What are CAFOs?

With an ever-expanding global population, and continually declining number of farmers producing fresh food, modern agriculture operates with necessary efficiencies often overlooked by critics. A long-standing false representation of agriculture has made consumers skeptical of how their food is produced. The purpose of this article is to explain what concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are, how they adhere to animal welfare priorities and their essential role in producing adequate food for our population.  

What are concentrated animal feed operations?  

Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs) are defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confided situations.” Feed is brought to animals, and they are confided for a total of 45 days or more in a 12-month period.  

A facility must be classified as an AFO before it is classified as a CAFO. Operations of a CAFO vary by animal. Swine, chicken and ducks are kept indoors for their whole lives, while cattle are raised on pasture for the first two thirds of their lives, then are often brought to feedlots for the finishing phase.   

Benefits of CAFOs 

Track illness and care for animals  

When animals are accessible to producers and they can check on their animals often and ensure they are healthy. Illness is caught earlier, therefore preventing animal suffering or widespread disease outbreaks. Animals can be removed, treated in a pen separate from others with proper care and reintroduced into their herd when well. Tracking illness benefits animal welfare, food safety and operational economics. Preventing widespread illness is a high priority for livestock producers.  

“If anything goes wrong with the animal, whether it shows signs of illness or discomfort, that animal can be taken out of the herd and put into a separate pen where trained personnel or veterinarians can provide needed care,” Dr. Frank Mitloehner, director of the CLEAR Center at UC Davis explained. 

Control manure  

Controlling manure is important for multiple reasons. First, manure is a valuable and useful byproduct of raising livestock. Manure is land-applied to fields as natural fertilizers. Producers may apply it to their own fields or sell it to be used by nearby farms. 

Additionally, anaerobic digesters offer an opportunity to process manure, capturing the methane it emits and using it to generate energy. The energy can be sold into the electrical grid, creating an additional income source for producers. The organic material left after processing manure, called digestate, can be land-applied to fields as fertilizer. Dr. Mitloehner explains that this is another opportunity for producers to create valuable byproducts, therefore reducing resource waste of nutrients consumed by the animal and excreted.  

Predator reduction and disease control  

Keeping animals protected benefits animal welfare and producers bottom-line. When animals are raised in CAFOs, they are protected from predators. This applies not only to other predators who may target animals, but also to diseases that spread easily when livestock encounters wild animals, especially birds.  

Chickens are an excellent example. As an animal with many predators, they are vulnerable if they are raised in a pasture setting. Additionally, chickens have a tendency to scrape through their manure and eat it, creating polluting dust and food safety concerns. By housing chickens indoors, their manure is collected and carried out of barns on conveyor belts multiple times per day. This practice also keeps eggs as safe as possible. Because eggs are porous, it is crucial they do not come into contact with manure, or they can spread food borne pathogens.  

“If you put chickens on a pasture, they’re exposed to wild fowl that spread disease, such as Asian Influenza,” Dr. Mitloehner said. “Chickens are very easily infected; no one would put thousands of chickens outside. If you saw chickens outside, you’d see all kinds of predators lined up right outside their fence. That’s birds of prey, foxes, coyotes, anything that likes to eat chickens. It’s not something you want to see.” 

Optimal diets provided on CAFOs 

Producers work with nutritionist experts to create diets for their herds that will allow them to grow at a safe rate while creating a desirable product for consumers. Cattle, who first arrive to feedlots, have different nutritional needs that than those who are about to be moved off — each animal group receives a targeted, specialized diet.  

Additionally, this allows producers to minimize food waste. Because cattle are ruminants — meaning they have complex stomachs with four compartments — their digestive system is much more complex than monogastric animals such as swine. This means cattle can digest food that humans cannot, such as crop byproducts and various grasses found on pastures.  

Utilizing Marginal Land  

Dr. Mitloehner explained that a common misconception of CAFOs is they are using land that would otherwise be cropland, he explains that the opposite is true. There are two kinds of agricultural land: arable and marginal.  

Marginal land makes of two-thirds of all land in the U.S. This land is not suitable for crop growth because of its soil type, climate and precipitation levels, among other factors. Livestock is an efficient way to make use of this land to produce food, because they are the only animals that can digest what grows on this type of land.  

Because cattle are ruminants, they are able to digest the grass that grows on arable land, which is high in a compound called cellulose. Dr. Mitloehner further explains that humans can only digest cellulose is if it is derived from ruminant products who digest it and convert it into a digestible element — such as meat or dairy products.   

Arable land, then, makes up the rest of U.S. agriculture land. This land is used to grow crops for direct human consumption, processing for goods (such as ethanol or processed foods) or given to livestock as feed.  

CAFOs allow us to produce enough food