#feedlot farming

[farmerstrend]

Focus on High Quality Beef: How Small-Scale Beef and Dairy Farmers Thrive in Urban Slums

Explore how Kenyan farmers are producing high quality beef by adopting modern feedlot practices and crossbreeding Bos taurus with traditional cattle breeds. Learn about the strategies behind producing high quality beef in Kenya, from selecting the right breeds to targeting premium markets for better profitability. Discover how feedlot farming and crossbreeding techniques are helping Kenyan…

[entegrasignaturestructures]

Top Construction Company Australia - Entegra Signature Structures

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[doomsayersunited]

A Decade Of Doom!

I started this blog ten years ago to compile the growing evidence that our planet would not longer be able to sustain human life by 2050, thanks to our continued, capitalist-fueled efforts to destroy all the systems we rely upon to sustain life. The first thing I put up here was this essay, on February 20, 2014. Now, a decade later, I thought it might be "fun" to look at what's changed: 1) Earth Overshoot Day

In 2014, "Earth Overshoot Day" (the day that humanity collectively consumes more resources from nature than it can regenerate over a year) was August 19th. Now, in 2024, Earth Overshoot Day is August 1st, 2.5 weeks earlier. At this rate and assuming things don't accelerate (even though they are likely to), Earth Overshoot Day will be around June 17th by 2050. 2) Biocapacity Biocapacity is the amount of resources contained on the planet required available to sustain life, measured by area. In 2014, I calculated that the planet had a biocapacity of 1.7 hectares per person. By dividing the total available biocapacity today in 2024 with the current global population as I did then, it now appears that there are just 1.5 hectares of planetary resources left per person to extract all the materials needed to sustain life, as well as all the area available to dispose of waste. That's a 12% loss over ten years. At that rate, we can expect to lose another 30% of biocapacity by 2050, going down to just 1.05 hectares per person by then, and that's assuming that the rate of biocapacity loss does not accelerate further and that the global population suddenly stops increasing after a run of non-stop increases spanning five centuries. Oh, also a reminder that the average human requires 2.7 hectares of land to sustain its current consumption habits/levels. So. 3) Individual Conservation To illustrate the futility of individual conservation at this point in the apocalypse, let me give you an example: If you were: a fully-vegan localvore living in a one-bedroom apartment with nine other people and using 100% renewably-generated electricity; who did not ever use motorized transportation of any kind or buy new clothing, furnishings, electronics, books, magazines, or newspapers and recycled all the waste you generated that was recyclable, you'd only require 1.4 hectares of biocapacity to sustain yourself. That is close to the kind of lifestyle extremism it would take to live sustainably. Deviate from that level of stoicism even slightly (say by living in a two-bedroom apartment with three other people instead of a one-bedroom apartment with nine other people and taking a single, four-hour roundtrip flight, once a year) and you're now consuming 1.6 hectares of biocapacity, which means you're using more resources than the world has available for you if everything was divided evenly among everybody. Of course, biocapacity, like all resources, are not divvied up evenly among everybody, which is why there are currently 114 different armed conflicts happening worldwide - the highest number of armed conflicts since 1946. 2023 was the most violent year in the last three decades. 4) Other Signs Of The End Times In my 2014 essay, I referenced the work of geologist Dr. Evan Fraser, who studies civilization collapse. In his book Empires of Food, Dr. Fraser noted common signs of a civilization about to collapse, which began to appear about two decades before it all goes completely to hell. Those signs were: -a rapidly-increasing and rapidly-urbanizing population We've added 700 million people to the planet since I began this blog in 2014. And where is everyone moving to?

-farmers increasingly specializing in just a small number of crops " "As farm ecosystems have been simplified, so too are the organisms that populate the farm.  A farm that specializes in a limited number of crops in short rotations does not, for example, look for plant varieties that do well in more complex rotations with intercropping.  A beef feedlot operation wants breeds that gain weight quickly on grain diets and does not want cattle breeds that digest well pasture grasses and thrive in all year outdoor environments on the range." The result? Recent estimates put the loss of global food diversity over the last 100 years at 75%. Over the 300,000 species of edible plants that exist, humans only consume about 200 of them in notable quantities, with 90% of crop plants not being grown commercially. -endemic soil erosion Climate change and the need to raise more crops have combined to increase the rate of agricultural soil erosion globally. Back in 2014, when I started blogging about the end of everything, the UN had already determined that there was only enough fertile soil left to plant 60 more annual crops. So, by 2074, we won't be able to grow food, full stop. This of course comes at a time when the global population continues to increase, and with it the need to grow more food. If projections are accurate, we will need to increase food production by 50% over the next three decades to feed everyone. -a dramatic increase in the cost of food and raw materials When I started this blog in 2014, I noted that 2011-2013 had seen the highest food prices on record. So what's happened since then?

