David Kirby “Time Magazine” Interview On Factory Farm Problems
Written by Vegetarian Star on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 in Animal Issues, Authors, Journalists.
Animal Factory by David Kirby
Journalist David Kirby recalls the night he slept near a pig farm during his investigations of factory farms.
Kirby wasn’t able to fall asleep that night, as all he heard were pigs fighting, screaming and squealing at each other, a sound he described as “kids being tourtured.”
Those three years of experiences that led to his book, Animal Factory, are just a few that he shared in a recent Time magazine interview, “The Problem With Factory Farms.”
What Exactly is a Factory Farm?
We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that’s not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Basically it’s any farm that has 1,000 “animal units” or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They’re never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.
What happens to the wastes from factory farms?
The manure is liquefied. It gets flushed out into an open lagoon, where it is stored until farmers can use it on what few crops they do grow. There’s just so much of it, though. I’ve seen it sprayed into waterways and creeks. These “lagoons” filled with waste have been known to seep, leak, rupture, and overtop. This stuff is untreated, by the way. We would never allow big open cesspools of untreated human waste to just sit out on the ground near people’s homes and schools. And yet because it’s agriculture, the rules are different.
Read the entire interview with Kirby at Time.
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