This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it's also a national security issue of the first order.
One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They'll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don't have to do anything differently in order to support two strains of corn or soybeans. You con't have to worry about one breed of milk cow being more susceptible to disease or giving milk with a different fat content. All your equipment is the same, all of your chemical inputs are the same, all of your processes are the same.
That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Significant enough climate change could as well. A single new strain of disease, if it were robust enough to spread through the air or via wildlife, could kill huge fractions of our cattle or pigs. It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next, with just the wrong set of circumstances.
We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system.
One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They'll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don't have to do anything differently in order to support two strains of corn or soybeans. You con't have to worry about one breed of milk cow being more susceptible to disease or giving milk with a different fat content. All your equipment is the same, all of your chemical inputs are the same, all of your processes are the same.
That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Significant enough climate change could as well. A single new strain of disease, if it were robust enough to spread through the air or via wildlife, could kill huge fractions of our cattle or pigs. It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next, with just the wrong set of circumstances.
We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system.