Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Kirschenmann offers insight into Pew report on livestock

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2008

Even with a blue ribbon panel, the recent "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Production in America" report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production was bound to create a furor. Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow Fred Kirschenmann, who had served on the commission since it was formed in March 2006, attended the Washington, D.C. press conference in April 2008 when a 124-page final report was released.

"I knew it would be a controversial undertaking," Kirschenmann said of the commission's task to look at problems often associated with industrial farm animal production (IFAP) and make recommendations to solve them.

"I am increasingly concerned about the fact that we are not helping farmers to prepare for future challenges such as increasing energy costs, depletions in water resources and more unstable climates," he said. "These challenges will make our entire industrial farming system, including our industrial animal system, increasingly untenable."

Kirschenmann was asked to write the concluding segment of the report, Toward a Sustainable Animal Agriculture, which looked at what the food and agriculture system could become over the next 50 years. "Future agricultural production systems are less likely to be specialized monocultures and more likely to be based on biological diversity, organized so that each organism exchanges energy with other organisms, forming a web of synchronous relationships, instead of relying on energy-intensive inputs," the report predicts.

Here are the key recommendations, as stated in the Commission's summary:

  1. Ban the non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials in food animal production to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance to medically important antibiotics and other microbials.
  2. Implement a disease monitoring program for food animals to allow 48-hour trace-back of those animals through aspects of their production, in a fully integrated and robust national database.
  3. Treat IFAP as an industrial operation and implement a new system to deal with farm waste to replace the inflexible and broken system that exists today, to protect Americans from the adverse environmental and human health hazards of improperly handled IFAP waste.
  4. Phase out the most intensive and inhumane production practices within a decade to reduce the risk of IFAP to public health and improve animal wellbeing (i.e., gestation crates and battery cages).
  5. Federal and state laws need to be amended and enforced to provide a level playing field for producers when entering contracts with integrators.
  6. Increase funding for, expand and reform animal agriculture research.

The commission was made up of 15 people in the fields of public policy, veterinary medicine, public health, agriculture, animal welfare, the food industry and rural society. The group included a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and was chaired by former Kansas governor John Carlin.

Kirschenmann said the commission made recommendations only after reaching consensus. "We often debated issues long and hard and listened to each other intently," he said. "We commissioned five groups of scientists to research and write a report in each of the study areas and used their reports in our deliberations. We poured through thousands of pages of documents, visited numerous sites around the country and listened carefully to many hours of testimony by a wide spectrum of industry representatives, farmers, government officials and citizens who came to public hearings we conducted throughout the country."

The Commission was a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2008