Meatonomics (21 page)

As these examples show, placing too much emphasis on food's local origin can easily cause one to overlook LCA components that have a greater effect on the environment. Such results led the New Zealand study's authors to criticize the practice of equating food miles with carbon footprint—a practice they say “ignores the full energy and carbon emissions from production.”
³⁸
The moral here isn't that we should completely ignore food miles in measuring food's ecological impact; we just need to exercise more discretion in how much importance we give those miles. As Texas State University professor James McWilliams observes in his book
Just Food:

Sure, it feels righteously green to buy a shiny apple at the local farmers' market. But the savvy consumer must ask the inconvenient questions. If the environment is dry, how much water had to be used to grow that apple? If it's winter and the climate is cold, was the apple grown in an energy-hogging hothouse? Is the local fish I'm ordering being hunted to extinction? . . . Distance, in other words, is just a minor factor to consider. In overemphasizing food miles, we have missed important
opportunities to think more critically about the fuller complexities of food production.
³⁹

When we settle for options like Polyface, we take our eye off the ball. Seeming panaceas like local, organic, or eco-rotated food just can't overcome the biggest challenge facing American animal food production, and the one that threatens to defeat any attempt at sustainability: our extraordinary level of consumption. With annual per-person consumption at 200 pounds of meat and 620 pounds of dairy, for a national total of 250 billion pounds of animal products, we simply lack the resources, technology, and market incentives to raise these products sustainably. The machinery of industrial farming is bursting at the seams, spilling animal emissions and production by-products across all environmental media—air, water, and land. The result is that after paying for animal foods at the cash register, Americans incur another $37 billion each year in hidden ecological costs.

Nailing down precise numbers is tough when calculating environmental costs, because not everything in nature can be monetized. As ecologists Peter Miller and William Rees note, “Most economic analyses are money- and market-based and are thus thoroughly abstracted from nature.”
⁴⁰
Money just isn't the answer to every question. After all, how do we measure the economic cost of a species becoming extinct? What's the cash value of the disappointment you might feel if fecal bacteria closed your favorite lake? There's no controversy-free way to count the losses, but that doesn't mean they aren't significant.

Another challenge lies in the difficulty of determining causality when agriculture disturbs complex ecosystems. “Colony Collapse Disorder,” the mysterious disappearance of millions of US honeybees, is a serious problem for US agriculture. That's because directly or indirectly, one-third of the food we eat depends on honeybee pollination—giving those pollination services an estimated value of $215 billion worldwide.
⁴¹
In 2008, there were just 2.4 million honeybee colonies in the United States, down from 5.9 million in 1945.
⁴²
These massive
colony losses have already raised honey costs and beehive rental costs, hurt some beekeepers' incomes, put others out of business, and threatened to disrupt the production of crops worth $15 billion.
⁴³

One theory for the bees' disappearance is that with vast amounts of US cropland now dedicated to monocrops like corn and soybeans, foraging bees cannot find sufficient nutritional or seasonal variety to meet their needs. Another is that the prevalent use of pesticides on crops is killing the little pollinators because, when exposed to toxins, bees become disoriented and die within twenty-four hours. As these likely causes stem directly from US consumption of meat and dairy, this consumption, at minimum, seems a contributing cause in the bees' disappearance. But just how much, we don't know yet.

Industrial agricultural practices disrupt ecosystems in many ways, including some we're just beginning to understand. In certain cases it may be premature to measure and allocate costs. But we've got to start somewhere. Peer-reviewed research permits an estimate of about $37 billion in environmental costs associated with producing animal foods, although gaps in the research, and items that current research can't measure, suggest the true figure may be significantly higher. While those costs may be elusive (at least at present), there are some amounts we
can
measure.

Did the Dust Bowl ever really end? Many of the same farming activities—like overgrazing and overplanting—that led to American farmers losing millions of tons of topsoil in the 1930s persist today. In fact, soil loss is one of the biggest problems farmers currently face, affecting nine out of ten acres of American cropland.
⁴⁴
Erosion robs dirt of organic nutrients like nitrogen that help plants grow, and it leaves the remaining soil unable to absorb water at proper levels. As a result, eroded farmland can become less productive by 25 percent or more.
⁴⁵
Shifting soils also damage nearby ecosystems, buildings, and infrastructure. Livestock production, according to the UN, is to blame for 55 percent of US erosion.
⁴⁶
Applying this percentage to cost data from a study published in
Science
shows that the externalized costs
of livestock-related erosion, including things like flood damage and siltation of reservoirs, total about $15.4 billion yearly.
⁴⁷
(Note that this figure does not include erosion's significant
internalized
costs—those absorbed by producers—which are caused by land's lower productivity. Adding those would nearly triple the total.)

