Modern food production is increasingly industrial and factory-like. Industrial characteristics include: raising livestock and poultry under confined indoor conditions, which concentrates manure and manure-related pollutants; excessive use of antibiotics; and intensive energy use – like petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. We focus on the negative impacts of industrialized agriculture on human health and the health of the broader environment.

CAFOs: Public Health Impacts
An estimated 54 percent of U.S. livestock are now concentrated on 5 percent of livestock farms, and the largest such farms keep getting larger. These industrial-scale, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or “factory farms,” now dominate U.S. livestock production. By definition a CAFO operation contains more than 1000 beef cattle, 2500 hogs or 100,000 boiler hens.

With the University of Iowa, we prepared a summary of the socioeconomic and public health impacts of factory farms. For health professionals, we have more detailed facts sheets describing health risks from manure-related air and water pollution, from antibiotic overuse, risks to farmers and CAFO workers.

CAFO meat factories in the U.S. generate an estimated 575 billion pounds of animal manure annually. Animal manure wastes include organic dust, molds, bacterial endotoxins and manure-generated gases of up to 400 separate volatile compounds, such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide – many of which are important airway irritants, allergens or respiratory hazards.

Antibiotics are fed routinely to livestock and poultry that are not sick, as artificial growth promoters, and to compensate for the confined, stressful and infection-inducing conditions. Our Antibiotic Resistance Project deals with the adverse impacts on humans. Our Eat Well Guide provides an online, searchable listing of producers, restaurants and markets offering meat and dairy products raised without routine antibiotics.

Injuries to CAFO workers, combined with rising evidence of harm to neighbors, led the American Public Health Association (APHA) in 2003 to call for a moratorium on new CAFO construction until better science could be marshaled to assure public health safety from these facilities.