#farm

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#factory-farming #meat #science #veganism #vegetarianism

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. ↗

— George Orwell

#animals #man #satirical #man

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#factory-farming #feedlots #manure #pollution #nature

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#environment #factory-farming #abuse

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#farming #food

...and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life. ↗

— George Orwell

#george-orwell #life

Escherichia colia O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#cattle #factory-farming #feedlots #nature

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#along #cleaning #deciding #exam #failed

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#because #easily #entitled #farmers #farming

We need to end permanently the tax that punishes American values of savings and investment and of building small businesses and family farms and ranches. ↗

— Kit Bond

#american values #building #businesses #end #family