Drawing by Mallory Butlin
What is the quality of treatment of the livestock and poultry that are the source of meat served on a college campus? We three freshman enrolled in the new Environmental Policy Clinic course at Pace University decided to find out. This led us immediately to the acronym CAFO.
Honestly, like many students, we had never heard this term before we began researching our food supply. We know now, and what we learned has made us determined to do what we can to limit the purchase of food from this kind of operation. So what does Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) really mean? Let us take you behind each letter:
oncentrated: According to various dictionaries, concentrated means to be closely gathered together, compressed and thrown together in a pile. Right off the bat this doesn’t make CAFO sound too great. Are they trying to tell us that all of their animals are piled together in a tight location? No wonder people often call it “Confined Animal Feeding Operations!” About 100 or more cows are placed in a pen on a CAFO, all standing and sleeping in their own manure. Guess there’s not a lot of room for the animals to walk around, not that the CAFO operators mind…
nimal: Almost all farms have animals. But a CAFO designation, according to the EPA, is all about numbers: 700 dairy cows, 30,000 ducks, 10,000 swine, 10,000 sheep…. Well, you get the idea. A large chicken CAFO can have 125,000 or more birds! Seems a little packed, don’t you think?
eeding: is the action of consuming and supplying food for nourishment. It is the process of fattening and feeding an animal. Pasturelands are a form of providing food for the animals; however, on a CAFO animals are not given much time to graze. Rather, animals are fed corn and antibiotics. Feeding them corn makes caring for them easier and cheaper while the antibiotics make the animals grow faster and fatter. Who needs to go to a doctor when there are so many antibiotics in the meat coming from CAFOs?
peration: is a business or industry run on a large scale, often thought of as a practical or mechanical process that involves a particular form of work. CAFOs place a large amount of animals in a small space for maximum efficiency. So, in case you did not realize, CAFOs are not farms.
Hopefully this will help clarify what CAFOs really are.
Personally we feel that CAFOs should stand for Confined Animals Fighting Oppression. What do you think?
Comment or join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #saynocafo.
Cruelty to Animals to Feed Ourselves
Cruelty against feeble organisms
As a documentary maker focussed on food and farm (mostly farm), I have spent a great deal of time in CAFOs, a part of the landscape in states such as Iowa, North Carolina, Missouri, and on and on. They are an essential part of a factory farmed food system that cranks out cheap meat by the ton. If CAFOs had glass walls, I think consumers might take a better look at how their food is produced. Thanks for paying attention to this.
All the best to the animal welfare initiative and please do your best to remain objective and find balance and perspective. During my teen years (back in the stone age) my father turned our hog operation into a near-total confinement system, and it was a beautiful thing. Efficiency was realized in improved rate-of-gain and feed conversion, reduced death loss, and lower environmental impact (efficient use of corn, soy, and labor, and much greater control of animal waste, which was used for improved crop production). And keep in mind that it takes just a few pigs to turn range into a total mud-hole, which begets serious erosion. I’m convinced the animals were better cared for than anything we had tried before. Also consider improved safety for farm workers – sows can be mean.
For an interesting compare and contrast with current U.S. production, consider China. Nearly 1/2 a billion pigs raised in all kinds of non-CAFO conditions.
And please remember that millions (billions, even?) of people globally have protein deficient diets. We need more options and greater access to proteins for these folks.
Thanks for your great coverage. Hope it inspires other colleges to do the same and not only link education with real life but also make a lasting impact in the world.
To the critical post, yes people are starving, but this is due to a failure of distribution and equitable sharing. After all, obesity is also a huge problem in this and other industrialized countries and our divorce from understanding the real costs and process of food production is surely a contributory factor. Ethical treatment of the providers (animals and land), producers ( fair price paid so they don’t have to subsidize income with these shortcuts), and greater awareness on the consumer end will create a sustainable future that we can all be proud of!
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