A 2009 study by World Bank scientists Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang blames livestock production for an amazing
51 percent
of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
⁴⁸
One reason the study's estimate is so high is the researchers went beyond previous assessments to count emissions that even the Kyoto Protocol doesn't measure, like farm animal respiration. This astonishing study might just cast the 2012 drought, which many believe was a manifestation of global warming, in a new light as largely the product of factory farming. As Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona said of 2012's long dry spell, “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level.”
⁴⁹

Perhaps even more astonishing is that if humanity wants to avert the worst effects of climate change, we can do so relatively cheaply. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-formed group of thousands of scientists from 195 countries, estimates we can mitigate climate change by spending less than 0.12 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP) yearly.
⁵⁰
In other words, about one-tenth of 1 percent of annual GDP—for a cumulative total by 2030 of less than 3 percent of one year's GDP. Using 2011 US GDP of $15.1 trillion, applying the 51 percent multiplier introduced by Goodland and Anhang, and adjusting for inflation, the yearly climate mitigation cost related to animal foods would be about $9.4 billion.
⁵¹

We might call this “trickle-off economics,” not to be confused with the trickle-down theory the Reagan administration promoted. Pesticides contain poison. Fertilizers contain nutrients. Both cause
harmful damage to ecosystems and drinking water when they trickle off into our lakes, streams, and groundwater. Pesticides, for example, are linked to bird losses, groundwater contamination, and toxin resistance in pests. Fertilizer in surface water, for its part, causes drops in real estate values, decreased recreational water use, and higher spending to save threatened species. Because more than half of US cropland is dedicated to growing livestock feed, the damage from pesticide and fertilizer runoff is closely linked to these crops. The annual social cost of trickle-off economics? About $7.5 billion.
⁵²

A factory farm produces two things: meat and manure. The meat goes off-site to be slaughtered and packaged. The manure stays behind in lagoons where it slowly cooks, releasing ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide into the air. Needless to say, it's best not to live downwind from a factory farm, in the danger area where noxious fumes drift like a long, smelly tail. A study by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found that hydrogen sulfide levels could violate state air standards as far as five miles downwind from a CAFO, and ammonia levels could violate standards a mile and a half downwind.
⁵³
For those living in the noxious zone, a shift in wind direction can mean a daily change in health and attitude. (Talk about watching weather forecasts
very
carefully.) As one Illinois resident told a local newspaper, “I could be out in the garden, and . . . have to run for the house if the wind switches direction. . . . One night the smell was so bad, I said to my wife, ‘I don't even know if it's safe to go to sleep.’”
⁵⁴

Life in this zone can also mean significantly depressed property values. Studies find that real estate values drop significantly with proximity to factory farms.
⁵⁵
All told, the total annual reduction in US property values caused by CAFOs is about $2.5 billion.
⁵⁶

The 10 billion land animals raised yearly in the United States generate 1 trillion pounds of manure, enough toxic waste to fill New York's
Giants Stadium two hundred fifty times.
⁵⁷
Because it has nowhere else to go, this manure sits—sometimes permanently—in lagoons around the country. From there, either through catastrophic breaks or persistent leaks, a little of it inevitably finds its way into our rivers, lakes, oceans, and groundwater. Like an overflowing toilet, this massive volume of poisonous, high-maintenance waste is literally overwhelming our capacity to handle it. The EPA, for example, has found that groundwater sources in one-third of US states are contaminated with animal waste.
⁵⁸
The annual hidden cost of the animal waste problem, as measured by the expense to repair leaky lagoons and spread stored manure over cropland, is $2.4 billion.
⁵⁹

CHART 7.1
Annual Externalized Environmental Costs of US Animal Agriculture (in billions of dollars)

Chart 7.1
provides an overview of animal farming's yearly ecological costs in the United States. Compare these costs—$37 billion—with the $8 billion annual budget of the US Environmental Protection Agency, which is tasked with regulating CAFOs' environmental impacts. Does the EPA, which must also police dozens of other
industries, have the necessary resources to monitor CAFOs? Perhaps more to the point, does the agency have the resolve to do so?

It was mid-December 2008, just one month before Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president. George W. Bush's appointee, Stephen L. Johnson, was still administrator of the EPA—but he didn't have long. Johnson's tenure had been controversial: among other things, he tried to block seventeen states from reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving cars' fuel economy. This time, his agency was considering a hotly debated proposal that would exempt CAFOs from federal emissions reporting requirements. A few months earlier, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) delivered a report to Congress with the lengthy but unambiguous title, “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations: EPA Needs More Information and a Clearly Defined Strategy to Protect Air and Water Quality from Pollutants of Concern.” The report found the EPA's efforts to collect data on CAFO emissions were inadequate, and as a result, the agency had failed to properly assess how “air and water pollution from CAFOs may be impairing human health and the environment.”
⁶⁰

Nevertheless, on December 18, 2008, a lame-duck Johnson stunned environmental groups by adopting a rule exempting CAFOs from most reporting requirements for hazardous emissions. One immediate effect was that despite the EPA's own earlier finding that groundwater sources in one-third of US states were contaminated with animal waste, the agency began collecting
less data
on CAFO emissions instead of more as advised by the GAO. It's as if your kid was getting F's at school and you told the principal the best solution is to stop sending report cards home. Another result was that environmental groups brought a lawsuit challenging the rule. The court remanded the rule to the EPA for reconsideration and possible revision. Nevertheless, the eleventh-hour exemption adopted in 2008 remains in effect as of this writing.

It's a recurring theme in this book—regulatory policy heavily coated with industry-friendly flavor. The EPA is tasked with enforcing
green laws like the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund). While the agency is technically responsible for requiring CAFOs to follow these and other laws, the EPA's rulemaking practices have yielded enough industry-friendly loopholes to shock even some federal lawmakers.