Factory Farms Effects On The Environment

You wake up. It is impossible to tell if it is the morning or night because you are constantly shrouded in all-consuming darkness. You try to move, but you are unable to; you are so tightly packed in with your peers that the space you inhabit is only barely large enough to fit your squished body. Your parched throat yearns for water, but your limited range of motion makes it nearly impossible to obtain even a drop. Sadly, this is a reality for the 99% of the farm animals raised in the United States. Factory farms should be shut down because of their various negative effects towards not only the animals, but towards our health and the environment.
However, there is a popular belief that factory farms are necessary to our society. America is …show more content…
Factory farming is a big contributor to global warming, as over 37% of the methane produced in the world is made by factory farming. Furthermore, according to One Green Planet, the fossil fuels used in these factory farms secretes 90 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Alternatively, the use of these commercial farms plays a big part in deforestation. One Green Planet, an organization that has been fighting for the environment, explains that 260 million acres of forest have been cleared to make room for the crop fields used to feed animals. Factory farms are eliminating our source of oxygen, and in turn creating more and more fuels that will contaminate our world. Additionally, the use of factory farms have had hazardous effects on our water, as industrial farming uses 70% of our fresh water. The EPA, the United States Environmental Agency, estimates that 75% of our water pollution issues have been caused by these farms. Furthermore, in the United States, the animals in these farms generate around one million tons of manure each day. As 75% of the antibiotics ingested by the animal ends up in the manure and urine, the manure can be dangerous to the environment. This manure is stored in one place, piled up in fields “as large as football fields” (Farm …show more content…
Factory farms put billions of innocent animals through pain and suffering every year to produce meat products around the world. Not only do the animals endure an extreme amount of pain, but factory farms are also destroying the environment by increasing the amount of pollutants to our air, water, and land, and is also destroying our personal health by increasing the chance of diseases such as E.coli. By allowing this to happen, we as a society have become oblivious to what really happens in the production of food. *question/statement that relates to