Usual suspects blast factory livestock farms

Two cliches come to mind, when I consider the Pew Trust and Bloomberg School of Public Health study on factory farming of livestock, whose results were just released: 1. closing the barn door after the horse is already out, and 2. recycling old bromides that already have been disproven.

Factory farming, particularly in chickens and hogs, and the feedlot finishing of cattle, are a reality and aren't going anywhere any time soon. Where were these people back in the 1950s, when it was still possible to do something about it?

The fact is, the idyllic small family farmer with a few chickens and a pig or two out in the backyard, is a thing of the past. If you think the pollution is bad from a factory chicken or pig farm, where all the odor and runoff is concentrated and can be easily treated, is bad, what was it like when it was spread all over the place, in little drops and dribbles here and there, with too little volume for any sensible treatment program?

The world's food requirements can no longer be met by pre-1950s idealism, by small farmers turning out a few head of livestock a year, none of them uniform, none of them fed the same way or raised the same way. The vast quantities of food the world requires today, which will only grow as the decades unfold before us, cannot be met with outmoded, old-fashioned methods, no matter how fond we are of nostalgically hanging on to them.

For centuries, man has dumped manure on his fields each year before the new crop was planted, and the natural leaching of the soil broke down all the impurities and no one worried about pollution. It was a food cycle, in which animals ate plants, and their waste went back into the soil to raise more plants. It worked fine.

The idealism of those not intimately familiar with, or involved in, agriculture never ceases to amaze. It is great to sit on a high hill and contemplate how things ought to be. It is entirely a different thing to actually do--to be forced to make a living growing food for a hungry world, the most practical way that it can be accomplished, on a scale that meets the need at hand.

Once again, the academic and the practical have collided, with murky results at best.