Yorkshire is a particularly beautiful county, with its wonderful scenic countryside, stunning national parks and quaint coastal towns. But the growing number of factory farms appearing each year is an increasing threat to all of this, as well as to human health, wildlife, the local environment, and ultimately, the planet.
Sadly, in rural Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone there are already over 300 mega farms, known for their intensive, factory farming practices. These farms rear a significant number of animals, thus ranking these counties with the among the highest numbers of intensely farmed animals in the country.
As our planet is being devastated by climate change, our health is simultaneously deteriorating as respiratory diseases become a leading cause of death – England having the highest mortality rate for lung disease in Europe. But few people could ever imagine that highly-intensive farming practices are contributing to both of these problems. Even without these issues, our countryside is a precious inheritance and I believe that our councillors and town planning committees should prioritise prevent the expansion of mega farms, and possibly even repurpose existing factory farms that are damaging our land and wildlife.
My story today is not about the cruelty and suffering the animals go through when they are bred and raised on factory farms, although some days I find it hard to get those images out of my head. Today, I’m all about the adverse impact these farms are having on our lives and future as they stealthily grow in number. By very briefly looking at just three of the problems they cause, see if you agree that factory farming is a danger to our health and our planet.
Polluting our waterways
Water pollution is a massive problem. The River Ouse, a major river in Yorkshire, is identified as being at risk from manure pollution from factory farms. UK livestock farming produces an estimated 33,450 tonnes of manure every day.
In 2023, Fish Legal won a landmark victory in the High Court that the government was not meeting its legal duty to clean up Costa Beck, near Pickering, North Yorkshire. Fish Legal had been fighting to save the former trout stream that is now plagued by sewage pollution and agricultural run-off from fish farms. Remember also, that our wildlife drinks from these waterways, so they too are consuming polluted water.
Antibiotic resistance
This is my (and many others’) pet fear: imagine a little splinter in your finger going septic in a world where antibiotics have become useless in the fight against infection. You’d be a goner! It would be like going back to the Dark Ages. The World Health Organization says: “Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.” By 2050, 10 million people could die every year from antibiotic resistant infections, outstripping cancer as a leading cause of death.
The more that antibiotics are used in humans oranimals, the more the bacteria develop resistance. And because animals are often kept in insanitary conditions, they need regular antibiotics to ‘stave off’ disease. If one animal gets sick, farmers may treat all their livestock with the same antibiotic.
The bacteria that develop antibiotic resistance in farm animals can easily pass this on to humans via direct contact, or at any point along the food chain including through food-borne illness from poor hygiene and sanitation; or via environmental contamination, environmental reservoir or gene transfer (examples of this include soil (where Clostridium tetani lives and causes tetanus), water (where Legionella pneumophila lives and causes Legionnaire’s disease), and even objects in the environment.
Here in the UK, many stridently object to the chlorination of chicken by the American agricultural industry. In the USA, chlorine is used to wash the hen after she is killed, to counteract any disease that she may have picked up in her unnatural and overcrowded dwelling. But in the UK, we over-vaccinate before slaughter for the same reason. Our vaccination of chickens and supplementation of feed additives like prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics, and bacteriophages are currently being used to mitigate the salmonella load in poultry. If you eat chicken from a factory farm you cannot avoid consuming all these additives.
Air pollution and lung problems
When I was young, asthma was a much rarer condition. In the 1950s, I knew of only one person who suffered (she was my cousin). But now in the UK, 7.2 million people have asthma. This is about 8 in every 100 people.
Dutch scientists summarising the health effects of livestock-related air pollution concluded that: “Higher ammonia concentrations in the air are associated with acute deficits in lung function in adults and asthmatic children living in livestock-dense areas. Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease living near livestock farms report more symptoms and are more often diagnosed with an exacerbation than patients living further away from farms.” Also it was found that “patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) living near livestock farms report more symptoms and are more often diagnosed with an exacerbation than patients living further away from farms”.
So just a very quick humane mention for animals: imagine how unpleasant it is for a chicken living with thousands of other chickens, cooped up in one smelly barn, with the rancid air stinging their eyes and lungs. Here are some of the nasties released by factory farms: nitrous oxide, hydrogen sulphide, endotoxins, high concentrations of ammonia and particulate matter.
Scratching the surface of the problem
There is so much more I’d love to tell you about factory farms, and I haven’t even given a mention to climate change, animal cruelty, improving food security and very importantly, pandemic risk. But, if you have been inspired by this information – and I hope you have – please contact your MP and push for further discussions into the phasing out of factory farms. And maybe share our booklet with them too. You can read Humane Being’s fact-filled e-booklet, ‘A future without factory farming’ in full, which also offers suggestions for further reading. And you are so welcome to contact us if you would like to know more about how factory farming really is a danger to our health and our planet.
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