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This is where your bacon comes from.

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these are the frightening conditions that animals all over the country are forced to live in.

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an article by the Washington Post about  a movement to help the environment.

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an article by the Washington Post about  a movement to help the environment.

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Correction: This story has been significantly revised to address several inaccurate and incomplete statements about meat production's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
It may be delicious, but the evidence is accumulating that meat, particularly red meat, is just a disaster for the environment - and not so great for human beings, either.

Agriculture today accounts for for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions - posing one of the biggest challenges to countries desperately trying to curb the emissions that promote global warming. And half of those agriculture emissions come from livestock, which produce large amounts of methane, a short-lived but powerful greenhouse gas.

The environmental impact is the driving reason why members of a United Nations panel last month urged its environmental assembly to consider recommending a tax on meat producers and sellers. Raising the cost of buying meat, the argument goes, would reduce demand, and ultimately, production of it.

[Meet the "clean cow" technology that could help fight climate change]

Maarten Hajer, professor at the Netherlands's Utrecht University, led the environment and food report that recommended the meat tax.

"All of the harmful effects on the environment and on health needs to be priced into food products," said Hajer, who is a member of U.N.'s International Resource Panel, which comprises 34 top scientists and 30 governments. "I think it is extremely urgent."

But, he added, "Food is very political."

Taxing specific bits of the American diet can be a touch matter. In June, a successful proposal to tax sugary drinks in Philadelphia caused an uproar among lobbyists, some groups representing the poor and even Bernie Sanders, who argued that the tax was regressive.

The response to limiting meat, which is certainly more beneficial to a diet than soda, could be mutinous.

[Why we're still so incredibly confused about methane's role in global warming]

But Hajer argued that governments must soon move to limit the major greenhouse gas producer. The idea of a meat tax has developed over the past 25 years as a "completely obvious" measure to economists and environmentalists, Hajer said, as knowledge of the environmental toll of meat emerged.

By no means is meat the only element of agriculture that contributes greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation of land for agricultural purposes -- to grow crops or grasses for cattle to graze -- also adds to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, partly because trees absorb CO2. Rice fields are a also huge source of methane emissions. And applying fertilizer also produces substantial amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, in the form of nitrous oxide.

But in multiple ways, meat is one of the worst offenders. For example, agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States. These two charts show that meat is particularly thirsty. For a kilogram of red meat, you need considerably more water than for plant products.

Governments are starting to take notice. China, which consumes half of the world's pork and more than a quarter of its overall meat, announced new dietary guidelines that advises people to their reduce their average meat consumption by half. That country's meat consumption has increased by nearly five-fold since 1982, even though its population has only increased by 30 percent during that time.

Meanwhile, Denmark is considering a recommendation from its ethics council that all red meats should be taxed. The council argued in May that Danes were "ethically obliged" to reduce their consumption to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

"For a response to climate-damaging food to be effective, while also contributing to raise awareness of the challenge of climate change, it must be shared," council spokesman Mickey Gjerris said .

This graph shows that phasing out meat and simply eating less would knock down greenhouse gas emissions considerably - particularly in developed, meat-loving countries.

Laura Wellesley, a research associate at international policy institute Chatham House, said she thinks a global tax could be achieved in the next 20 years. She has studied attitudes about meat consumption among the four most carnivorous countries: China; the United States; Britain and Brazil.

Countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland have dramatically reduced their agricultural emissions output, as much as a half. But countries that are expanding their meat-lovers' impulses are doing so at much larger jumps. Brazil's greenhouse gas output from food production has increased by 47 percent from 2000 to 2012. In China, a 35-percent jump from 1994 to 2005 means 220 million more tons of greenhouse gas emission. So, Estonia's 58-percent cut from 2000 to 2012, while commendable, is less than 2,000 tons.

Overall, agricultural greenhouse gas emissions have hardly decreased since 1990, despite growing awareness of the threat they pose to the planet. Food and meat production is typically not targeted by civilians and governments as a way to whittle global warming.

