Excellent insight of industrial farming

Any additional comments?

The authors explain in an interesting way methods used nowadays to provide endless meat resources to the supermarkets. It is an interesting story of the industry and how it affects communities worldwide providing facts and research based evidence of the influence that modern farming has on people and planet.
It gives a food for thought on how the world is changing and why we should think twice about the origin of the food we are eating.

11 people found this helpful

Excellent listen

This book was very well written and read. It opened my eyes to the effects that factory farming has and why we as consumers must use our money to change the demand. Buy local organic free range grass fed :)

2 people found this helpful

Mind-blowing eye-opener, even for a vegan!

Up until about one hundred years ago, farmers would grow their crops and farm their animals on one piece of land. Each animal and bird and insect worked harmoniously together. The cows and sheep would eat the grass, the pigs and chickens would relish the leftover cuttings of fruit and vegetables, and the ducks would munch on snails that made their way up the stems of the fruit trees and crops. Every animal and every insect had a special role to fulfil in keeping the soil in pristine condition, and it happened quite seamlessly, and as naturally as it possibly could—because nature always finds a way.

But then somebody decided to take the animals off the land and put them in sheds. They called it factory farming. It was “the new way” of doing business, and the government subsidised it heavily. Many farmers who refused to comply went out of business.

The soil was no longer fertilised by the animals as they walked around; instead chemical fertilisers were brought in to do that job. The soil never had a chance to regenerate, and the animals never saw the sun again.

In their sheds, the animals were enclosed in tiny pens or cages. They no longer bred naturally; many were artificially inseminated instead. No longer did they feed off the land; they were fed soy and grains and fish meal instead, food meant for humans, much of it being shipped halfway across the world to get to them. Leftover fruit and vegetables were thrown away. Their urine and faeces was pumped into rivers. Sometimes it ended up in large man made dams. The fish could hardly breathe. The birds flew away. The flies moved in. So much of the environment was being destroyed. Yet nobody seemed to care.

Suddenly, the farming of animals became completely mechanised. Everything was about how much could be produced, and how quickly it could be done. Farming for need quickly became farming for greed. Before long, the scientists were genetically modifying and selectively breeding these animals so that they could be meatier, produce more milk, lay more eggs, and grow quickly and be ready for slaughter faster. Animals were fed antibiotics to control disease. They were injected with growth hormone to grow faster. Unable to move around freely, their flesh became fatty and unhealthy. Not once did anybody think about the impact this was having on human health and the environment.

The truth is, the impact is catastrophic. If you’re not already sick, you will be soon. If it’s not high cholesterol, it’s diabetes or heart disease or cancer, and a host of other lifestyle and auto-immune diseases, with a healthy dose of osteoporosis thrown in for good measure. The medical profession is making a killing—quite literally.

The little calf, the tiny lamb, the fluffy yellow chick, the pink piglet and the sweet little lamb born into this cruel world are unable to understand why nobody cares about them, other than when they are held down to have a numbered tag punched through their ear, or their tails docked, or their teeth removed, or they're lifted onto a conveyor belt to have part of their beak removed—and they think that maybe the human is going to be kind to them.

The land cries out, it’s topsoil depleted, trees cut down to make space to grow more soy and grain to feed these animals. Factory farming has ruined the lives of animals, the health of humans, and the sustainability of our planet. Yet so few people seem to care.

Have a look at these photos. These pictures depict how the average factory farmed animal is kept. Most of the meat and dairy sold in our supermarkets comes from places like this. Restaurant and fast food chains keep their margins high by buying from these establishments too. This is what is hidden from the consumer. Clever labelling with pictures of happy animals makes us think that everything is okay. But it’s not. And it never will be. Not until the consumer raises their hand and says, “No, I will not accept this, I will no longer support this.”

As individuals, we have a great deal more power than we think we have. Farmers will breed their animals based on our demand. If we simply choose to eat something else—something healthier and more sustainable to the environment, something that stops all this unnecessary suffering—we can tip the scales and restore balance to the world around us, a world that is quite clearly out of kilter. All we have to do is decide to be the change we want to see in the world.

