#industrial animal agriculture

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Recent data analysis conducted by a human rights advocacy organization found that nearly a dozen international finance institutions directed over $3 billion to animal agriculture in 2023. The majority of those funds — upwards of $2.27 billion — came from development banks and went towards projects that support factory farming, a practice that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions as well as biodiversity loss. 

The researchers behind the analysis are calling on the development banks — which include the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, part of the World Bank — to scrutinize the climate and environmental impacts of the projects they fund, especially in light of the World Bank’s climate pledges.

The analysis comes from the International Accountability Project, which reviewed disclosure documents from 15 development banks and the Green Climate Fund, established in 2010 at COP16 to support climate action in developing countries. Researchers found that 10 of those development banks, as well as the Green Climate Fund, financed projects directly supporting animal agriculture. The data serves as the basis for a new white paper from Stop Financing Factory Farming, or S3F, a coalition of advocacy groups that seeks to block development banks from funding agribusiness, released last month. 

The International Accountability Project, which advocates for human and environmental rights, hopes that its findings will pressure international financial institutions like the World Bank to see the contradiction in financing industrial animal agriculture projects while also promising to help reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture accounts for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions, so much so that research has suggested limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is not possible without changing how we grow food and what we eat. Within the agricultural sector, livestock production is the main source of greenhouse emissions — as ruminants like cows and sheep release methane into the atmosphere whenever they burp. 

[thatveganwhiterose]

Tumblr, I promise you that animal agriculture does not need you licking their boots.

[peripateticavian]

H5N1 bird flu outbreak response could be hampered by USDA, FDA turf war

[homeofhousechickens]

Things I like

-Most birds are active and in good spirits

-no beak mutilation

-bedding in the indoor area looks clean and cozy and good for dust batheing

-plenty of natural safe enrichment. You don't want very tall perches for battery hens they could break a bone.

-Communal roosting

-cockerels used for meat rather than culled at a day old

-use of solar for energy

-when the birdflu isn't a threat they have outdoor pastures the birds can access anytime during foraging time.

-natural daylight

Things I don't like

-birds seem dirty due to communal roosting situation, they are getting pooped on basically. Changing the layout to a almost look like stairs would probably help.

-some birds still show evidence of feather picking, obviously not as bad as American battery farms but always room for improvement. They didn't have as much evidence of this when they could go outside but unfortunately they can't right now for their own safety.

-their feed regime might contribute to the feather picking behavior and poor feather quality if they are truly only using byproducts in their feed. Wheat,soy, and corn byproducts are harder on a chickens gut microbiome than better ingredients.

Things to note-

-Leghorns are more prone to neurotic behaviors than other breeds (this can happen when you take a flighty land race and turn it into a production animal) if they had a different production breed they might see less feather picking. I think they chose pure production leghorns on purpose for sustainability reasons so can't fault them for that.

Their feathers will likely always look a bit shit. White feathers are structurally weaker than pigmented ones and that goes pretty much for all birds.

The feathers you see on the ground are just molted not from plucking of anything like that.

What do you think fellow chicken keepers?

[fjordfolk]

people really be out there like “I wonder what this breed called a Shetland sheepdog was used for historically? alas it’s impossible to tell, we may never know” 🤦‍♀️

There is, believe it or not, some actual controversy regarding the breed origins and most of it (imo) stems from many people's mental image of a working sheepdog is a border collie, and not quite grasping that border collies are freaks and the way that we now work border collies didn't exist prior to the development of the border collie, and in some parts the way we keep SHEEP didn't exist prior to the border collie. There's also been some debate around old letters written by non-shetlanders after visiting the isles or talking to locals and having mmm interesting ideas of how people handled sheep over there. This leads to statements like:

Sheltie legs are too short to outrun sheep

They're also too small to grab the sheep and hold it (don't get me started)

A sheltie could never take sheep through a- (name specific type of herding trial)

Maybe they were actually placed with flocks on peripheral islands to keep watch for birds??

Shelties never existed and were made up in the late 1800s just for shetlanders to make money off of selling cute puppies to gullible tourists

There was an original sheepdog on Shetland but it was a much bigger dog (see reasons above) and the current sheltie was made up in the late 1800s, by breeding cavaliers to pomeranians and maybe a collie, just for shetlanders to sell puppies to tourists

...and so, clearly, they can't have been sheepdogs and we have No Clue what they were actually for (except scamming foreigners)

Meanwhile we know that traditional shepherding on Shetland relied on roaming sheep, keeping them off the property rather than on it (because that's where your crops are) and you'd only be rounding up your sheep a couple of times a year, and that island-bred shelties were smaller and spitzier type than even the current UK type.

[vegandude72]

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.

Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters and coincided with attempts by FAO leadership to muzzle their work.

