairy SPOs produce somewhat less milk per cow than dairy CAFOs, the SPOs often earn more profit per cow and per farm. And when the externalized costs are considered, the comparisons clearly tilt in favor of these newer approaches.
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A Smarter Way to Raise Dairy and Beef Cows Pasture-based livestock operations are a win-win for the environment and for animals. There is a growing movement among U.S. farmers to create efficient livestock operations that harness natural systems rather than work against them. One approach is managed intensive rotational grazing (MIRG), in which pasture is divided into individual paddocks and the animals are rotated through the different paddocks to graze in a way that optimizes both pasture quality and animal production. MIRG is cost-effective because grazing animals harvest their own forage, thereby largely avoiding the costs and environmental impacts associated with growing, harvesting, and transporting grain. Manure is distributed by the animals themselves, avoiding fertilizer costs and greatly reducing manure-related pollution. Healthy pastures are also less susceptible to erosion and absorb more of the nutrients applied to them, thereby contributing less water pollution. And because the animals are eating their natural diet of pasture grasses, they are often healthier and therefore rarely require antibiotics. While proper management is critical to avoid creating the same environmental problems as CAFOs, pasture-based systems such as MIRG can and should replace CAFOs in the animal production landscape.
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Considering the clear benefits these alternatives provide, however, an important question remains: If CAFOs are not appreciably more efficient than many small and mid-size farms, how have they managed to force better farms out of the market? The answers lie largely in misguided, outdated government policies that have favored massive, stand-alone operations. In addition to policies that make taxpayers pay for feed grain and waste cleanup, lax enforcement of antitrust laws has given too much power to the large meat and dairy processors that hold production contracts with CAFOs. As these large operations have grown even bigger, they have wielded a virtual monopoly over processing and marketing. In practice, this means that mid-size and small operations cannot easily get their animals slaughtered and to market.
UCS supports policies that will force CAFOs to bear the full cost of the problems they create, which will level the playing field for smaller, more responsible producers, and encourage modern production practices. Specifically, we call on the U.S. government to:
• Eliminate the waste-management subsidies that CAFOs now receive, and instead offer assistance to small and mid-size farms for pollution prevention
• Substantially increase funding for research on modernized animal production practices that will benefit the environment, public health, and rural communities
• Strictly enforce antitrust and anticompetitive practice laws to prevent processors from undermining midsize operations
• Revise slaughterhouse regulations to facilitate larger numbers of safe, smaller, geographically dispersed processors
• Strengthen and enforce the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act to reduce the generation and spread of pollutants from CAFOs
New policies, better grounded in both the science and economics of animal agriculture, can lead us to abundant food and efficient production practices that avoid much of the harm associated with CAFOs. Shifting away from CAFOs and toward more modern livestock production systems will be an important component in our efforts to make the U.S. agriculture system environmentally sustainable and economically profitable for generations to come.
Doug Gurian-Sherman is a senior scientist in the Food and Environment Program.