It's important to point out here that the current food price spike started in 2020, so if Dr. Fraser's calculations are correct, the food system will collapse sometime around 2034, taking civilization with it. I closed my debut essay on this blog with a quote from the (now deceased) climate scientist Dr. James Lovelock, who advised a Guardian journalist to "enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan." That interview was published in 2008. We have four years left to enjoy.

[acti-veg]

Recently I've seen a lot of people argue that the water use of foods like beef are overstated because the majority of its water usage is comprised of green water and I don't really know how to respond

I’d need to see their source (and you should ask for that first) but only about 10% of beef cattle in the US are completely free ranging, and therefore mostly use green water. Most cattle are at least finished in feedlots where water use is intensive, if they’re raised in a factory setting their entire lives.

It also depends where you are. Most regions where cattle raising is most prominent don’t see enough rain for cattle to use mostly green water. Again I don’t know where these people are talking about, but in the US, beef uses 500 times its weight in blue water alone. That is five times the water intensity of even the thirstiest protein sources, with only almonds coming anywhere near that level.

None of this includes water used for anything other than drinking for cattle. What about the water raised to grow their feed crops? What about waste water run off and contamination, which is infamously high impact. I think I know the study they’re probably referring to here and it only factors in water produced and used by the cattle farmers themselves, not the rest of the supply chain, which is very limited.

It’s interesting that beef and leather advocates are so interested in this particular study, when they have ignored everything else that the Water Footprint Network have ever published. This is how it always goes with environmental science. You have a wide consensus gathered through decades of research, then you get one limited study that seems to contradict that consensus, so those with a vested interest leap on it, at the exclusion of all other established conclusions. This is the ‘one true study’ because I agree with its findings.

When you dig into it though, you figure out that the study doesn’t actually contradict anything, it is just looking at something quite limited, or their conclusion has been massively misunderstood or overstated, as in this case. If they are referring to the study I think they are, they are wildly misrepresenting what it was actually measuring.

If someone raised this to me, I’d start by asking them their source, then I’d ask some questions. This is from 14 years ago, do we think this is still accurate, considering the continued shift to intensive farming, and the fact that the conclusion you’re drawing from is contradicted by more recent studies? What was this study actually measuring? Just farm water use? Where in the world? Are most cattle raised 100% pasture? What about intensive farms and feedlots? Do you the rest of the supply chain might be where a lot of the blue water use is coming from? That should be enough to reveal the obvious weaknesses in drawing big conclusions from limited data sets.

[devoted1989]

Male calves are often considered entirely disposable by the dairy industry, though some farms are equipped to exploit them for other purposes. Regardless, no male calf will live beyond the age of 2 years before being killed - and in some cases, the end can come within the first few hours of life.

Male dairy calves can be sold for beef production to eventually be turned into food like hamburgers. They're sent to feedlots, which are penned-in facilities that can hold up to 150,000 cattle, where they are confined and fed grain diets so that they gain weight and can be slaughtered as quickly as possible.

Calves are separated from their mothers, fed an artificial milk replacement, and prevented from fully socializing or even touching another animal until they are sent to the slaughterhouse, which occurs when calves are 8-16 weeks old.

In the United Kingdom, where veal crates have long been outlawed due to their overt cruelty, it's often cheapest to simply shoot male calves shortly after their birth. In the UK, close to 60,000 male calves are disposed of in this way every year. This practice is also disturbingly common in the United States, and in Australia, where one survey revealed that around 600,000 male calves were killed on dairy farms every year when they are just a week old.

Image with kind permission from The Ethic Whisper.

@theethicwhisper

[gatheringbones]

[“While “essential workers” in the poultry industry were made to feel dirty, nonessential workers in fields like finance and computer engineering—the “people with laptops”—were sheltering in place, more distant from what transpired in industrial slaughterhouses than ever before.

Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from. And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system.

Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.

Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.

But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.

“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.

“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[lilithsaintcrow]

"Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within."

[jessicafurseth]

Reading List, First Summer Flush edition.

