Sunday, December 19, 2010

Geography and factory farms.

I found an awesome website recently that does a really nice job of showing people how the numbers of animals in factory farms has changed over the past 15 years or so:

http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/

Texas, Iowa and California lead the race towards unhealthy food, animal abuse, and just general nastiness in the 1, 2 and 3 positions in terms of absolute numbers.

However, California counties holds 3 of the top 4 spots for sheer numbers overall on a county level.



The website is packed full of interesting factoids such as:

-there are 4 factory farmed broilers (chickens) for every American alive today.
-US beef feedlot operations added ~1100 cattle overall per day to their operations between 2002 and 2007.
- in Maryland, the nearly 31 million broiler chickens, mostly concentrated on the Eastern Shore, produce as much untreated manure as the sewage from 10 million people, nearly twice the state’s population.

The great thing about this website is you can actually zoom in on your own home state (or neighboring states if you live in a bi-, tri- or quad-state area like we do) and find where the concentrations of feedlot/confinement operations are concentrated in your back yard!

Check it out! Nice work!

K


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