Factory Farming: Not Just on Land Anymore

[marmar]

from Civil Eats:



Factory Farming: Not Just on Land Anymore

November 1st, 2011
By Wenonah Hauter


When most people think of factory farming they typically think of feedlots, hog factories or chicken operations–not massive open net pens growing millions of fish in our oceans. However, factory fish farming will soon pose many of the same threats to the environment and to consumers as its land-based counterparts.

Growing fish in a crowded environment in open net pens or cages and giving them antibiotic-laced feed inevitably leads to pollution. The waste, which includes excess feed, antibiotics and the chemicals used to treat the cages, flows directly into the ocean and, ultimately, on to our plates.

Food & Water Watch’s new report reveals that if the government used factory fish farming to reach its stated goal of offsetting the U.S. seafood trade deficit (that is, importing less seafood than it exports), 200 million of these fish would need to be produced in ocean cages off U.S. coasts each year. Calculations show that this could result in the discharge of as much nitrogenous waste as the untreated sewage from a city nearly nine times more populous than Los Angeles.

The environmental issues don’t end there. Escapes from open ocean pens are common, and when farmed fish escape they can compete or interbreed with wild fish, altering natural behavior and weakening important genetic traits. They can also spread disease to wild fish. Washington State and California, for example, are now dealing with a highly contagious disease that is linked to factory fish farms and is threatening to wipe out their wild salmon populations. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2011/11/01/factory-farming-not-just-on-land-anymore/

[ixion]

1. fish farms should be required to use aqua culture

which would use that nitrogenous waste to grow plants.

[nc4bo]

3. And in the case of Talipia and other plant eaters, best for the fish.

I've been doing some reading about fish farming and the entire industry leaves a lot to be desired especially if the fish are imported from countries like China.

Back to topic, this would be an excellent idea and I'd hope someone in the industry would investigate it.

[starroute]

2. And the use of antibiotics is a serious problem in itself

Here's something on the results of a study that just came out:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111101125958.htm

Much as people can exchange information instantaneously in the digital age, bacteria associated with humans and their livestock appear to freely and rapidly exchange genetic material related to human disease and antibiotic resistance through a mechanism called horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

In a paper appearing in Nature online Oct. 30, researchers -- led by Eric Alm of MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Biological Engineering -- say they've found evidence of a massive network of recent gene exchange connecting bacteria from around the world: 10,000 unique genes flowing via HGT among 2,235 bacterial genomes. . . .

"We were surprised to find that 60 percent of transfers among human-associated bacteria include a gene for antibiotic resistance," adds computational systems biology graduate student Chris Smillie, one of the lead authors of the paper.

These resistance genes might be linked to the use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture: The researchers found 42 antibiotic-resistance genes that were shared between livestock-associated and human-associated bacteria, demonstrating a crucial link connecting pools of drug resistance in human and agricultural populations.