Do we really know what we’re eating? Let’s discuss about that. Today we’re going to talk about industrial and extensive farms: how do we treat the animals that gives us food? First of all, some distinctions.
Animals intended for human consumption or for food production (milk, eggs) can be reared in several ways: there are industrial, extensive and biological/traditional farms.
Extensive breeding
In this system, livestock are free to graze in open environments and it is a self-sufficient system that does not need to move materials to function, therefore it brings the environmental impact generated to a minimum. The density of animals is low so that animals can grow naturally, healthily, without the massive need for medicines to survive. Livestock dejections are scattered directly on the ground favoring their natural fertilization.
It cannot, of course, compete in terms of the quantity of production with the other systems and would certainly not be able to meet the abnormal demand for meat and milk currently registered.
Intensive farming
Animals are grown in confined environments and the density of livestock is quite high: they are not allowed full freedom of movement; unnatural conditions generate stress in them and the onset of diseases involving the regular use of medicines for the maintenance of the state of health.
Breeding plants often form very dense colonies and for this reason they are hardly sustainable cars, generating a strong environmental pollution.
Nutrition is controlled and calibrated to increase the animal’s meat yield: to further accelerate the growth process, growth hormones and estrogen are used in some countries, as well as high-protein feed that contains slaughter waste from other animals, which have already generated negative consequences for both humans and animals (one in all “mad cow disease”).
Meat for slaughter: farms – Part 1
