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Inside Blog

The Pesticide Gamble – What We Don’t Know

The full range of impacts from pesticides are unknown due to the varying effects of hundreds of agricultural pesticides, the added “inert” ingredients, the unstudied effects of chemicals in combination, the lag time for slowly degrading ecosystems, and the EPA’s ineffective regulatory oversight.
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RECENT POSTS

The Pesticide Gamble – What We Don’t Know

The full range of impacts from pesticides are unknown due to the varying effects of hundreds of agricultural pesticides, the added “inert” ingredients, the unstudied effects of chemicals in combination, the lag time for slowly degrading ecosystems, and the EPA’s ineffective regulatory oversight.
READ MORE

Factory Farm Ammonia: The Unrecognized & Unregulated Air Pollutant

Ammonia is generated by factory farms at levels that regularly exceed the EPA’s “reportable quantities” by 10 to 50 times or more. And yet, these emissions are underestimated, underreported, and largely invisible to the American public.
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The Planetary Boundaries Framework: A Moral Guide for the Anthropocene

For those who believe that the health of our Earth and the long-term survival of its inhabitants are in jeopardy, the Planetary Boundary framework may be the new Ten Commandments.
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When Antibiotics Fail: The Role of Factory Farming

Given the stakes, factory farming’s continuing abuse of antibiotics surely ranks high among the most irrational and dangerous practices of industrial animal agriculture. Our government’s enabling of this profligate usage is a serious dereliction of duty.
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America’s Overlooked Pollution Crisis: Factory Farm Manure

While headlines may focus on PFAS or microplastics, this more potent and pervasive pollutant continues to escape national scrutiny. Produced in unfathomable quantities, the embedded nutrients – nitrogen and phosphorus – severely contaminate waterways and degrade air quality.
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Nitrates – Hardship for the Few, Cheap Meat for the Many

Along with 42 million other Americans, our household sources drinking water from groundwater via a private well. Last month, after spending a couple of weeks researching and writing about nitrates in our nation’s drinking water, we woke one morning to the strange smell of something noxious in our own water.
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Unpacking the “National Security” Implications of Glyphosate

The claim that glyphosate is crucial to U.S. agricultural productivity and food security is a smokescreen. The true national security concern is that the government encourages farmers to grow cheap monoculture feed crops in some of the most fertile soil on earth instead of growing healthy food for humans.
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Factory Farming is the Primary Driver of U.S. Water Pollution

For decades, our society and our government have failed to address nutrient pollution from the factory farming and feed crop system despite an understanding among some EPA scientists that this is the central water pollution issue in the country.
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A Protest Vote

It can be a challenge to feel the optimism one normally longs for as we enter that period of the year known for the dark, the cold, and the spiritual. And yet, we keep thinking we do have the power to end this madness. We each have a vote. We all can protest.
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Factory Farming’s Grazing “Debate”

The beef industry and its supporters have kept alive the notion that there is some controversy about whether grazing cattle in America is beneficial for the land. This is despite clear evidence that grazing has degraded land conditions across the nation and that climate change and drought are steadily increasing the toll.
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Agricultural Intensification and Disposable Animals

The world of factory farmed pigs is ground zero in the “agricultural intensification” that some tout as the answer for feeding a growing world population. Intensification relies on technological advances to propel increasing yields per unit of land, labor, and capital. Industrial animal agriculture has been on this road for a long time.
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Inside Corn – How much really goes to animal feed and why it matters

Corn is the largest U.S. crop by acreage and production volume. It is the quintessential industrialized monoculture crop, mostly grown on tracts of more than 500 acres. The corn production system has enormous negative impacts on land, water, soil, and biodiversity. We pay this environmental toll mostly in the service of factory farming.
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Loss of the wild ones – no room on the farm

Wild mammal populations are about one-seventh the size of pre-human days, as measured by total weight. Humans and farmed animals now dominate the earth, with wild land mammals just 2% of total land mammal biomass.
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Until All the Rivers Run Dry

The Colorado River and the Rio Grande are running dry. The major U.S. aquifers are being depleted at alarming rates. Yet no one seems to be asking: Is feed for livestock really where our water should be going?
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Counting the Uncounted

Last year 1,358,812,000 farmed land animals in the U.S. died or were killed before reaching the slaughter line. That’s 43 animals dying every second of every day. In the drive to maximize profits, animal death and suffering is just a line item on an expense sheet.
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Neonics: Poison, Profit, and Policy

Take a highly toxic pesticide with limited efficacy and bundle it to increase sales. Now it’s the default option for feed crop farmers. Neither monitored nor regulated by the government. Myriad species are harmed and the potential for human health risk grows.
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Factory farm manure is a pollutant – the valuable fertilizer pretense is wearing thin

Factory farm manure creates nutrient pollution that poisons waterways, kills wildlife, and degrades drinking water. That reality has been obscured by federal agencies and the animal ag industry for decades.
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The Animal Ag Industry: Hiding in Plain Sight

Factory farming wears a thin but effective disguise. Because of our appetite for cheap meat, we’re easily taken in by labels with red barns or photos of family farmers with cows on pasture.
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