Factory Farms – friend or foe? (Foe, if you don’t know…)

What exactly is a factory farm? And how does this affect me?

A factory farm is a way of raising animals where they are confined together so tightly that the animals suffer and are prone to illness and disease; where there is too much waste that’s untreated and usually spread so heavily onto land that it runs off and pollutes the surrounding ground, water and air; and where communities and workers are treated unjustly and health problems are common.

You can see pictures of factory farms in the GRACE Factory Farm Project photo gallery.

How does this affect you? Well, if you’re eating meat from these facilities, you could be eating meat from an animal that was sick and diseased. That animal could have been pumped full of antibiotics and hormones to help keep it alive and grow faster. Does that really sound healthy to you?

Want a piece of evidence as to why you should be eating organic and sustainable food? Turns out scientists in Europe did a study and found that rats that ate organic food were much healthier than rats who ate conventional diets. The organic-eating rats slept better, had stronger immune systems and were slimmer than rats fed the less healthy diets.

As we get more in depth with this blog, we’ll take you further inside each of the issues surrounding factory farming – not to gross you out, but to let you see what the problems are, to see what the solutions are, and to let you make up your own mind about what you want to do.

Tomorrow, we’ll start to discuss what the problem actually is.