Old McDonald had a Factory Farm E-I-E-I-OMG by Skott Brill

              When we walk through the grocery store and pick up chicken nuggets or steak, we don’t really think about where our food was coming from. We might every once in a while think about how it once lived on a farm and roamed around until it was its time to become food. We probably don’t think much more about it.

               According to Frostburg State University professor Skott Brill, this could be farther from the truth. At the 2015 Frostburg State University Appalachian Festival Symposium, Brill gave a presentation titled “Old McDonalds Had a Factory Farm E-I-E-I-OMG!” where he described the realities of modern industrial farm corporations.

               Brill went through the story of Old McDonald with his daughter Sophia. As she read a section about an animal, he explained many industrial farming practices that went along with that animal. “Old McDonald had a chicken, E-I-E-I-O” Sophia sang out. Brill then took the audience through the life of a chick from hatch to slaughter. This consisted of being confined to cages with many other birds. “If a chick is a female and will become a hen, it will be transported to a large shed and will in a short period of time be placed in what’s called a battery cage, and the hen will be place in that cage with 4 to 9 other birds and the birds will be such that they are so close together that they can’t spread their wings”. He went on to talk about many other conditions that lead to an unnatural life for the birds including, being too large for its bones to support its weight.

As well, he presents some environmental issues that come with these factories. “Tens of thousands of chickens in one place produce a lot of chicken manure. And what happens is that on these places nearby fields use the manure but often too much manure is put on the fields, and as a result the manure runs off and gets into streams and rivers and can seep down into ground water, this is especially a big problem on the Delmarva Peninsula”.  The Delmarva Peninsula is on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and includes parts of Virginia and Delaware.

        “Old McDonalds had a pig E-I-E-I-O”. Brill went into explain the issues of the pork industry. “In 1975 there were 660 thousand pig farms producing about 69 million pigs a year. Today, there are only about 73 thousand farms but they’re marketing 120 million pigs a year”. This shows that there are significantly less family owned pig farms in the US and more industrial farms pumping out as many pigs as they possibly can. This leads to many practices that are not environmentally friendly or humane to the animals. Brill says that “a typical pig raised in the United States today never spends any time out of doors. It spends its entire life…inside a mental barn with bars and concrete and usually no hay”. Environmentally, the pig farms have similar concerns to the chickens with too much manure than the region can handle, but it also comes with an unbearable smell. Brill read a quote from the book “The Ethics of What We Eat” from a woman who lives in Nebraska near a large industrial pig farm who said “[The smell] comes in the house even with the windows shut…It gives my seven year old diarrhea it we have it all day and it makes me sick”.

                “Old McDonalds had some cows E-I-E-I-O”. There are many inhumane treatments of these animals as well, like the raising of cafes in complete confinement and immobility for the production of veal. But cows come with new batch of problems that are effecting human even more directly. Beef cows are feed a diet of grain, which is not the natural diet of these animals which leads to the cows getting very ill. What do you do when something is sick? Give it medicine. Beef cows are feed antibiotics to keep them healthy enough to reach optimal weight. “One concern with antibiotic use is that bacteria and other pathogens can become resistant to these antibiotics and so [they] can stop working and that is to say that wide spread antibiotic use can lead to superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics. That might not only decimate populations of cattle, it might do us humans some real harm”.

               Skott Brills presentation ended on a brighter note and a possible light in the distance, and maybe not so far of a distance. Brill pointed out that there are many family owned farms are in the Western Maryland region and they are growing and selling all natural local foods. Three of these farms are Savage River Farm (Avilton, MD), Backbone Food Farm (Oakland, MD), and Cedar Rock Farm (Mount Savage). These are healthy, natural alternative to buying from industrial factory farms.