Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
location, location, location
in addition to greater health risks, what else may you expect if a factory farm
moves into your community?
lower property values, family income,
retail sales, quality of life, and farm
worker wages
higher rates of poverty, tension, anger,
depression, fatigue, and confusion
it should be no surprise, then, that in rural iowa, which leads the united states
in both egg and pig production, a survey found that
the development of a
factory farm was equally or less desirable than the construction of prisons,
solid-waste landfills, slaughter plants, and sewage treatment plants.
North Carolina and Iowa are frequently cited examples of geo-
graphic concentration. Two decades ago, North Carolina produced
2.6 million pigs per year. It now produces 10 million pigs and gen-
erates around 19 million tons of pig waste annually. In our state
of Iowa, in just two decades, we've seen an 84 percent decrease
in the number of farms that raise pigs in the state, while the aver-
age number of pigs per farm escalated from 250 to 1,430, nearly a
sixfold increase.
What does this mean for the communities where these farms are
located? How do factory farms assault communities and quality of
life in rural America?
As discussed extensively in chapters 2 and 5, factory farms con-
tribute to land, water, and air pollution and have also been impli-
cated in climate change. Aside from these forms of environmental
