influential global cities are located disproportionately in certain parts of the world.

To dispose of the waste, producers typically spread or spray it onto nearby fields, often in excess of what crops can use. Liquid manure from an Iowa hog facility being pumped onto cropland.Ī single IFAP operation may produce as much waste as a small city, 11 concentrated over a small area of land. See also Ecological and Urban Agriculture, Food and Climate Change and Food Safety. 5 However, IFAP incurs heavy costs to public health and ecosystems that are not reflected in the sales price of these products.īecause IFAP is by far the dominant model of meat, milk, and egg production, it is the focus of this section. IFAP produces an enormous amount of food with minimal human labor, and has been credited with lowering the price of meat, eggs, and milk. They are also heavily dependent on specially formulated animal feeds, pharmaceutical drugs, fossil fuels, and other inputs to the production system. 3,4 IFAP facilities are designed to maximize the amount of meat, milk, or eggs from a particular breed of animal in the shortest amount of time and at the lowest cost.

2 Beef and dairy cattle spend at least part of their lives in similarly large-scale indoor or outdoor feeding operations.

A single IFAP facility, for example, typically houses over 5,000 hogs, or over 100,000 laying hens. In IFAP, poultry and swine are confined in densely stocked indoor facilities.

2 The vast majority of these animals are raised in a system called industrial food animal production, or IFAP (pronounced “eye-fap”). Over the course of a typical year, over 9 billion are slaughtered. population of poultry, swine, cattle, and other food-producing animals numbered over 2 billion-outnumbering U.S. Although conditions like these still exist, the industrialization of agriculture radically transformed how most animals are raised for food.Īt the end of 2012, the U.S. 1 Where do most of these animal products come from, and why does it matter?įor most of agriculture’s history, farm animals were raised on diversified farms, where they generally had access to the outdoors and ample space to move about. The average American consumes more meat, milk, and eggs than nearly any other citizen of the world. Photo credit: Jeff Vanuga, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. 2 Slats in the floor of this operation allow the animals’ waste to drop into a pit below the facility. are produced in facilities that confine over 5,000 animals at a given time.

Influential global cities are located disproportionately in certain parts of the world.