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April 24, 2006 Farming's
True Enemy Agroterrorism was the topic at a meeting of the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce & Industry last week, and it featured a visit from a counterterrorism expert with the FBI's Philadelphia office. Perhaps officials in Lancaster - the agricultural heartland of Southeastern Pennsylvania - were concerned with sinister plots to poison feed supplies, or to infect farm animals with mad cow disease? Hardly. Their concern: Animal activists with video cameras going public with undercover footage taken inside massive egg production facilities. Lancaster County's peaceful and pastoral way of life has certainly been shaken in recent years, but not by a few camera-toting citizen investigators. The change is due primarily to the growth of large-scale animal farming, often called "factory farming" or "industrial farming," in which family-run farms and green pastures are replaced with corporate-owned farms with large-scale agricultural operations. The result of this growing trend is loss of control - if not bankruptcy - for small farmers, health and environmental hazards for those who live nearby, and intense animal cruelty. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for Lancaster County and Pennsylvania show that nearly every year for the last several decades, the number of farms has declined while production rates have risen. Small family farms - where animals and the local environment are usually treated with more respect - are being driven out of business because they cannot compete with the low prices created by large corporate-owned farms that typically use immigrant labor and treat their animals as units of production rather than living creatures. Farmer-run organizations such as the Center for Rural Affairs and the Farm Aid Organization (which held the Farm Aid concerts to benefit family farmers) have been speaking out for years against factory farming and the threats it poses to rural communities. National environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, as well as hundreds of small community groups, have launched campaigns to keep factory farms out of their towns. Before building its newest facility in Mount Joy, Kreider Farms (Pennsylvania's second-largest egg producer) was met with widespread opposition by a large community group. Concerns were that the facility would negatively impact the town - from increasing air pollution and affecting asthma sufferers to lowering property values to causing harmful environmental impacts through large-scale farming. When it comes to the welfare of animals, national polls have shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose many of the current methods of production used on large-scale farms. For example, a 2000 Zogby America poll found that 86 percent of Americans believe the use of battery cages - where as many as 10 egg-laying hens are confined to cages the size of an open newspaper - is an unacceptable farming practice. Battery cages are the standard at farms such as Kreider and Lancaster-based Esbenshade Farms, where a recent investigation brought landmark cruelty charges against the farm's owner. My organization, Hugs for Puppies, conducted an investigation of Kreider Farms, which houses a whopping 3.5 million chickens at its five egg-laying plants in Lancaster County. The investigation (online at www.KreiderCruelty.com) revealed conditions standard in most large egg-laying facilities: hens and eggs covered in feces; live hens living in cages with the decomposing bodies of dead hens; and hens packed so tightly in cages that they could not turn around. Calls for a halt to factory farming - from small farmers, community groups, and environmental or animal-protection groups - threaten nothing but the profits of a few large corporate farms. They are far from being terroristic. Those concerned with the impact of factory farming would do wise to "shell" out a little more money for organic and free-range eggs, or eliminate eggs from their diet altogether. And if Lancaster County officials want their community to return to a more peaceful, pastoral way of life, they would do best to make factory farming a thing of the past.
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