On the Factory Farm Incentive Program

This photo, from "In the Farm Bill, a Creature from the Black Lagoon?" by Andrew Martin in today’s New York Times, is one of the most captivating, damning images I’ve seen in a long time regarding our treatment of animals (and the planet), and there’s not a sentient being in sight. Yes, those are lagoons full of excrement. They are supposed to contain the manure and its potentially devastating human and environmental impacts, and as you probably know they do a poor job. The hydrogen sulfide gas that emanates from them can be lethal (as in, people have died just from breathing it), they contaminate groundwater when their walls break or they flood, and they contaminate the air with hydrogen sulfide, methane and ammonia, causing respiratory distress in humans for miles around them.

I think all of that is a great reason to outlaw lagoons in addition to requiring that the industry clean up its mess, with its own money. Another option, which is what Congress is about to do, is to give the farmers money to manage the waste they produce.

Yes, you read correctly. Some of our tax dollars go to EQUIP, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which is yet another subsidy for an industry that has no positive impact on humans or Planet Earth. And according to the industry, the more contaminants and pollution a farm produces, the more money it should get to help it try to minimize the damages. According to a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, “If larger farms are going to be viewed — accurately or not — as part of the problem, then the resources necessary to implement the solution also need to be available to those farms.” 

Best of all, these funds are under the category of "conservation."

Luckily, Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, has injected a modicum of sanity into the discussion with, "You shouldn’t be justifying that as a conservation payment. You are building things that have been proven time and time again to cause severe environmental damage when they misfunction.” (And by the way I don’t think they need to "misfunction" to cause damage.) But it’s all for naught, as no matter whether or not the funds end up being under "conservation," the farms are going to get their incentives to continue to do their business in a way that makes the most money for them, with the highest subsidies, no matter what they have to do to the animals. And when it comes to the environment, they’ll get away with whatever they can, regardless of the human or environmental toll, and do only the minimum necessary under their clearly liberal regulations.

Our laws (tax and otherwise) certainly don’t appear to be going in the direction of dismantling farming in America, which makes spreading the message of nonviolence to the animals and the planet through veganism more important than ever. The industry isn’t budging, and the government is only enabling it, so it’s up to us to hit the industry where it hurts by decreasing demand for its products. Yes, at first the excess will end up in schools, but at some point it seems that that set up will cease being a good idea for the government, and that should expedite change.

Or at least that is my hope.