"I need to be alone for certain periods of time or I violate my own rhythm." - Lee Krasner

Image: @80svintagepulps

*

"Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future." We Need To Rewild The Internet [Maria Farrell, Robin Berjon, Noema]

"I [now] see what I wanted the therapist to tell me. I wanted permission. I wanted to be told I could stop trying. I wanted her to tell me I had done everything I could — that we had indeed put in the work and shouldn’t feel ashamed for throwing in the towel." [Scaachi Koul, The Cut]

The new science of death [Alex Blasdel, The Guardian]

In praise of the dumbphone revolution [Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker]

“Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.” The New Luddites are taking on AI [Brian Merchant, The Atlantic]

"Brand smells" and the people that make them [Aimee Levitt, The Guardian]

It's almost impossible to find actually interesting writing about polyamory - this is a rare exception [Brandy Jensen, The Yale Review]

"You probably have less effect on your kids than you think, with one major exception: Your love will make them happy." [Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic]

101 ways to make and maintain friendships [Madeleine Dore]

"Is what’s wrong with me what’s wrong with everyone else?" My anxiety[Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker]

"In my mind, dropping a ball or doing less invited intolerable risk. I worried that if I said no to a project, no one would ever want to work with me again, or if I stopped, I’d never be able to start again. But as OCD took up more and more of me, these actions and how I rationalized them became less and less clear, like if I didn’t read something 50 times, I’d be punished somehow, by something terrible happening in another area of my life. But because these behaviors came across as productive, pressure to just keep going mounted. Maybe this is just how ambition felt, I thought to myself. Maybe overworking is what I was good at, and what I was supposed to do." Could I Still Be Ambitious Without My OCD? [Rainesford Stauffer, The Cut]

"I am rattling my cage, grasping at the bars of my own constraints - my own slow motion - and trying to break my way out. There is so, so much to do in this life, so many ideas, so many ways I could help. I feel like I do so little. I am so slow. I get slower with age. My capacity does not match my desire." The Roaring [Katherine May]

Pie chart for bodies [@sophielucidojohnson on Instagram]

Pond life on Hampstead Heath in 1963 [The Guardian]

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

About five miles south of Broken Bow, in the heart of central Nebraska, thousands of cattle stand in feedlots at Adams Land & Cattle Co., a supplier of beef to the meat giant Tyson Foods.

From the air, the feedlots look dusty brown and packed with cows—not a vision of happy animals grazing on open pastureland, enriching the soil with carbon. But when the animals are slaughtered, processed and sent onward to consumers, labels on the final product can claim that they were raised in a “climate friendly” way.  

In late 2022, Tyson—one of the country’s “big four” meat packers—applied to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), seeking a “climate friendly” label for its Brazen Beef brand. The production of Brazen Beef, the label claims, achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Soon after, the USDA approved the label.

Immediately, environmental groups questioned the claim and petitioned the agency to stop using it, citing livestock’s significant greenhouse gas emissions and the growing pile of research that documents them. These groups and journalism outlets, including Inside Climate News, have asked the agency for the data it used to support its rubber-stamping of Tyson’s label but have essentially gotten nowhere.

“There are lots of misleading claims on food, but it’s hard to imagine a claim that’s more misleading than ‘climate friendly’ beef,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “It’s like putting a cancer-free label on a cigarette. There’s no worse food choice for the climate than beef.”

The USDA has since confirmed it is currently considering and has approved similar labels for more livestock companies, but would not say which ones.

On Wednesday, the EWG, a longtime watchdog of the USDA, published a new analysis, outlining its efforts over the last year to push the agency for more transparency, including asking it to provide the specific rationale for allowing Brazen Beef to carry the “climate friendly” label. Last year, the group filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking the data that Tyson supplied to the agency in support of its application, but received only a heavily redacted response. EWG also petitioned the agency to not allow climate friendly or low carbon claims on beef.

To earn the “climate friendly” label, Tyson requires ranchers to meet the criteria of its internal “Climate-Smart Beef” program, but EWG notes that the company fails to provide information about the practices that farmers are required to adopt or about which farmers participate in the program. The only farm it has publicly identified is the Adams company in Nebraska.

A USDA spokesperson told Inside Climate News it can only rely on a third-party verification company to substantiate a label claim and could not provide the data Tyson submitted for its review.  

