The New York Times and Washington Post are getting pushback for recent editorials defending large-scale factory farms.
Some environmental groups argued the columns made one critical assumption, that there is no other option.
Peter Lehner, sustainable food and farming program managing attorney for the advocacy group Earthjustice, noted while the Times and Post’s editorials claim factory farms are needed to keep up with the demand for meat products, industrial agriculture does not feed the world. Rather, he said, It feeds itself, perpetuating a cycle of overproduction and environmental degradation.
He added U.S. taxpayers foot the bill, sending tens of billions of dollars a year to large corporations.
“There are huge numbers of subsidies to the livestock industry.” Lehner pointed out. “The hamburger that you pay (for) is only a fraction of the true cost, as reflected by what taxpayers pay.”
It is important in a state like Utah, where people eat the third-highest number of burgers in the country and about eight in 10 farms are family owned. The New York Times editorial said the crop yields of small farms cannot meet the world’s daily needs. And the Washington Post editorial urged readers to save the planet by not eating free-range beef. It said moving livestock off pastures and into high-density operations conserves valuable farmland.
Lehner insisted a better way to make more farmland available is to stop growing inefficient crops. For example, it takes 15 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. In Utah alone, 27,000 acres were used to harvest grain in 2023.
“We use almost 60 million acres, an area the size of Indiana and Illinois combined, to produce biofuel,” Lehner explained. “Where we could produce the same amount of energy with a couple hundred thousand acres of solar panels.”
Lehner worries doubling down on industrial agriculture, which mostly produces commodity crops like corn, soy and sugar, for highly processed foods, ignores other meaningful reforms like reducing waste. He pointed out one-third of all food produced in the U.S. ends up in landfills.
“Let’s try to not have taxpayer subsidies for inefficient products,” Lehner urged. “Ensure that we have a food system that produces nutritious food, not one that gets us sick. And we spend a trillion dollars a year in our health care system because of diet-related disease.”
