Contentious Issues in Animal Production:
The Broader Context of Environmental and Social Concerns

Paul B. Thompson
Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Distinguished Professor
Department of Philosophy, Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1360

biography

Livestock producers and animal scientists have come in for an enormous amount of criticism in the last decade. Not all of these issues stress intensive production systems. Habitat and rainforest destruction, for example, has been widely characterized as the result of animal grazing. Although critics have long faulted intensive animal production for its impact on animal welfare, it has only been recently that environmental and social concerns have been added to the critique. Thirty years ago, large intensive production systems were comparatively rare. Typical livestock producers of the 1960's fed animals on a combination of forage and animal feeds grown on site. Animal production was widely distributed across all areas of the United States. Two factors have influenced the change. First, new efficiencies in housing, transportation and information technology have made it possible for producers to increase total farm profits by increasing animal numbers as much as a thousand fold over the 1960's. Second, these large units have tended to cluster near packing plants, feed supplies and in areas with favorable environmental regulations. Rural areas affected by clustering face not only large intensive farms with lots of animals but also a lot of such farms in the same locale. Rural activists have opposed intensification of production in poultry, hogs and finally dairy production on both social and environmental grounds. Activists argue that the presence of these facilities detracts from rural quality of life in many ways. Large industrial buildings are unaesthetic, and odors from these facilities are displeasing and possibly unhealthful. Rural areas lack infrastructure to support the vehicles and equipment used by intensive livestock producers, and to support the needs of the workforce that such operations tend to employ. Some argue that large livestock units are inimical to the community values often associated with farming throughout much of the United States. Large intensive livestock units concentrate many animals in the same place. Manure disposal becomes one of the most challenging problems. Lagoon systems have been developed to contain wastes, and systems to compost animal waste in an economically efficient manner are being explored. Critics note the impact of lagoons that have overflowed during flooding, and question whether wastes are being contained. Critics also argue that the clustering of animal production has disrupted the ecology of nitrogen cycling, an ecological impact that may not be fully evident for decades. Prior to 1980, animal production was essentially unregulated with respect to the effects noted by critics. Since 1980, groundwater regulations have been adapted to provide both state and federal regulations to address the basic problems of pollution from livestock manure. However, other ecological and social impacts continue to be unregulated. Critics have been frustrated in their attempts to enact policies that would address these issues. In addition, intensive producers tend to be associated with the use of controversial technologies such as sub-therapeutic animal feeds, hormones and genetically engineered products such as recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). These technologies are properly associated with public and animal health, and regulatory agencies exercise considerable control over their use. Nevertheless, the full range of issues has become blurred in the public's mind. Hormone, anti-biotic and genetic engineering issues have become identified as "environmental," as have social issues. Arguably, critics who have been frustrated by attempts to influence change on social or ecological grounds are being forced to frame their issues in terms of food safety. In excluding social and ecological considerations from the policy debate for livestock production (not to mention animal welfare), policy makers and livestock advocates have created a well of distrust among a subset of the consuming public. If experts speaking on social consequences lack credibility, it affects the credibility of experts speaking on other controversial issues as well. Ironically, the attempt to separate welfare issues from environmental and social impact may exacerbate public distrust. Paul B. Thompson Trained in philosophy, Paul B. Thompson has conducted research and teaching programs on controversial issues in the U.S. and global food systems for over twenty years. He has published books and essays on world hunger, the international acceptability of genetically engineered foods and crops, and on agrarianism and U.S. agricultural policy. He has been a frequent presenter at meetings on animal science, and served on the CAST task force on animal well-being. He was on the Texas A&M faculties of philosophy and agricultural economics for 16 years, and assumed the Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Chair of Applied Ethics at Purdue University in 1997. Thompson teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue and is Director of Purdue's Center for Animal Productivity and Well Being.