Actually, no, it’s not new. The macro farms began to settle in the decade of the sixties. We have been consuming products of animal origin that come from macro-farms for many years. It is not new. But for you to understand what has happened recently and why they are now being talked about, I have to explain to you, first, what they are.
These are very intensive production systems. That means there is a high density of animals on each of these farms, from thousands in the case of pigs and cattle, to tens of thousands in the case of poultry. In addition, they are highly genetically selected animals so that they give a very high production. This leads to some environmental problems such as soil contamination by faeces and air pollution by the emission of CO₂, ammonia and, in the case of cows, also methane.
Ammonia comes from the feces and urine of animals; The CO₂ from their breath and the methane are expelled by ruminants through their mouths, not through farts, as is often said, due to the fermentation of food in their rumen, which is one of the parts of the digestive system of ruminants.
The problem is that these gases are polluting and negatively affect climate change. And at the same time, the enormous amount of feces produced by macro-farms is harmful to the soil because there are not enough plants that take advantage of it as nutrients.
The advantage of mega farms and what has made them more and more widespread is that they produce very cheap food. Currently, in developed countries we have meat, eggs and milk at very affordable prices, when fifty years ago meat was only for Sundays. It has become so cheap that an anomaly has occurred: mineral water is more expensive than milk. And any vegetable milk is always more expensive than cow’s milk.
This is an aberration because vegetables have a very short energy cycle, the sun’s energy goes to the plant and with the nutrients from the earth, it is transformed into organic matter. While meat and milk have to go through an animal, which means that energy expenditure is much higher. And despite that, a kilo of chicken is cheaper than a kilo of tomatoes.
And why have mega-farms become a problem now when they seemed fine to us before? The reason is that these intensive systems were used in very few countries, only in the industrialized ones. In the rest of the countries, a much more vegetarian diet was still eaten because meat and animal products were a luxury.
But when large countries like China, India, South Africa or Brazil, all of them highly populated, have started consuming more products of animal origin produced in the same way, with intensive systems, it has become unsustainable. Not only because of the contamination I was telling you about before, but all these animals are so productive because in addition to having been genetically selected to grow a lot and give a lot of milk and eggs, their diet is based almost exclusively on corn and soybeans.
There is no room on Earth to produce as much corn and soybean as would be needed by the macro-farms that would produce food of animal origin to feed all the countries as we have been feeding ourselves in the industrialized world until now. The system cannot be maintained if the diet in which animal products prevail, which we now follow by 20% of the world’s population, expands to 60% of the inhabitants of the Earth. In other words, when the macro farms were few, they did not pose the problems that they pose now that they are spreading throughout the rest of the world.
Maria Theresa Paramio She is a professor in the Department of Animal and Food Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Question submitted by Luis Fernando
Coordination and drafting: victory bull
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