Have you ever found yourself flipping through the flyers and you come across this section that says organic products on sale? “whoa, that’s awesome”, I’d say, looking at the picture of the cooked beef burger. Then as my eyes travel to the price written in large white numbers, I thought about it twice before asking my parents if we can have that for the barbe que we were going to have in a few weeks. A few weeks later when I actually tasted the burger, it was the best thing I had in a very long time.

Organic farming and factory farming are two very different methods of farming. Today, I’ll show you the bad things about factory farming. First of all, factory farms are in a constant cycle of planting seeds, bombing them with pesticides, fertilizers, harvesting them, and repeat this cycle over and over again for as many years as they can. What’s wrong with that cycle? First of all, pesticides do keep the pests out but they’re also not that easy to wash off. When you don’t wash them off, food poisoning might happen.  In Canada, rinsing and rubbing a little is enough to get those pesticides off, but in other countries, it’s a lot different. Take china for example, our family has been in Canada for long enough that we forgot how to wash vegetables in china. When my dad cooked dinner one night, all he did was rinse, rub, and cook. And that night everyone who ate the lettuce dish got sick and spent a few hours in the washroom. Pesticides aren’t the only thing that can cause sickness in factory farmed products, their fertilizer is most cases is animal manure and they smell so bad that loss of sense of smell have been recorded in factory farm workers. An added plus, the manure isn’t just there sitting in a huge tank not bothering anybody, it’s constantly leaking into the ground, therefore, contaminating ground water and the soil. Can you imagine drinking water contaminated with animal manure? These leaks have produced sickness mainly caused my salmonella and in a few cases, the sickened person died. This probably won’t happen to all of you but in some poor regions they do. Not only does that manure pollute ground and surface water, it can cause an algal boom in the ocean or lakes and rivers. This algal boom causes an area of the water to be depleted of oxygen because of all the algae. This is from the everyday little by little spilling from manure lagoons. When the actual holding tank collapses or gives away or over flood, huge areas of land can be destroyed. In August 2005, a factory farm in New York’s manure lagoon collapsed and killed over 250,000 fish in a nearby river. Three million gallons were dumped into the river. That incident destroyed the ecosystem in the river for a long time.

Not only does factory faming pollutes the environment and the life support systems of our planet, it also uses a lot of energy. A beef cow raised on the range produces more food energy than it does to raise them. On a factory farm, the energy used in raising that cow is over ten times the food energy it provides. So you can imagine how much oil and electricity and manpower went into making a single burger.

Factory farms claim to provide jobs for the community in which it is built. However, in reality factory farms dramatically lower the living conditions of the community around it. It does not provide as many jobs as it says it will due to two reasons. One, the factory farm owners try to employ as little people as possible so that the profit will be the highest. Two, who would want to work on a farm that’s constantly clouded with the overpowering smell of manure? The workers that do work there are constantly under the exposure to hazardous gases.

So in the end, we have a farm that can potentially kill people, downgrade the standard of living in the areas around it, under the constant threat of spilling millions of gallons of manure into nearby lakes and rivers, and using so much electricity and oil and power to raise a cow. Organic farming has lasted the human population on this planet for centuries. Already, it hasn’t even been a century and factory farming is already being disputed and ecosystems, lives, and land have been destroyed because of them. It is not the bright, inventive and wise alternative to organic farming as we thought it would be. Maybe sometimes, old traditions are much better off than modern technology.