Animal Agriculture and Factory Farming
Title: 5 Types of Animal Exploitation Considered ‘Normal’ in the US
Summary: Learn about The Five Types of Animal Exploitation considered NORMAL in the USA. Animal farming is one of the biggest contributors to climate change (equal to transportation), and YOU can help make a change.
Title: Fast facts about animal agriculture to help you get informed
Summary: More information about factory farming.
Title: Want To Reduce Pandemic Risk? Start By Ending Factory Farming.
Summary: This link really was one of my favorites out of all the ones on here. It really helps put you in the animals’ shoes where they are inside the factories, suffering from disease and living a miserable life and awaiting their fate.
Regenerative Farming
Over the last century, commercial farming has resorted to using artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides that have killed our once-fertile soils, and also our health. Many of our chronic diseases have roots in the accumulation of herbicide- and pesticide-ridden foods we eat. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller called Roundup and RangerPro, has been clinically proven to cause non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (a cancer of white blood cells) and chlorpyrifos, another widely sprayed pesticide derived from WWII-era nerve gases, has been associated with learning disabilities in children, including ADHD.
Many cities, counties, states and countries throughout the world have restricted or banned glyphosate, the active ingredient in weedkillers such as Roundup. The crusade to ban glyphosate in the U.S. made some headway recently, when Monsanto-Bayer announced that by 2023 they would no longer sell glyphosate-based herbicides in the U.S. residential market. Nonprofits such as The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Center for Food Safety (CFS) are still working hard to bring legal action against the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) for allowing glyphosate use in agriculture, where farmworkers are exposed to its cancer risks. Not only do herbicides and pesticides adversely affect our public health, their use sheds light on environmental injustices, as rural families, underserved farm workers, and groundskeepers (often representing BIPOC) are the ones spraying these chemicals and are the most at risk being in the frontlines.
In August 2020, Environmental Scouts hosted a webinar with the founders of Herbicide Free Campus: www.herbicidefreecampus.org, an environmental nonprofit organization, founded by UC Berkeley students, that is making a lot of headway exposing the prolific use of glyphosate and other herbicides at university campuses across the United States. They are converting these campuses to organic methods of groundskeeping, and are also including elementary and high schools.
If you haven’t already watched Kiss The Ground movie, you should. It is a wonderful documentary about regenerative agriculture and describes (through science) how regenerative farming is one of the biggest solutions to our climate crisis. It is currently streaming on Netflix, narrated by Woody Harrelson, and is both entertaining, educational and eye-opening!
Title: Farmer’s Footprint – Regeneration ~The Beginning
Summary: What is “Regenerative Farming?” It is the next generation of growing food, although its principles lie in traditional farming practices. Regenerative agriculture focuses on rebuilding organic matter and living biodiversity in soil, to grow more nutrient-dense food for a longer time, while also sequestering excess carbon in the atmosphere to help reverse climate change.