Global livestock contributes an estimated 14.5 percent to annual greenhouse gas emissions. In raw numbers, that's more than emissions from every car, train, ship and airplane combined. (However, methane doesn't live in the atmosphere anywhere near as long as carbon dioxide, produced by transportation, so its contribution to the planet's warming is more of a short-term phenomenon.)

Of meat's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, 65 percent is enteric fermentation (or, cow, sheep and goat belching and farting) and manure, according to a 2014 Chatham House analysis. Feed constitutes one-fifth of that, followed by land-use change, energy use and post-farm activities.

The methane produced by cattle digestion alone is what leads many researchers to call for focusing on the impact of red meat, rather than poultry or pigs. Pigs and poultry contribute only 10 percent of total livestock emissions.

But Wellesley said reducing meat consumption in rich countries was equally important to boosting meat access for the world's poorest. Americans ate an average of 120 pounds of meat in 2009, compared with an average of four pounds in Bangladesh. The planet could be in trouble if populous, economic centers in China and Brazil acted like the West.

China is a "grave concern" to experts, Hajer said.

Along with a tax, a meat cutback could be achieved by making plant-based diets more appealing and less expensive. People in the West often think that vegetarianism is a diet for wealthier folks, Wellesley said.

This chart shows the considerable health benefits that could be reaped from reducing meat consumption as part of a more nutritious diet. The United States could slash its health-care spending the most by phasing out meat for vegetables.

But until tariffs are levied, experts worry about how to make people realize that meat is harmful for the environment. Wellesley said people globally are more apt to wring their hands over cranking the air conditioner. That cheeseburger is largely seen as disastrous to heart health or their thighs, not global warming.

"Government is wary of introducing taxes on food products," Wellesley said. "Civil society and industry may say the tax would would harm or limit the poorer members of society. Those concerns were raised in the focus group."

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Correction: This story has been significantly revised to address several inaccurate and incomplete statements about meat production's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. It may be delicious, but the evidence is accumulating that meat, particularly red meat, is just a disaster for the environment - and not so great for human beings, either.

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a shortened versions of the movie Conspiracy, highlighting the effects of meat production on the planet.

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a shortened versions of the movie Conspiracy, highlighting the effects of meat production on the planet.

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COWSPIRACY - The Sustainability Secret in about 15 minutes (Short Version)

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What the health, a movie about how meat may be taking a tole on your health.

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What the health, a movie about how meat may be taking a tole on your health.

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What The Health   Vegan Documentary 2017

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Grab The Vegan Cookbook here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521710449/ Vegan 4 Life Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Vegan4LifeCo... I do not own the rights to this video. All copyrights belong to the original producers and publishers. No copyright infringement intended.

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Hog farms compromising the quality of air, water, and now the health of neighboring city?

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Hog farms compromising the quality of air, water, and now the health of neighboring city?

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Modern meat production, in which thousands of animals are packed into barns for concentrated feeding operations, has proven to be efficient and profitable, but comes with its own set of problems.

From Washington state to North Carolina, federal lawsuits are challenging the livestock industry to change its ways, basing arguments on studies that increasingly show the impact that phosphorous, nitrates and bacteria from fertilizer and accumulated manure have on lakes and rivers, as well as air pollution that can be harmful to respiratory health.

Livestock farmers insist they're trying to ameliorate the problem by installing grass strips, tilling less and using other techniques to keep manure and fertilizer from draining into waterways.

"I have a general care and concern for the state's water quality and I've personally invested my own dollars to install conservation nutrient retention practices on my farm," said Bill Couser, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer with 5,200 cows. "We realize this is not going to happen overnight or in two years. This could take up to 10 years as this technology comes along."

However, those who rely on rivers and lakes for drinking water or live near the large-scale operations - especially in the top two hog-producing states of Iowa and North Carolina - are growing impatient. Joined by environmental and animal rights groups in a growing number of lawsuits, they're highlighting the debate between the right to raise livestock and the right to clean water and air.

Des Moines' water utility, which serves a half-million people, recently filed a notice of intent to sue farmers in three counties populated by 1.2 million pigs and a million turkeys because it must run water sourced from two central Iowa rivers through a costly system to strip out nitrate, which at levels above a federal limit can reduce the amount of oxygen carried in the blood of children younger than 6.