[farmerstrend]

Boosting Kenya's Livestock Sector: How the Establishment of 450 Feedlots in ASALs Could Transform Meat Production

Learn how Kenya’s plan to establish 450 feedlots across ASAL counties is set to transform livestock production, addressing the country’s 60% feed deficit and boosting red meat supply. Discover how modern feedlot farming and sustainable rangeland management can help Kenya overcome feed shortages and improve livestock productivity for local and global markets. Explore Kenya’s livestock sector…

[entegrasignaturestructures]

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[anti-workshop]

I dunno if we're gonna make it, y'all. Rode the train for about a thousand miles to see family, about to ride it back. I've been very comfortable and coddled in my little bubble of leftist unionists back home. I've never seen this much of the imperial core before. Capitalism's empire is too fucking big. It's everywhere and I don't think we can actually stop it. I don't think most people actually want to. I used to think we just needed to organize, help each other, fight power. Maybe it's because I haven't slept, but it all looks too big and insurmountable now. We passed gigantic factories literally shooting plumes of flame into the sky, massive factory farms and feedlots with cow trailers for what seemed like forever, advertising and strip malls everywhere, and so many unhoused people sleeping rough and begging. And of course I'm complicit. Freeways, a million million cars and enormous vanity trucks and semis criss crossing the vast, wasted landscape of concrete and garbage. I dunno. It doesn't help that I'm headed home to a struggling shop and a looming slow season. I feel old and pretty unemployable if the co-op fails. Mutuals here are all struggling with the shitty job market, so it scares me. What do you think, y'all? Am I being too pessimistic? Is there hope? Sitting in the train station surrounded by strangers in really nice clothes, drinking expensive coffees and posing for photos, I feel utterly disconnected from them. Not a great feeling. Help?

[hylianengineer]

We've been talking in sociology class about the concepts of Food From Nowhere vs Food From Somewhere.

Obviously, all food comes from somewhere, but Food From Nowhere is the concept where the people eating the food are very intentionally distanced, physically and mentally, from those origins. The people who grew it, processed it, prepared it, the land it grew on, the agricultural methods (usually industrial, with lots of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the case of plants or feedlots in the case of meat/other animal products - industrial ag has a vested interested in being Food From Nowhere because it's not from somewhere nice). It's called distanciation - the creation of that distance between people and where the food they rely on comes from. And for industrial agriculture this is the GOAL. It's seen as a good thing, more efficient, for food to be part of this big complex supply chain where it's almost impossible to sort out where things come from or how they got there.

But it's kind of... empty, isn't it? Disconnected. Hollow. Food From Somewhere is now a pushback against this system, instead of the default. Food From Somewhere is intentionally connecting people to where food comes from, to the people and places and knowledge involved in making that food. It says that place MATTERS, that how our food gets to us matters, that we should and do care about what happens to people at the other end of that supply chain. We care if the farm workers are getting paid well. We care if the factory workers have safe working conditions. We care about the environmental and human impacts of the things we eat - those hidden costs that Food From Nowhere tries to hide from us. They're there and they're real and we're not looking away.

[acti-veg]

Someone recently posited that dismissing "harvesting grain kills mice tho" with statistics about how much grain is fed to livestock is too detached and akin to "repeating propaganda" because that's not true everywhere.

They used Australia as an example of a place that "doesn't do COFA" and has a huge problem with the astronomical numbers of rodents dying in grain harvest. They claim that over there there are way more animal lives lost to grain harvesting than slaughter and that grain consumption is as optional as meat consumption, but vegans "dismissing" those concerns are doing nothing to help. They also said something about some vegans thinking intentional slaughter is objectively worse than incidental death due to monoculture, but that "utilitarians are held to a stricter moral standard" and that the sheer number of deaths should make it worse.

I don't even know where to begin learning the details of the food systems in Australia. I know the statistics and some details globally and in my home country but I feel out of my depth with this conversation. Do you have any guidance you could share?

Well the first thing to recognise is that Australia absolutely does do intensive feeding operations, that’s a frankly bizarre claim. There is no way they could feed the number of animals they farm and kill without it. Here is a farming consultancy talking about it and advocating it, here is the department of agriculture acknowledging pigs, sheep and cattle in feedlots, here is meat and livestock Australia discussing it, here is RSPCA Australia discussing it.

It took me about five minutes to find all of these, so they can’t have done much honest research on this topic. The same thing is true of the ‘huge problems of astronomical numbers of animal lives lost to grain. Australia is currently experiencing an ‘epidemic’ of mice due to sustainable unseasonable weather and rainfall, every reference I could find on this topic was talking about how we can get rid of them - there doesn’t seem to be any such concern about mice being lost to grain harvesting.

