Nothing Oracle or IT related here…feel free to skip over this one.
CAFOs, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or to give them a more appropriate name, Factory Farms, are fairly common in the USA – there are about 9,000 or so, from the stats I’ve seen. They don’t exist in the UK, yet…but there are some plans afoot to introduce them here, starting with one in Nocton, Lincolnshire and also one in my village of South Witham, Lincolnshire.
Obviously, when someone tells you they plan to build a very large shed in the village and put 3000 cows in it, with a 24×7 milking operation and creating a 60,000 tonnes per annum manure issue to deal with, it doesn’t go down very well. Needless to say the residents of my village are, to a person, livid and are fighting to ensure that this thing doesn’t get built in our village – yes, we are NIMBYs, but also that they don’t get built anywhere in the UK – which makes us NIABYs as well.
Just a few of the reasons why these CAFOs are not a good idea:
- All manner of pollution – noise, light, odour, ground water
- Public health
- Animal welfare
- Antibiotic misuse and the fact that they then get into the food chain
- Reduced nutritional value of the end product
- Externalised costs hide the fact that it’s not actually cheaper to produce the end product
- Sustainability
I could go on…all I’ll say is that after just a few minutes reading around various sites on the internet – sites which appear to have a decent enough pedigree – I am truly worried about these proposals and the direction UK farming is perhaps about to embark on.
If you are interested, more details of our campaign will emerge on our blog site.