Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO): A Case Study
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The first premise is known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO). These are operations concentrate to meet the demand of low cost high quantity amounts of food. For years, farms were thought of as the farmer that woke before the sun to tend to the livestock and the children would work the farm after school. This is no longer the case, these small-scale farms fight to complete with the larger industrial factory farms that have the capability to meet the economic and agricultural demand. CAFOs are becoming a battleground in the war over food and the environment in the United States. (Kolbe, 2013) The center of this war is Iowa with its rural population and interest in the agricultural industry. There is increasing concern over…show more content… Factory farms administer antibiotics whether the animals are sick or not. They justify the use of these antibiotics as a necessity to treat animals that are sick and prevent the other animals from getting sick. Diseases such as Bird Flu, H1N1, and different strains of influenza have been found to be resistant to antibiotics when transferred from animals that lack the antibodies needed to fight the diseases. According to the National Resource Defense Council, “The problem with feeding antibiotics to animals that are not sick is that it kills off weak bacteria and creates the perfect environment for antibiotic-resistant bacteria to multiply and thrive. When the meat industry routinely misuses and overuses antibiotics in this way, it threatens public health when essential drugs no longer work to treat infections.” (NRDC, n.d.) This explains the importance of continuing to ingest unnecessary antibiotics though factory farm animals prohibits our body’s natural ability to create antibodies that fight off bacterial infections on our own. This also makes the antibiotics that we may need for infections less effective or possibly not effective at all due to the tolerance we have built for