In fact, the only source I could find talking about this (making the exact same points you’ve included here) was written by the Center For Consumer Freedom, a notorious animal agriculture lobbying group. It’s literal propaganda. The sole reference in that piece is a ‘study’ they link to, which is actually just an opinion piece in The Conversation. The only actual source there is a paper that actually supports the opposite conclusion.

“While the number of mice found in fields substantially decreased after harvest, their numbers substantially increased in the border regions. When it came to disappearances, a category that included both mouse deaths and migration out of the study area, there was no significant difference between the three habitats. The study concluded that changes in the number of field animals were “the consequences of movement and not of high[er] mortality in crops”.

So the factual basis of this argument is obviously deeply questionable, but you can still make the argument ‘ok we don’t know details but it’s highly likely some animals do die to provide plants for human consumption.’ This is undoubtedly true. However, it’s not just true of grain, it’s true of all the plants, it’s true of medicine, building materials, electronics - everything. If we stopped eating grain they’d be calling us hypocrites for not boycotting sprouts.

Furthermore, who is dismissing these problems? I don’t know any vegan who doesn’t want to improve plant agriculture, arguing for agriculture without animal inputs is a fundamental part of what veganism is about. Acknowledging the reality that whatever we eat will cause harm is not hypocrisy, nor is trying to reduce that harm by boycotting industries who directly and purposely exploit and kill billions of animals for profit.

Veganism is, as we all know, about doing whatever is possible and practicable to avoid animal exploitation. We have to eat something. Incidental vs purposeful deaths absolutely do matter, animals die as a result of grain harvesting, but they’re not exploited for grain. Those things are ethically very different, even if both are wrong. We can harvest crops without harming animals, that is what veganic farming is, there is no way to produce animal products without exploiting animals.

As for ‘utilitarians are held to a stricter moral standard,’ since when? If we feed more humans from harvesting grain than we kill in producing it, that’d be fine for most utilitarians. Interestingly, it’d also create the moral imperative to feed that grain to humans directly rather than farmed animals, since those farmed animals will suffer to produce less food and produce less good than would have been produced had that grain been fed to humans directly.

However, that data just does not exist. It is a hugely speculative assumption that more animals are killed to produce grain than to produce meat, there isn’t anything even resembling reliable statistics on that front. It is also an argument only relevant to utilitarians which… is fine for them, but for anyone is not a utilitarian the response is just… okay, so what? I’m not a utilitarian.

This is phrased as if veganism is dependent on utilitarianism as part of its ethical principles, which they may have gotten from someone like Singer but it’s a misunderstanding to suggest that is what vegsnism is, and arrogant to insist we should all hold ourselves to the same ‘strict standard’ as utilitarians, whatever the hell that means.

In conclusion, it’s a confused piece of pseudo-philosophy, likely sourced from corporate propaganda, which is based on assumptions, the misrepresentation of data and some odd assumptions about the ethical basis for veganism. You don’t need to learn anything about the food systems of Australia to debunk this argument, since evidently the person making it didn’t bother to learn about it themselves.

[devoted1989]

This week is farm animal awareness week

What’s wrong about factory farms?

While it might be tempting to believe the meat on your plate comes from an idyllic childhood version of a family farm the reality is very different.Today the vast majority of our meat and eggs come from large - scale operations, what are often called “factory farms.” In the U.S., more than 21 000 of these industrial operations raise billions of animals each year to satisfy our insatiable demand for cheap meat and eggs.

So just what is a factory farm? And why is the most common source for meat and dairy in this country so bad for animals? Factory farms were created on the assumption that the ‘factory’ concept could be applied to animal farming.

It refers to a method of breeding and raising farmed animals for food with the goal of maximizing production and minimizing costs.

This approach comes at the expense of animals, who are treated as commodities. To house such a large number of animals, these farms intensively confine them to small spaces such as cages or crates. They are unable to carry out their natural behaviours. Most spend their lives inside a shed - never to feel the sunlight or breathe fresh air. This is the reality for farmed animals used for meat, dairy and eggs.

On factory farms, animals live brief lives filled with cruelty and suffering. Pigs and chickens live as long as just a few weeks to several months. Dairy cows live longer, but spend most of their lives standing for hours on concrete floors.

Here are some of the most striking examples of animal suffering on factory farms:

1. Male calves are surplus to the dairy industry

About half of all calves born on dairy farms are killed simply because they are born male and can’t produce milk. These unwanted male calves are slaughtered for veal at anywhere from a couple of weeks to just under a year old.  Others are sold at auction - destined for feedlots, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

2. Cages the size of a piece of paper

In the U.S., around 80 percent of layer hens are still kept in battery cages typically sized anywhere from 67 to 86 square inches per bird or less than a standard sized sheet of printer paper.

