Factory Farm Presentation

Nick Cooney's presentation on factory farms gave insights into both the overlooked and often times unknown amount of animal cruelty that slides in the American law system. One of the more interesting as well as shocking portions of the presentation centered around the statistics on animal waste. Of course cruelty being one of the obvious negative effects from factory farms, it seems that this simple equation [animals + food = waste] is overlooked in many circumstances in attempts to end the practice or radicalize a new one. One specific fact concerning animal waste in factory farms is waste removal and the depiction of the world's largest dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, clearly caused by American negligence. A dead zone is an area of land inhabitable of any animal life, and the dead zone illustrated in the presentation was just a massive floating body of dead fish. Waste obviously needs to be monitored and disposed of properly, or even eradicated entirely! Radicalization of factory farms is needed.

Factory Farm Presentation

One thing that was both new and surprising to me about Nick Cooney's presentation was the environmental effects associated with factory farms. I had no idea that agriculture was a larger cause to global warming than automobile emissions. 20% of all greenhouse gas is directly related to agriculture, which is 40% more than all vehicles on the road. I was also unaware that 1 million tons of animal waste is dumped each day that contains harmful pollutants. This has led animal waste runoff to be the number one cause of water pollution in the United States. Another thing that really astonished me was the "dead zone." It was disgusting to see miles of dead marine life as a result of serious pollution.