[MUSIC] Hi, everyone. This is Keeve Nachman, I'm one of the course co-instructors. And I'm going to kick off the concept of food animal production, which is the dominant production model for animal protein in the United States. And we'll talk a little bit later today about how that model may or may not be expanding overseas. So anyways, let's jump right in. Let me give you a quick overview of what you're going to hear about from me today. I'm going to talk extensively about this model of industrial food animal production. Then, I'll give you two case studies of specific practices within this dominant model. The first is the use of antibiotics in producing food animals, and the second is the use of arsenic based drugs in producing those same animals. I'll close with a little teaser about how our food animal production model may be being adopted elsewhere. So, let's talk about industrial food animal production. Let's give an overview of what we're going to talk about in this first part of the lecture. First, I'll quite obviously go over what food animal production is. I'll talk about how farms that produce animals have changed over the past half century. I will talk extensively about animal waste, I bet you're very excited about that. I'll then transition onto how animal production systems and how we manage waste from those systems impacts people and the environment. And I'll close this section with challenges in conducting research about animal production. Okay. So, going back ten years, when I first got involved in this field, my idea of how animals were raised to produce meat for me looked a lot like this picture. A nice bucolic scene with a farmer hand-feeding a field of chickens, not too many chickens. And what I realized as I delved into the existing literature is that my perception as to how food animals were produced is about as old as this picture. I apologize for being dramatic going into the remainder of the lecture. But, I want to start off by showing a couple of pictures that give you a visual perspective of how things really are today in the industrial food animal production system. So, this first picture is a picture of a mid-sized swine production facility. In general, larger swine facilities today can house as many as 5,000 hogs in a single facility at a given time. And many of these operations go well into the tens of thousands of hogs on site at any given point. This next picture is a picture of an industrial cattle operation. To be considered a large cattle operation, these would typically house greater than a thousand cows at a given time. But some of the larger operations can be as large as 90,000 cows at a given time. This next image is of an industrial poultry production facility. The larger facilities routinely exceed a 125,000 chickens on site at a given time. Some of these operations, can have in the millions of chickens at any given point. I wanted to share some terminology with you that's useful for the rest of the lecture and may help familiarize you with some of what you'll see in the literature. So, the environmental protection agency has terms it uses to talk about animal operations. So, they define an animal feeding operation as a facility that stables animals for at least 45 days per year. And that same site typically is not used to grow crops or any other forage during a growing season for the majority of the year. They have a size-based classification for animal feeding operations, called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and that is an CAFO, that has greater then a thousand animal units at a given time. And an animal unit is equivalent to a thousand live pounds of animal. So, a CAFO has to have over a million of live weight of animals at any given time. Public health researchers who look at food animal production tend to be a little less than satisfied with the term CAFO to describe the types of operations we're interested in. Largely because there's no magic to the size theshhold that EPA has assigned in this context. But instead, we think it's important to think about operations in terms of a number of other characteristics that relate to public health. So, we've listed a few of them here. The first, is that these operations intend to produce animals at a very quick rate and at high numbers often. The animals are usually produced in one geographic location, we'll talk a little about geographic concentration in a moment. The animals are produced under very specified conditions, often contractually so that control the way animals are fed. The composition of that feed, the lighting of the operation and many other facets of production. The intent of industrial food animal production is to produce a very, very uniform consumer product for consistency in the market place for consumers. and animals produced under industrial food animal methods are typically produced at, at very, very minimal profit margins. So, changes to industrial practices can have big impacts on prices. So, now we're going to talk a little bit about how animal production has really dramatically shifted over the past 50 years. And this is the figure showing data from the USDA Census of Agriculture that documents changes in the volume of animal products produced over time. And what you can see is that between 1960 and about 2007, we're producing far more animal products in terms of magnitude than we've ever produced. The largest increases are in the poundage of poultry. Poultry has become a much more popular product. And just to clarify this figure because it isn't exactly clear, the top line or the purple is turkey and the green line is chicken, or broiler chicken, meat chicken. And you can see across all classes of animal products we've seen substantial increases since the 1960's. And so, not only are we producing more meat than have in the past, but the way we're doing it has changed pretty dramatically. So, this figure is really interesting. This takes data from USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service and shows changes in the number of farms producing broilers chickens and just opposes it with changes to the number of chickens produced per operation over time. And what you can see is the number of farms drops off pretty incredibly and at the same time you see an inverse strand with the number of chickens being produced per farm. So, we're producing far more animals and far fewer locations. This next figure is the same idea but in the hog industry, as we'll see. So, if you have hog farms, and a much larger number of hogs per farm over time. This is another slide that was taken from a paper we published a few years ago that shows changes in the geography of the broiler industry. So, the top of the figure is from 1949, and it maps poultry processing plants. And each dot in that part of the figure represents a plant that processes 50,000 or more chickens each year. Now, a newer map, in 2007, is a map of chicken production. And we've actually had to change the metric by which we measure the industry. These are no longer processing plants. But each dot here represents an annual production of a million or more chickens. The number of processing plants is far fewer. But what's interesting to note between these two figures, and you've probably already done this yourself, is that the production has concentrated in the south eastern part of the United States, something that we jokingly call the broiler belt. But, this geographic concentration of the industry poses some public health issues that we'll talk about in a moment. So, in addition to the changes in the numbers of animals and locations of animals that we're producing, the industry has also shifted in its economic structure as well. So, the majority of the poultry and swine industries are now vertically integrated systems. This is about 90% of poultry and swine as of about a decade ago. This vertical integration system places much of the control in a group of corporations called integrators. and the easiest way to know what an integrator is to think of some of the brand names that you might find on meat products when you go to the grocery store. And these integrators typically own the animals, control the inputs. I mentioned before controlled conditions that are specified by contract. These are the people who hold the contracts. and one important piece of controlling the inputs is that they have control over what goes into animal feed, and we're going to talk about why that may be an issue in a little bit. And most importantly, is that they own the processing plants. So, one big issue here is that if you don't have a contract with an integrator, you may not have access to a processing plant. There are so few processing plants now that without these contracts, you may not have a way to bring your animals to market. So, even if you do have an independent farm, that can be a real challenge. The growers are the people who are under contract with the integrators. They do not own the birds, sometimes they self identify as babysitters. But one important detail is that they own the animal waste and they're responsible for managing the animal waste after the animals are raised and sold back to the integrators. So, I have the word farmers here in quotes because it's very common for the industry to use the word farmer to refer to a variety of different players in the game. It's common to see integrators refer to themselves as farmers, when in fact those corporations are typically not the ones responsible for raising the birds themselves despite owning them. The growers are likely the ones who would most closely jive with the public perception of what a farmer is. Although, in many cases, their accusations of those growers may not be farmers as well I don't know if that's always totally fair. Okay, just wanted to close this piece with some statatistics on the volume of animals produced in the US and the inventory at any given time. The challenge here in presenting both of these is that inventory can be difficult to assess, especially for animals like broiler chickens where the lifespan of the animal prior to slaughter is only about 42 days. And I'm not going to go through each statistic here, but I think the important message is that we're producing in excess of 9 billion food animals per year. So, we're producing nearly 9.1 billion animals per year for human consumption. And in a moment, we're going to come back and talk about why producing that many animals may pose concerns for public health and environmental quality.
