Today, behind worldwide massive food production lies industrial farming, driving food niches from fast food chains to instant microwavable food. Industrial farming’s main features are single-crop farms and animal coops. Hailed in the past as an industrial miracle, today an increasing chorus of farming experts, researchers and policy makers think the industrial agriculture sector is at a stalemate, with a misguided approach to generating food.

Unsustainable Method

Commercial agriculture’s impact on public health and the environment has made it an unsustainable method to grow our food for the long term. A more sustainable farming system is found on science-based techniques.

Monoculture Concept

A foundation of commercial food production, monoculture’s concept is to grow single crops intensively year in and year out. In the United States, these are grown:

• Corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and grain;
• Beef, pork, chicken and other meats.

Present Day Farm Factories

Here, farm animals have these conditions:

1. Packed by the thousands into:

    

   • Filthy, windowless sheds limited to wire cages;
   • Other cruel caging systems.

    

2. These creatures won’t ever do the following:

    

   • Raise their young;
   • Graze the soil;
   • Do anything that’s natural and vital to them.

    

3. Most will not have these before loading onto trucks for slaughter:

    

   The sun lying on their backs;

   Breathe outdoors.

    

4. No more eco-friendly pastures and idyllic barnyard moments.
5. When they’ve grown big enough, they are then:

    

   • Loaded onto trucks and moved over miles to the slaughterhouse;
   • Through all weather extremes;
   • Typically, without food or water.

    

6. After surviving this nightmarish journey, they suffer these, often still conscious:

    

   • Throats slit;
   • Lowered to defeathering or hair removal tanks’ scalding water.

 
Still, this cruelty extends to plants on a less obvious scale.
 

Chemical Inputs and Atmospheric Effects

 
Monoculture farming depends on chemical inputs like:
 

• Synthetic manure – to replenish wasted nutrition due to annually growing the same plant in the same location;

 

• Pesticide sprays – to get rid of certain weeds and unwanted pests which find monoculture fields highly appealing.

 
Regardless of what techniques are utilised, agriculture has some effect on the atmosphere. But industrial agriculture damages the following on an unparalleled scale:

 

• Soil
• Water
• The weather

 

Intensive monoculture wastes away soil leaving it susceptible to erosion. Contaminated runoffs and waste chemical fertilizers do these:
 

• Increase pollutants;
• Make zero-oxygen “dead zones” in major rivers.

 
Herbicides and pesticides harm wildlife, posing human health problems. In and near monoculture fields, bio-diversity suffers as wild bird populations and other animals decline.