A federal judge in eastern Washington ruled last month that an industrial dairy farm's manure management practices posed an "imminent and substantial endangerment" to the environment and thousands in the lower Yakima Valley who rely on well water. And on Jan. 28, a coalition of groups sued the EPA for what they said is a failure to address air pollution from cattle, hog and poultry farms in California, Wisconsin and Iowa.

"Pork is cheap and cheap to produce in large factories because they don't pay for cleaning up the Des Moines water supply and they don't pay for the asthma neighbors get, they don't pay for polluting downstream water that used to be potable and they don't pay for the loss of property values," said Steve Wing, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill epidemiologist.

About 68 percent of the nation's lakes, reservoirs and ponds and more than half of its rivers and streams are impaired, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says, meaning they don't meet one or more water-quality standards and are considered too polluted for the intended use. The main culprit: agriculture, including poorly located or poorly managed animal-feeding operations and misapplication of chemicals and fertilizer, EPA reports show.

The hog industry's shift from small family farms to large-scale farms is dramatic, going from more than 200,000 in the early 1990s to just over 21,600 in 2012.

A driving force behind some of the large-scale hog farms is Murphy-Brown LLC, which became part of the world's largest pork producer when China-based WH Group bought corporate parent Smithfield Foods in 2013. WH Group aims to feed China's appetite for meat with cheaper hogs from the United States, and that foreshadows increased production in the U.S., according to lawsuits filed in eastern North Carolina.

The water- and air-quality lawsuits are mostly driven by advocates of locally grown food as well as animal-rights and environmental activists. But in some cases, farmers are going after farmers.

Barb Kalbach has fought for more than a decade against the construction of huge hog operations, and joined a statewide nonprofit that argues such enterprises are ruining Iowa's waterways.

Pork is a $7 billion industry in Iowa, which is the nation's largest pork producer with about 21 million pigs - seven times the number of human residents - that create about 9 billion gallons of manure annually.

Read More Apple has a new solar farm, and greens hate it

"I have in the back of my mind this idea that we have thousands of miles of clean water, which is a gift in this state and we just throw manure in it," the 64-year-old said. She and her husband, who live about 40 miles west of Des Moines, once raised a few hogs, cattle and sheep, but quit primarily because it's difficult to compete with large-scale operations that have corporate meatpacking contracts.

About 200 miles north, Matt Schuiteman raises about 3,000 hogs plus some cattle. Since 2008, the 40-year-old farmer has worked with the city of Sioux Center, Dordt College and others to research how to keep nitrogen on the farmland and out of waterways.

Farmers care about the environment and are willing to work on improvements that will minimize impact, he said, adding that lawsuits aren't the course of action.

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Water, air quality fears conflict with pig farms

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Modern meat production, in which thousands of animals are packed into barns for concentrated feeding operations, has proven to be efficient and profitable, but comes with its own set of problems. From Washington state to North Carolina, federal lawsuits are challenging the livestock industry to change its ways, basing arguments on studies that increasingly show the impact that phosphorous, nitrates and bacteria from fertilizer and accumulated manure have on lakes and rivers, as well as air pollution that can be harmful to respiratory health.

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How much of the rainforest is compromised for agricultural land use

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How much of the rainforest is compromised for agricultural land use

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A new study led by a Stanford researcher shows that more than 80 percent of the new farmland created in the tropics between 1980 and 2000 came from felling forests, which sends carbon into the atmosphere and drives global warming. But the research team also noted that big agribusiness has largely replaced small farmers in doing most of the tree cutting in Brazil and Indonesia, which may make it easier to rein in the trend.

© Lanthilda | Dreamstime.com

Global agricultural expansion cut a wide swath through tropical forests during the 1980s and 1990s. More than half a million square miles of new farmland - an area roughly the size of Alaska - was created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000, of which over 80 percent was carved out of tropical forests, according to Stanford researcher Holly Gibbs.

"This has huge implications for global warming, if we continue to expand our farmland into tropical forests at that rate," said Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, who led the study.

