Why Dairy Is Destroying Our Rivers, Lakes, and Streams

A new piece by The Guardian is highlighting the startling impact that animal agriculture, especially dairy farming, has on the environment.

“Climate change, water use, forest destruction, river pollution, floods, dead zones in the sea: the impacts of animal farming are massive and global; in many cases greater than those of anything else we do, explains the article.

The author details how subsidies encourage dairy farmers in the U.K. to produce milk in excess of demand and also observes that people’s attitudes about farming and eating meat have played their part in creating an incredibly unsustainable system that is literally destroying the planet.

“Imagine how we would respond if this were any other industrial sector. If rivers like the Culm were frequently trashed by toxic sludge from factories, there would be an outcry, he asserts.

These problems aren’t isolated to the U.K. The U.S. dairy industry has a record of egregious water pollution. In fact, animal excrement and other agricultural runoff from large-scale farms have polluted nearly one-third of rivers in the U.S.

To make matters worse, dairy cows are treated as mere milk-producing machines, and there is a wide spectrum of chronic diseases associated with dairy. Dairy is not only unsustainable, but also cruel and unhealthy, plain and simple.

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