3. Chickens used for meat can hardly stand

In 1920 the average chicken was slaughtered at 112 days old weighing just over 2 pounds. Fast forward and the average chicken is now slaughtered at around only 47 days but now weighing nearly 6 pounds. That rapid growth and extreme size can eventually cause chickens raised for meat, also called “broiler chickens,” to become unable to stand on their own. 

4. Mutilations are common on egg and pig farms

In the U.S., baby piglets are typically castrated and their tails are docked to prevent tail - biting outbreaks at just a few days old — without anesthesia. Overcrowding, forced - lighting and unnatural feeding causes a great deal of stress to factory chickens. These otherwise peaceful birds start attacking and hurting each other. To minimise this behaviour farmers routinely cut off the chicken’s beak. This practice is called ‘debeaking’. Debeaked birds suffer acute and chronic pain in their beaks, heads and faces.

5. Pregnant pigs are confined to small stalls

The standard housing system for pregnant pigs are gestation crates usually 7 ft by 2 ft. These crates provide only enough space for the animal to stand, sit and lay down but not enough room to turn around. About a week before she is due to give birth, the mother pig is moved to a farrowing crate that allows her piglets access for feeding, yet these are no bigger. The pork industry continues to insist farrowing crates are necessary to prevent mother pigs from crushing their piglets, despite the existence alternative systems. 

6. Male chicks are redundant to the egg industry

They are killed on the day they hatch. Worldwide, around 7 billion male chicks are culled each year in the egg industry.

If you want to reduce the amount of suffering caused by what’s on your plate, choose peace - choose vegan.

Sources: Sentient Media and Animal Equality.

Images with kind permission from Lindsay Leigh Lewis.

@lindsayleighart

[stellernorth]

sam going vegan at stanford. no more hunting people saving things has left him with a compulsion to Do Good and Reduce Harm in his day to day life, and after traveling the midwest constantly as a kid he has some idea of what beef feedlots at least look like. he decides one way to reduce harm is to stop supporting the killing of those animals.

so he stops eating beef. it's not like he's only eating fast food still and hamburgers are the only option anyway; he eats at the stanford dining hall. there's pumpkin soup and oatmeal and a salad bar and curry and plain pasta and fruit and fries.

then he thinks about it and decides to treat this decision like a little bit of a case. so he goes to the library and researches for himself which is a weird kind of not-exactly-nostalgia. and he learns about the factory farming industry and dairy production. and he doesn't do half-measures and he's trying to be committed to his choices and beliefs so he decides there in the library that he's vegan, starting from that moment.

socially, he expects to be the odd one out anyway, he's seen that way anyway, he knows it; he can feel it. how he's a little too alert; how his casual interactions with others aren't a practiced reflex. refusing some food just seems like another small thing in the long list of reasons he's unusual to the other students, even his friends.

anyway, jess, who's been vegetarian for awhile, likes that he's vegan. she eats vegan at their house, but will have some dairy if she's out somewhere. it bothers sam a little in the back of his mind but he doesn't want to control her. and he knows their belief systems aren't exactly aligned anyway; he's always scanning for monsters.

brady makes fun of him a little once or twice, playful, friendly. then after sophmore year's thanksgiving break he makes a few more comments that are a bit more cruel.

although dean made sure sam never was hungry for long as a kid, this new mentality that the food selection in many places is now limited for sam comes pretty easily. the sparse vegan options in the stanford dining hall are a way more plentiful spread than the options in one of the motel rooms he grew up in.

sam does get a weird sense of simultaneous satisfaction and guilt at seeing hamburgers like he'd share with his dad and dean and knowing, more and more as the months go on, that he's not the kind of person who eats them anymore. but he feels that way about a lot of things he does at stanford.

then years later, keeping to veganism as best he can, back in the family business (he keeps reminding himself, "as far as possible and practical"), he meets ruby. for the most part, he keeps his own personal definition of veganism and decides about eating things like honey on his own terms, rather than by what others seem to think. but he does remember dryly, as his mouth is metallic with ruby's blood, that human products are accepted as vegan if given consensually. later he thinks somehow maybe it's vegan for her to give it but not for him to take; maybe he is the animal harmed in the interaction.

time goes on and he's more wary than ever of being poisoned possesed altered he wants his body to be his own. this becomes another reason to be vegan, not consuming other beings into his body so it remains his.