Gibbs and colleagues at several other universities analyzed Landsat satellite data and images from the United Nations to reach their conclusions. Theirs is the first study to map and quantify what types of land have been replaced by the immense area of new farmland developed across the tropical forest belt during the 1980s and 1990s.

While this huge increase was happening within the tropics, agricultural land in the non-tropical countries actually decreased in area.

The study was published this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that to keep pace with increasing demand, global agricultural production will have to keep increasing, possibly even doubling by 2050. That would likely lead to millions of additional acres of tropical forest being felled over the next 40 years.

Direct impact on carbon released into atmosphere

"Every million acres of forest that is cut releases the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as 40 million cars do in a year," Gibbs said.

Most of the carbon released comes from burning the forests, but even if the trees are simply cast aside, the bulk of the carbon from the plants makes its way into the atmosphere during decomposition, she said.

Gibbs and her colleagues found that about 55 percent of the tropical forests that had been cut between 1980 and 2000 were intact forests and another 28 percent were forests that had experienced some degradation, such as some small-scale farming, logging or gathering of wood and brush for cooking or heating fuel.

"The tropical forests store more than 340 billion tons of carbon, which is 40 times the total current worldwide annual fossil fuel emissions," Gibbs said. "If we continue cutting down these forests, there is a huge potential to further contribute to climate change."

The increasing demand for agricultural production stems in part from the ever-growing number of people on the planet, who all want to eat. Additionally, members of the growing middle class in emerging economies such as China and India are showing interest in eating more meat, which further intensifies demand. And incentives to grow crops for biofuel production have increased.

But Gibbs and her colleagues also observed some encouraging signs. The patterns of change in the locations they analyzed made it clear that during the 1990s, less of the deforestation was done by small family farms than was the case in the 1980s and more was done by large, corporate-run farms. Big agribusiness tends to be more responsive to global economic signals as well as pressure campaigns from advocacy organizations and consumer groups than individual small farmers.

In Brazil, where a pattern had developed of expanding soy production by direct forest clearing and by pushing cattle ranching off pastureland and into forested areas, a campaign by Greenpeace and others resulted in agreements by key companies to rein in their expansion. Instead, they worked to increase production on land already in agricultural use.

'Seeing positive changes'

"These farmers effectively increased the yield of soy on existing lands and they have also increased the head of cattle per acre by a factor of five or six," Gibbs said. "It is exciting that we are starting to see how responsive industry can be to consumer demands. We really are seeing positive changes in this area."

Along with wiser use of land already cleared, Gibbs said, improvements in technology and advances in yield intensification also could slow the expansion of farming into the forests.

Other studies that analyzed land use changes between 2000 and 2007 have shown that the pace of cutting down the tropical forests has begun to slow in some regions.

But as long as the human population on the planet continues to grow, the pressure to put food on the table, feed in the barnyard and fuel in the gas tank will continue to grow, too.

"It is critical that we focus our efforts on reducing rates of deforestation while at the same time restoring degraded lands and improving land management across the tropics," Gibbs said. "The good news is that pressure from consumer groups and nongovernmental organizations combined with international climate agreements could provide a real opportunity to shift the tide in favor of forest conservation rather than farmland expansion."

In addition to her position at the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, Gibbs is affiliated with Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Jon Foley, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior, and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, was Gibbs' PhD adviser when the research was begun. He is a coauthor of the paper.

Initial funding for the project was provided by NASA. Gibbs is currently funded by a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship.

Media Contact

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

Louis Bergeron, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-1944, louisb3@stanford.edu

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Most new farmland comes from cutting tropical forest, says Stanford researcher

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A new study led by a Stanford researcher shows that more than 80 percent of the new farmland created in the tropics between 1980 and 2000 came from felling forests, which sends carbon into the atmosphere and drives global warming.

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This picture is a representation of how tightly the animals on farms are packed together.

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this is a disturbing picture of the neglect animals face while being raised for their meat.

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51% of all greenhouse gasses come from cows?

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51% of all greenhouse gasses come from cows?

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This article explains some of the impacts the meat industry has on the environment.

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Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.

