Free range pet food

If animals have what they need and are healthy, they are deemed to have good or high welfare. Animals in Factory Farms do not have what they need and are often unhealthy. They live in over-crowded conditions and denied many of their physical and behavioural needs. They’re kept permanently indoors where they’re caged, crammed or confined, living out their short lives in absolute misery. Pushed beyond their natural limitations, they are treated like production machines, rather than individual sentient beings. There are 500 million animals living in Factory Farms in Australia.

Intensification has had so severe an impact on meat quality that some scientists claim you’d have to eat four entire Factory-Farmed chickens to benefit from the same level of some nutrients you would have got from a single organic chicken in the 1970’s. They also contain nearly three times more fat and about a third less protein than 40 years ago, resulting in a worldwide epidemic of obesity-related diseases. Plus, over half of all antibiotics produced in the world are destined for food animals. These are used to boost growth or prevent disease – not to treat it. This creates the ideal conditions for bacteria to fine-tune their resistance and create powerful new bacteria that are being transmitted to people.

Seals eat salmon, so they naturally flock around Scottish fish farms where salmon are bred in Factory Farms (yes -fish are Factory Farmed). This is a problem for the fish farmers so the government has issued licenses for them to kill the seals – and this they do! Due to agricultural intensification, there are no longer enough bees to pollinate crops. As a result, farmers are forced to hire or rent them. At the same time every year 3,000 trucks drive across the US carrying 40 billion bees to California to pollinate almond trees. Think about the implications of that for just a moment.

Factory Farms are food factories in reverse. They waste it, not make it, and squander valuable cropland in the process.

Factory Farming uses vast amounts of land called “ghost acres”. An intensive chicken farm producing 150,000 chickens per annum will take up 892 square metres of ‘space’ but will need 90 hectares of arable land to produce the cereal (which they shouldn’t be eating in the first place) to feed those chickens. That land may be thousands of kilometres away from the farm, requiring substantial transportation, which in turn pollutes the environment. For every 100 calories of edible crops fed to livestock, we get back just 30 calories in the form of meat and milk, that’s a 70% loss. A third of the world’s cereal harvest is fed to industrial livestock. If it were used directly for human consumption it would feed about 3 billion people.

Every year an area of forest equivalent to half the UK is cleared, largely to grow animal feed and for cattle ranching. 200,000 hectares of Argentinean woodland is being lost each year to make way for soy (90% of which is used to feed Factory-Farmed animals). Globally, the livestock industry contributes 14.5 % of human-produced greenhouse gas emission – more than all our cars, planes and trains put together. Central Valley in America is home to 1.75 million dairy cows who generate more excrement than the entire population of the UK. This waste is channeled into vast lagoons attached to the farms where the poisons leach into the ground. One tonne of intensively produced US maize (a staple feed crop for intensive livestock) takes the equivalent of 1 barrel of oil to produce.

Fishmeal is one of the filthiest secrets of the Factory Farming industry – an environmental catastrophe that involves sucking million of tonnes of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens.

The process deprives milions of larger wild fish, birds and marine mammals of their natural prey. Drastically depleting stocks of important species, it also pumps vile fatty waste into ocean bays, creating ‘dead zones’, polluting the atmosphere around processing plants, causing widespread human health problems and diverts what could be a highly valuable source of nutrition for people to industrially farmed animals.