EDIT: The purpose of this post is to educate the unaware on the origins of factory farming. Whereas I do not support the farming (i.e. exploitation) of any animals for food (or anything for that matter) AT ALL, no matter how the animals are farmed, I think it is important that those who consume animals and who are not “in the know” understand exactly where most of their meat and dairy comes from. Ultimately, my hope and dream is that people make an ethical connection to what is on their plate, realise that that piece of flesh was once a living, breathing being, and, if what they’re eating suffered in any way to get there (which every animal does, no matter how they are raised—slaughterhouse practices are brutal, rushed, and most certainly inhumane) they simply choose to leave that food off their plate and make kinder choices in future.

1 person found this helpful

The narrator

For some reason, the British accent turned me off to continue listening. Informative, but I couldn't finish it.

1 person found this helpful

On The Wrong Track

Any additional comments?

You only need to have little bit of common sense to see that monocultures are a bad idea. You only need a little bit of compassion to feel that the way modern farming practices treat animals is wrong.
You only need a little bit of conviction to change your grocery shopping habits, just a little at first, then perhaps snowballing in to finding yourself buying mostly local, mostly organic, mostly plant-based, and so on.

Start the journey and see where it takes you. I feel good because the food I eat is healthier AND because the food-systems I support with my purchases makes the world a bit happier.

Listen to this book if you want a catalyst for making the change.

5 people found this helpful

Painfully slow narration

Would you try another book from Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott and/or Julian Elfer?

I didn't like the narrator. He started at a good tempo (as in the audible sample) but slowed to an annoyingly pedestrian pace part way through. The narration shouldn't be so slow that it gives you time to contemplate each word.

Were the concepts of this book easy to follow, or were they too technical?

I was hoping for a little more education and a little less story.

How could the performance have been better?

The narrator needs to read sentences, not words. The reading had a very deliberate feel to it. It wasn't flowing. It just wasn't easy to listen to.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

For the most part, I enjoyed the author's writing, and I likely would not have returned the book had the narrator read the material at a faster pace. Given the title, I was expecting something a little more educational, and a little less biographical, and I was disappointed with how little I learned from the book. There are nuggets of interest buried in mountains of verbiage.

9 people found this helpful

Packed with Good Research

Author Plymbery has amassed a mountain of useful and alarming realities, statistics, and consequences about factory farming.

This book is a diverse array of investigative findings (most first-hand) that lead to the unavoidable conclusion that we need to stop being consuming the garbage from these farms and to stop wasting food.

Audio was poor, the content was good/scary

The audio kept slightly changing volume.
The content of the book was good. It's scary really, to know what is actually going on in the Industrial Farming sheds.
I hope more people listen to this and change their habits.

very superficial analysis

Many of the claims in this book are well documented by multiple studies (mass extinction of wildlife species, epidemics of obesity, rise of more resistant bugs due to overuse of antibiotics in industrial farms, etc). All of these issues, however , are also widely reported by the more serious news outlets. What is the point of reading a book that basically repeats what you can get from a Google search, a few Wikipedia entries and some NYT articles? This books basically repeats widely available information in an arrogant tone and through lots of stories that range from irrelevant to deeply unrelated examples. These stories are brought to make the narrative more dramatic, and they take a lot of space from what should have been extensive analysis of serious research. I expected a book that could explain the complexity of the latest scientific research on issues like the overuse of antibiotics in farms, I already know this is an issue, as most people who read the news. instead of deepening my knowledge on this, the book offered sad stories about dying children.
Some fundamental topics are not discussed at all. I only listened to half the book because I got tired of hearing a collection of sad stories with no scientific analysis. Most sad stories are about animals. Working conditions in intensive farming are not even mentioned. The author cares about animals, surrounding communities and consumers . Workers don't seem to exist. They are barely mentioned. Stories about the chickens owned by the author occupy more space than the analysis of working conditions.
a waste of time...

Eye opener

I will be changing the way we buy all our fish poultry and beef. The evidence is depressing and overwhelming.