Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [15]
Factory-farm manure not only causes water pollution, but it also causes water scarcity. Industrial animal agriculture requires massive amounts of groundwater for cleaning facilities, cooling animals in hot weather, and providing drinking water for the animals. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), countries around the world and large areas of the United States are seeing reduced water capacity for food production as well as industrial and human consumption. The main culprit is industrial agriculture and the animal factory farms, which account globally for 70 percent of all water usage. In short, we’re running out of clean drinking water and irrigation water because we’re using it to raise animals for slaughter. Vegan diet, anyone?
Fish farms have been hailed as the answer to overfishing the oceans. Sadly, these contained areas are creating pollution and abuse issues of their own. Up to a million fish, including salmon and trout, can be farmed in one penned area. The fish waste is concentrated and allowed to settle like untreated sewage into the surrounding ocean. The pollution is so bad that most other fish and marine life are forced from the area, creating an ocean desert. The farmed fish carry diseases like sea lice, which then infect other free-swimming fish, destroying wild stocks.
The most absurd part of this equation is that fish farms grind up so many wild fish to feed to the farmed fish that more fish are destroyed than are created. It takes more than 2 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon. This math shows that fish farms exacerbate the very problem they were created to solve.
Toxic odor and air pollution
Smell something funny? It’s probably the animal farm down the road. CAFOs jam together huge numbers of large animals that produce lots of odor. These odors from animal gas, waste lagoons, and waste treatment methods combine to form pollution clouds that threaten human health and the surrounding environment. Sadly the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and most states have done little to regulate these emissions. Being vegan means being part of the solution instead of part of the problem — keep choosing that tofu scramble over the eggs Benedict!
Odors from all this waste can be stifling. The unbearable smells from large-scale animal agriculture cause a wide range of respiratory illnesses, fatigue, and depression. They also affect land values, leaving some homeowners stuck with property they can’t sell.
What if, like CAFOs, you had millions of pounds of waste to dispose of every year? One method these farms use is to simply spray the liquid and solid waste into the air like a volcanic fountain in hopes that the wind and weather will disperse it. Hardly. Instead, surrounding humans are being showered in fine particles of waste.
People who live near waste disposal fountains experience breathing problems, asthma, and bronchitis as a direct result of exposure to the high concentration of particulates in the air. Animal waste contains ammonia, which is released into the air from lagoons, spray-field applications, and barns.
As you can see, besides helping spare their four-legged friends from becoming dinner, vegans also score high humanitarian points for protecting their fellow two-legged friends from being negatively affected by these nasty practices, too!
Mountains of manure
Some CAFOs pile animal manure into areas where it can then be used or redistributed. The laws governing waste-use on the land are too gray to really protect the environment and humans living around these large-scale operations. These manure piles can cause massive fly outbreaks and attract coyotes and rats if dead animals are in the piles. When placed near residential homes, the air quality is of course intensely affected.
Disease is spread through animal waste, and all humans are in danger of getting sick, even if they don’t eat meat. Dairy cow operations have discharged manure onto piles of hay; that manure can then leach