The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Contemporary Issues)
He is the author of numerous articles, essays, and books including Food Fight: Optimizing and Finding Alternatives to Wood. He served as the editor of CAFO: Dan lectures regularly on a variety of topics, from food and farming to environmental design and conservation. He has testified before Congress and spoken at numerous conferences, corporate and government offices, and college campuses, including Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale Graduate School of Forestry.
Dan is the president and co-founder of Watershed Media, a non-profit publishing house based in Healdsburg, California. He is the president and a co-founder of the Wild Farm Alliance, a national organization that works to promote agriculture systems that support and accommodate wild nature. Between and , Dan worked at Esprit International, where he was communications director for a team at the forefront of environmental product design.
The Shame of Concentrated Animal Feedlots
He received a B. He lives on a small homestead farm in Northern California. Roberto Carra Roberto Carra, Co-founder, vice-president and art director. An internationally renowned photographer, graphic designer and art director born in Parma, Italy, Roberto Carra's still-life images significantly influenced commercial communication throughout the s.
Carra began his collaborations with Dan Imhoff in early at the design studio of Esprit International, where they worked on a unique project to incorporate social and environmental issues into product design. Carra, a classically trained graphic artist, works in a broad range of visual communication media, but concentrates primarily on photography and graphic design. In addition to art directing an increasing number of broadly distributed environmental publications, his layouts and images have appeared in dozens of books and magazines, including Paper or Plastic: He lives and works in northern Italy.
Jon Harvey, Conservation activist. After retiring in as an engineer from the computer industry, Harvey turned his focus to conservation and sustainable land use planning.
Since that time, he has served on various government and non-government boards in the San Francisco Bay Area including a city Planning Commission, county Board of Zoning Adjustments, and a county land trust. Harvey is an active member of The Sierra Club both locally and at the national level where he chairs the club's National Agriculture Committee. CAFOs, which demand huge amounts of industrial livestock feed, most notably corn and soybeans, are commonly held responsible for fertiliser-induced nutrient runoff that flows down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico.
You can explore this website for a good visual explanation of what the dead zone is and how it has been caused.
While the US is the epicentre of this shame, it is becoming a global problem as evidenced by the dead zones identified worldwide, much of them linked to the livestock sector. But this is no monotonic anti-capitalistic-hippie-vegetarian-greenie crusade that can be easily thus labelled and demonised. What makes The CAFO Reader so convincing is the diversity of contributors writing from all walks of life and from all political persuasions. Conservative and former speechwriter for George W.
Contributors to The CAFO Reader form a chorus of moral outrage against a system that they view as unfair, unjust and unhealthy to animals, humans and, in fact, all living creatures. Recently, prominent British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah , a professor at Princeton University, even included industrial agriculture in a list of the top four things for which future generations will condemn us.
But does this mean that there are not benefits to industrial livestock farming? There must surely be rational reasons why the US, and increasingly other countries, are pursuing this model of production? One of the advantages of the vertical integration approach where one or related companies control all stages of the supply chain of CAFOs is that protein can be produced cheaply. Industry supporters argue that economies of scale lead to lower food prices which benefit low-income families in particular. Another argument is that CAFOs attract economic development and sustain rural communities through employment.
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Food can be cheaper, if it does not include the real cost to the environment and society of pollution, poor workplace conditions and health bills down the track; CAFOs decimate some rural communities while providing low paid jobs in others, often to easily-exploitable migrant workers.
So how could such a seemingly bad idea have taken hold in a society that supposedly has open discussion? The obvious political explanation is that industrial agricultural corporations wield disproportionate power in American legislative and executive bodies over farmers, environmentalists and animal rights activists. Yet despite the foothold that CAFOs have in the American political, economic and cultural landscape, the book provides faint hope that the intertwined human, animal and environmental tragedies can be addressed in a future era where cheap energy is not so abundant.
Progressive legislative changes like those made in the European Union look unlikely in the US for now.
For the meat or dairy-eating reader for now, the inevitable question arises, what should one do? Putting aside, for the moment, complex moral questions about eating meat in general, the advice is clear: Support local farmers who produce high-quality sustainably produced meat from healthy and happy animals.
- Why Factory Farming Is (Still) the Worst?
- In the dead zone.
- Different voices, one story.
- The CAFO reader : the tragedy of industrial animal factories - Waubonsee Community College.
- IA - Simon Brent.
More importantly, ask your family, friends, food providers and local restauranteurs where they get their meat from. In short, demand good quality meat, albeit not too much of it. The list of web resources at the back of the book is particularly useful.
The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Contemporary Issues) [Daniel Imhoff] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Editorial Reviews. Review. "The book is fantastic." -Martha Noble, National Sustainable The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories ( Contemporary Issues) - Kindle edition by Daniel Imhoff. Download it once and read it on.
It includes a glossary of all the key CAFO terms jargon that is perhaps an indication of how technical and removed from reality this production model is and contact information on around 50 further organisations involved in the campaign against CAFOs. For our international audience, the one disadvantage is that as it is a US-focused book, you will have to search beyond this book for organisations in your own countries although it could be positive that fewer organisations exist, given that other countries have not marched as far down the CAFO path. Those familiar with the perils of industrial farming will find it a rewarding, albeit repetitive read.
Those with only a passing interest in the subject will, like some of the contributors, have their views on the absolute and relative importance of CAFOs profoundly altered. Once I was told by an animal right activist that if I ever care about animals, the first things I should stop eating are eggs and dairy products because the way those animals are kept is absolutley hellish.