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Industrial farms where animals are kept tightly confined present a serious and growing threat to humans, animals and the environment, a private commission reported Tuesday.
The facilities can be harmful not only to workers and neighbors but also to others because of pollution and the potential for the spread of disease, according to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production report.
“One of the most serious unintended consequences of industrial food animal production is the growing public health threat of these types of facilities,” the report said. “There is increasing urgency to chart a new course” in agriculture, which has been shifting over the last 50 years from family farms to large livestock meat producers.
The report came out of a 2½-year project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit philanthropic organization, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It includes a number of recommendations, such as banning use of antibiotics to promote growth and stricter regulations on handling of millions of tons of animal waste.
But Garrett Hawkins, Missouri Farm Bureau national affairs director, said the report went too far and would force animal production to be shipped overseas.
“Essentially you are talking about driving production to Mexico, Brazil and other countries,” said Hawkins. “It makes me question how can American family farmers and ranchers compete in that type of environment if those regulations that they call for go into effect? The question becomes how does that impact food security in this country?”
Hawkins added that a global economy would make it even more difficult for producers to compete under new requirements.
John Carlin, a former Kansas governor who was chairman of the 15-member commission, said the recommendations attempted to strike a balance.
“The American public has a growing concern about public health and their food,” said Carlin, who now is executive-in-residence and teaches political science at Kansas State University. “We are not saying we can go back to the good old days of just small family farms.”
Another commission member was Dan Glickman, former U.S. secretary of agriculture and congressman from Kansas and now the chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America.
The commission studied industrial livestock facilities that housed dairy cows, hogs, chickens and other livestock. It addressed four broad areas of concerns about them, including their impact on:
•Public health and the use of nontherapy antimicrobials for animal growth.
•Humans and the environment because of massive amounts of animal waste.
•Animals and whether their confinement is humane.
•Rural life and how that has changed because of a lack of competition in farming.
Commission members said Tuesday that they hoped Congress and state and local governments would study the report and implement at least some of its recommendations.
Large-scale meat production already is controversial in Missouri, where the industry has grown rapidly. Kansas also has industrial farms, but they haven’t been as controversial.
Regulators and residents have sued over odors and pollution in Missouri, where hog farms are common in the north and chicken facilities in the south.
There also has been a yearslong battle over regulations — should the state or local government have control? The report recommends more power should go to local governments because state regulators cannot take into account all the particularities of a site.
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