How clever of BBC’s Countryfile, to highlight on prime time Sunday TV, the horror of American Factory Farming. If you missed the programme and you’re not aware of this mass form of animal torture go to; http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00br05p and watch the video clip yourself. In the programme, Adam Henson travels to America to see first hand exactly what intensive farming means – for the animals and for the environment. His trip coincides with plans for the UK’s biggest ever dairy farm in Nocton, Lincolnshire, which have faced fierce opposition.
He meets vet Dr Gordon Jones who runs Central Sands Dairy in Wisconsin – the inspiration behind plans for the biggest ever dairy in the UK. Dr Jones has been one of the main advisors to the company behind the dairy at Nocton, Lincolnshire. He tells Adam that whilst many people may be unhappy that smaller farms might be put out of business by mega dairies like his, few people are prepared to pay a premium price for their milk to help them survive.
Adam then travels to Indiana to see one of the biggest dairy farms in the world – Fair Oaks Farm Park, which has 32,000 cows in giant sheds on a 17,000 acre site. The farm has managed to turn its large scale intensive farming operation into a tourist attraction with nearly half a million people visiting every year. The farm produces nearly two million pints of milk every day. Adam sees the scale of the operation from a helicopter. “Makes my farm look like an allotment,” he says. Adam then meets with CEO Gary Corbett who tells him it’s a ‘family’ business that just happens to be bigger than those down the road.
In Indiana, Adam visits a pig farm belonging to Belstra Milling – a company that produces 140,000 pigs for slaughter every year. It’s big business. Sales are worth £16million pounds a year. Adam learns though that the ‘hog’ farming industry in the US isn’t regulated in the same way it is in the UK and the rest of Europe. Sows are kept in pens where they can’t turn around, and their lives are governed by the pressures on the business to produce more and more pigs. Adam asks Vice president of the company Malcolm DeKryger:
“Some people would have a problem with this, the pig being an intelligent animal. How do you feel about that?”
Mr DeKryger replies: “The way that we measure contentedness and well-being is not based on humans, because pigs are not humans. Confined operations were put together for the sake of the animal; put together for the sake of human labour efficiency.”
Adam Henson looked on in disbelief. who could let this happen anywhere in the world?
Credits.
Countryfile.
Series Producer: Andrew Tomlinson
Presenter: Adam Henson
Executive Producer: Andrew Thorman
Yvonne Ainsworth - editor