The allegations date back to the years after 2006, when some of the officials who spoke exclusively to the Guardian on condition of anonymity wrote Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS), a landmark report that pushed farm emissions on to the climate agenda for the first time. LLS included the first tally of the meat and dairy sector’s ecological cost, attributing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock, mostly cattle. It shocked an industry that had long seen the FAO as a reliable ally – and spurred an internal clampdown by FAO hierarchy, according to the officials.

“The lobbyists obviously managed to influence things,” one ex-official said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism.”

Serving and former FAO experts said that between 2006 and 2019, management made numerous attempts to suppress investigations into the cow/climate change connection. Top officials rewrote and diluted key passages in another report on the same topic, “buried” another paper critical of big agriculture, excluded critical officials from meetings and summits, and briefed against their work.

"There was substantial pressure internally and there were consequences for permanent staff who worked on this, in terms of their careers. It wasn’t really a healthy environment to work in,” said another ex-official.

Scientists also expressed concern about the way the FAO’s estimate of livestock’s overall contribution to emissions is continuing to fall. The 18% number that was published in 2006 was revised downwards to 14.5% in a follow-up paper, Tackling Climate Change Emissions in 2013. It is currently being assessed at about 11.2% based on a new “Gleam 3.0” model.

But many scientists plot farm emissions on a very different trajectory. One recent study concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from animal products made up 20% of the global total and a 2021 study found that the figure should be between 16.5% and 28.1%.

[sidewalkchemistry]

The whole world is obsessed today with cutting down plastic straw consumption. But the reality of it is, that if you take all the straws around the world, and you put them all in the ocean, that is still less than a tenth of a percent (0.1%) of the plastic that goes into the ocean every year. In fact, more than 40% of all the plastic that goes into the ocean is plastic fishing nets. - Vikas Garg in Let Us Be Heroes - The True Cost of Our Food Choices (2018)

[wanderingandfound]

After having a lot of trouble falling asleep, then a lot of trouble staying asleep, I have woken up earlier than I would like with a sore throat and a worryingly precarious mental state for first thing in the morning.

[plethoraworldatlas]

Critics of factory farming renewed demands for U.S. policy reforms on Tuesday in response to new federal data on the nation's agricultural activity, which is released every five years.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) put out its report about the 1.9 million farms and ranches that collectively spanned more than 880 million acres as of 2022—a loss of nearly 142,000 operations and over 20 million acres since 2017. The document features state tallies and other details including inventory and values for crops and livestock.

"The USDA's new data show that without policy changes, factory farms will continue to get bigger and bigger, wreaking havoc on public health, the environment, and the climate," warned Environmental Working Group (EWG) Midwest director Anne Schechinger.

...

Food & Water Watch (FWW), which also analyzed the new government data, found that "there are currently 1.7 billion animals raised on U.S. factory farms every year; an increase of 6% since 2017, 47% more than roughly 20 years ago in 2002.

"The group emphasized that "as factory farms take over, the number of small dairies raising animals outside the factory farm system plummeted, with barely one-third as many today compared to 20 years ago."

[watermelinoe]

and see how dialogue isn't possible when you block someone who doesn't even disagree with your movement, just with certain premises behind it? see how it doesn't allow for practicing harm reduction or nuance? when i'm struggling to get myself to eat anything at all, which can last for days or weeks at a time, what i do eat needs to count. sorry, i'm eating the cheese stick because it's the only thing that sounds palatable and it gives me seven grams of protein. sorry there's no room for women with eating disorders and deficiencies because "eat less animal products" isn't good enough when your ideology values non-human animals more than women's health. but of course the burden falls on women to make ourselves tired and weak while the male-led industry overproduces and overconsumes. at least you stayed true to your logically inconsistent, female-socialized emotion-based beliefs and allowed for zero compromise! there's no way your airtight ethical philosophy has blatant logical flaws at the slightest nudge of critical thought, the people who point out fallacies are just heartless!

[makerscockandballs]

if you think vegan food is just shit like quinoa and imported "exotic" foods you dont know jackshit about veganism outside of movie stereotypes and animal agriculture industry propaganda (which is a real thing, big surprise. capitalism is full of industry propaganda) and should inform yourself outside of that. read a fucking cookbook at this point.

[woodruff]

:(

[falinscloaca]

my sympathy for vegans getting a flood of “DEBATE MEEEE” comments versus my frustration that their explanations and reasoning for vegan-ness still being fucking shit

[gmos]

half of my tumblr "recommended" is the tips of discourse icebergs drifting past me

[sidewalkchemistry]

As children, it is actually our nature to care and to have empathy towards each other, but also towards animals. But, somehow, along the way we are conditioned not to care. - Rebecca Cappelli in Let Us Be Heroes - The True Cost of Our Food Choices (2018)