In a paper published by a respected US thinktank, the Worldwatch Institute, two World Bank environmental advisers claim that instead of 18 per cent of global emissions being caused by meat, the true figure is 51 per cent.

They claim that United Nation's figures have severely underestimated the greenhouse gases caused by tens of billions of cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry and other animals in three main areas: methane, land use and respiration.

Their findings - which are likely to prompt fierce debate among academics - come amid increasing from climate change experts calls for people to eat less meat.

In the 19-page report, Robert Goodland, a former lead environmental adviser to the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, a current adviser, suggest that domesticated animals cause 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), more than the combined impact of industry and energy. The accepted figure is 18 per cent, taken from a landmark UN report in 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow.

"If this argument is right," write Goodland and Anhang, "it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.

"In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy."

Their call to move to meat substitutes accords with the views of the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who has described eating less meat as "the most attractive opportunity" for making immediate changes to climate change.

Lord Stern of Brentford, author of the 2006 review into the economic consequences of global warming, added his name to the call last week, telling a newspaper interviewer: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources."

Scientists are concerned about livestock's exhalation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows and other ruminants emit 37 per cent of the world's methane. A study by Nasa scientists published in Science on Friday found that methane has significantly more effect on climate change than previously thought: 33 times more than carbon dioxide, compared with a previous factor of 25.

According to Goodland and Anhang's paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, scientists have significantly underestimated emissions of methane expelled by livestock. They argue that the gas's impact should be calculated over 20 years, in line with its rapid effect - and the latest recommendation from the UN - rather than the 100 years favoured by Livestock's Long Shadow. This, they say, would add a further 5bn tons of CO2e to livestock emissions - 7.9 per cent of global emissions from all sources.

Similarly, they claim that official figures are wrong to ignore CO2 emitted by breathing animals on the basis that it is offset by carbon photosynthesised by their food, arguing the existence of this unnecessary animal-based CO2 amounts to 8.7bn tons of CO2e, 3.7 per cent of total emissions.

On land use, they calculate that returning the land currently used for livestock to natural vegetation and forests would remove 2.6bn tons of CO2e from the atmosphere, 4.2 per cent of greenhouse gas. They also complain that the UN underestimated the amount of livestock, putting it at 21.7bn against NGO estimates of 50bn, adding that numbers have since risen by 12 per cent.

Eating meat rather than plants also requires extra refrigeration and cooking and "expensive" treatment of human diseases arising from livestock such as swine flu, they say.

One leading expert on climate change and food, Tara Garnett, welcomed Goodland and Anhang's calculations on methane, which she said had credibility, but she questioned other aspects of their work, saying she had no reason to dispute the UN's position on CO2 caused by breathing. She also pointed out that they had changed scientific assumptions for livestock but not for other sources of methane, skewing the figures.

She said: "We are increasingly becoming aware that livestock farming at current scales is a major problem, and that they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But livestock farming also yields benefits - there are some areas of land that can't be used for food crop production. Livestock manure can also contribute to soil fertility, and farm animals provide us with non food goods, such as leather and wool, which would need to be produced by another means, if it wasn't a byproduct from animal farming."

While looking into the paper's findings, Friends of the Earth said the report strengthened calls for the Government to act on emissions from meat production. "We already know that the meat and dairy industry causes more climate-changing emissions than all the world's transport," said Clare Oxborrow, senior food campaigner.

"These new figures need further scrutiny but, if they stack up, they provide yet more evidence of the urgent need to fix the food chain. The more damaging elements of the meat and dairy industry are effectively government-sponsored: millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent propping up factory farms and subsidising the import of animal feed that's been grown at the expense of forests."

Justin Kerswell, campaign manager for the vegetarian group Viva!, said: "The case for reducing consumption of meat and dairy products was already imperative based on previous UN findings. Now it appears to have been proven that the environmental devastation from livestock production is in fact staggeringly more significant - and dwarfs the contribution from the transport sector by an even greater margin.

"It is essential that attention is fully focused on the impact of livestock production by all global organisations with the power to affect policy."

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Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

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Study claims meat creates half of all greenhouse gases

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Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.