The economics of this for the producer are pretty simple. If you restrict movement and provide cattle with little to do other than to eat then it is self evident that those cattle are going to fatten up more rapidly and much more cheaply than any cattle that are allowed to graze naturally. You can pack more animals onto less land and bulk them up using less feed over their lifetime.
The consequences for the animal and for wider society are appalling. Being packed together in confined spaces for hour after hour and week after week is effectively subjecting animals to a mass jail sentence. It treats the individual animal as if it was no better than a production unit and leaves it with a miserable life. For some parts of their lives in some facilities the animals can’t even turn around.
Cramming animals together increases health risks and not just to animals. In the States the overcrowded conditions lead to the routine use of antibiotics as preventatives rather than as cures. The result is that around 80% of the antibiotics used in the US every year are given to animals. The rate at which humans are developing new antibiotics is massively slower than the rate at which infections are becoming immune to the old ones. The low dose residues that remain in the meat are almost perfectly designed to help resistant strains of bacteria to develop. So we are wasting one of our most critical defence mechanisms against some terrible illnesses on boosting profit margins of a few mega-farmers.
Then there is the problem of sewage disposal. Living Earth reported recently that the manure production in a single farm in the US can range between 2,800 tonnes and 1.6 million tonnes a year. They got the figures from the US agriculture department before Trump started to censor inconvenient information. A million tonnes of manure is a lot to deal with. It has to go somewhere and the most frequent choice is to spread it on the land to fertilize crops. Which might be fine in the right doses in the right places. In the high doses that are frequently dumped on the land because of these animal factories the fertiliser simply washes off and pollutes waterways with nitrogen. A lot of nitrogen in a stream or a river produces an algal bloom that can be toxic and even relatively small amounts can reduce oxygen content and reduce water quality and biodiversity. Put simply it is getting rid of massive amounts of sewage this way is exceptionally harmful.
Yet none of those negative costs to society are encountered by the individual producer. Any individual farm that moves to this method of production is going to see a rapid increase in its profits. It is also going to be able to sell its products cheaper than its rivals and attract extra business. Therein lies the real threat of these farms. Once a few of them get established all responsible farmers who want their animals to actually have some kind of life find the price they receive for their hard work is no longer high enough to be able to carry on. They either have to adopt the same ruthless approach to their animals as the factory farmers or go out of business. The inevitable outcome is that the bad practices drive out the good and there is a race to the bottom.
At the moment UK farmers have some protection against some of the worst excesses of such methods. Routinely soaking animals in some of the chemicals and antibiotics that quickly become necessary in crowded conditions is much more heavily controlled in the UK than in the US. The reason is partly down to the strength of the small farm lobby in the EU and partly down to strong environmental and food standards campaigns in the UK. Poor quality food and mistreatment of animals is a very big issue in the UK.
All of which is one of the many reasons why the UK needs to be careful about signing a free trade deal with the US. One of the main motivations for the US to enter into a free trade deal with the UK would be to enable it to sell more of its farmers produce onto the UK market – and of course to export it to the rest of the EU if the borders are porous and badly policed. Any such deal would come with an international court of arbitration making sure that neither country imposed ‘restrictive trade practices’ on the other. For restrictive practices read decent standards. Any UK animal welfare standard that is higher than that applied in the US would be challenged in an international court and overturned.
So if you value UK food standards or UK animal welfare standards then watch out for post Brexit trade deals. And if you value UK sovereignty you might also want to watch out for that. Brexiteers have told us that with one bound we’ll be free from all the evils of the EU. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before any of them raise the same concerns about the much more serious loss of sovereignty that will happen the day we sign a new free trade deal with the US.
Cheap imported food comes at a price. Animal welfare, human health and UK sovereignty.