I hope everyone is off to a good week!  I just finished up my fantasy football lineup and I’m looking forward to kicking all of your asses this week.  Since I focused on the impact of factory farming on chickens and turkeys last week, this week I’ll focus on the amount of waste that is produced by raising animals in a factory farmed environment.  Some of these numbers are amazing and really illustrate the fact that raising animals this way not only affects the animals but our environment and the health of the people that live near these animal factories.  

I apologize for this being pretty weak this week.  Next week I’ll bring a little more to the table.  However, here is a cool website that has a bunch of great veg recipes and allows people to rate them (which is a must). http://allrecipes.com/recipes/vegetarian/main.aspx

-   According to the EPA, the ‘s 376,000 livestock confinement operations generate approximately 128 billion pounds (64,000,000 tons) of manure  each year. 

-   A dairy cow can produce 23 times as much waste as the average human.

-   The EPA reports that the waste generated by hogs, chicken, and cattle has polluted over 35,000 miles of river and has contaminated groundwater in 17 states.

-   In Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin, feedlot pollution was responsible for 74% of the 216 fish kills induced by agricultural practices between 1990 and 2000, thereby causing more fish kills than municipal and industrial pollution combined.

-   Since heavy metals are added to animal feed in order to promote growth, manure can contain trace amounts of metals such as arsenic, copper, selenium, and zinc.

-    The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that in 1995, 37% of all nitrogen and 65% of all phosphorus inputs to watersheds in the central were derived from manure.

-    North Carolina‘s 7,000,000 factory-raised hogs create four times as much waste – stored in reeking, open cesspools – as the state’s 6.5 million people. The Delmarva Peninsula‘s 600 million chickens produce 400,000 tons of manure a year.

-   Pfiesteria, a microscopic organism that feeds off the phosphorus and nitrogen found in manure, is a lethal toxin harmful to both humans and fish. In 1991 alone, one billion fish were killed by pfiesteria in the Neuse River in North Carolina.

-   In 1995, 25 million gallons of animal waste spilled from an eight-acre lagoon into North Carolina‘s New River, killing 10 million fish and closing 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shell fishing.

-   About 20% of the ‘s on-farm excess manure nitrogen (and about 23% of its excess manure phosphorus) is produced in counties that have insufficient cropland for the manure to be applied at agronomic rates.

-   Manure from Factory Farms can also degrade soil quality; since heavy metals are added to animal feed in order to promote growth, manure can contain trace amounts of metals such as arsenic, copper, selenium, and zinc. The high concentration of manure in Factory Farms lagoons enable heavy metals to accumulate in the surrounding environment, contaminating soil, poisoning wildlife, and polluting groundwater.

Delicious.

Author Information -  During his spare time Eric writes for and maintains wannaveg.com. For his day job he works for an electronics company in San Diego, CA. Eric has been a vegetarian for about 10 years and believes that going 'green' and reducing meat consumption go hand-in-hand.