Industrial animal production factories are uncommon in Albemarle County. Around here, animal husbandry usually means keeping a reasonable number of animals on the land rather than tens of thousands in a single building.
However, the confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) industry is big business in our state. Virginia’s poultry industry is the nation’s sixth-largest producer of turkeys and eighth-largest producer of broiler chickens.1 At least one CAFO exists in our watershed. More may follow as the poultry industry seeks to expand beyond its traditional territory in the Eastern Shore and the Shenandoah Valley.
CAFOs are a bad deal for the environment, for local communities, for the animals raised in confinement, and – more often than not – for the farmers who raise them. In most cases, a multinational corporation owns the animals and reaps the profits, while the farmer takes on massive debt to build and maintain the factory buildings to the company’s requirements. The farmer is also responsible for disposing of the tremendous amount of waste produced by the animals inside the CAFO buildings. While ostensibly useful as fertilizer, the staggering volume of waste generated by factory farms often degrades the natural environment and nearby residents’ quality of life. Our community and natural resources shouldn’t bear the externalized costs of an exploitative industry.
1 Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Agriculture Facts & Figures(Source: USDA’s 2022 National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) and the Economic Research Service (ERS)).
