Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat is a 2014 non-fiction
book by Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott. It surveys the effects of
industrial livestock production and industrial fish farming around the world.
The book is the result of Lymbery's investigations for which he travelled the
world over three years. Isabel Oakeshott is the political editor of The Sunday
Times, Philip Lymbery is CEO of Compassion in World Farming. The book was
published by Bloomsbury.
The thesis examined in the book is that globalised
production chains of industrialised agricultural systems negatively affect
farmed animals, human health, the countryside, rivers and oceans, biodiversity
in rainforests and many of the world's poorest people. The authors seek to shed
light on the conditions in intensive agriculture which, according to them,
often differ from the image that the industry wants to sell to the public.
Intensification in animal farming goes along with a growing demand of cropland
to grow animal feed – factory farming is thus not a means to save space.
They argue consequently that to feed the world population
factory farming is not the solution but a threat, not least since more than a
third of the world's arable harvests are being used to supply farmed animals.
According to the book the consumer price of cheap meat does not include the
overall costs of industrial meat production.
The reader follows Lymbery's journey from his start in
California's Central Valley. There he finds dairies where 10,000 cows can be
milked at once. He travels to enormous piggeries in China and visits the
fishmeal industry of Peru, which converts millions of tonnes of anchovies to
fishmeal for supplying the livestock industry with feed. In Taiwan he visits a
farm (labelled "organic") where 300,000 laying hens are being starved
and held in batteries. A visit is paid to the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, US
where he finds the marine ecosystem impacted by waste from the poultry
industry. The author talks to a community in Mexico in an area dominated by pig
sheds. There he documents a lake of effluent and air and water pollution, and
discusses the outbreak of swine flu.
One chapter of Farmageddon is dedicated to the question
"What happened to the vet?" Lymbery says that veterinarians work in
an industry with an "inbuild flaw". He states that veterinarians
often comply with the industrialization of animals, for example in the
prophylactic use of antibiotics which are applied in the mass production of
animals, eggs and milk instead of demanding a different (pasture-based)
agricultural system. According to Lymbery veterinarians should not support
systems that are "inherently bad for animal welfare", which allegedly
is the case in "mass production of broiler chickens, caged production of
eggs, the large-scale permanent housing of dairy cows (so-called mega dairies)
and highly intensive pig production where mothering pigs are kept in
confinement where they can't turn around for weeks at a time".
In order to prevent Farmageddon the authors come up with
suggestions for consumers, policy makers and farmers: Consumers should eat less
meat. Fish should be fed to people rather than converted into fishmeal. Animals
should be fed with grass and animal farming should be a pasture-based system.
These changes would save resources by reducing the competition of humans and
animals for food and land.
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