Confiteri: The Effects of Industrial Agriculture Are Mounting

Dead zones in waterways from synthetic fertilizer runoff:

http://harvest.news/2018-03-01-big-ag-using-synthetic-fertilizers-nitrogen-causing-dead-zones-and-algal-blooms-waterways.html

Abuse of chickens on factory farms:

A whistleblower who once worked for the 2nd largest chicken producer in the U.S. has come forward to tell the world about the birds’ horrible living conditions. He also sheds light on the reason why the overwhelming majority of US chicken producers wash the poultry in chlorine before putting it on the market.

Yes, chlorine. You know, like swimming pools.

According to the whistleblower, ex-North Carolina chicken farmer Craig Watts, tens of thousands of ultra-plump birds are stuffed into oversized warehouses, where they are so fat their legs buckle under their own weight. The chickens, which can reach 9 lbs., are not exposed to natural light and often die before they reach maturity. Many of them are covered in their own feces. [1]

This, the whistleblower claims, is why 97% of American chickens are washed in chlorine after they are slaughtered, though there is no legal requirement to do so.

Watts said:

“The birds are too heavy to stand because they have been bred for breast meat and nothing else, so they spend their lives squatting. It’s like 2 toothpicks sticking out of a grape.

They spend 95% of their time sitting on the litter, a mixture of pine shavings and fecal matter from that flock and prior flocks.”

It gets worse. Watts says the birds’ living conditions are so cramped, they injure one another just moving about the warehouse.

“Their flesh would rot, and when you have them crammed in so tight, they will walk over other birds if they want to get to the food or scratch the others and cause a wound. It is awful.” [2]

. . .

Source: Julie Fidler, http://naturalsociety.com/whistleblower-reveals-why-us-chickens-washed-chlorine-1654/, opened 30 March 2018

The monks of Valaam Monastery can show us a better way if we will let them:

The orchards of Valaam… So much has been said and written about them. But the flood continues of exclamations and puzzled questions about how people can grow vegetables and exotic fruits in conditions described as “extremely high-risk agricultural”, and even produce amazingly abundant harvests. What is the secret? Do the Valaam monks know something that is hidden from the rest of the world? What gives them the strength to transform nature and create with their hands paradisal foliage on bare rocks?

Growing potatoes, making cheese, and farming trout are all vitally important, but not the most important thing for monks. As opposed to strong collective farms and agribusinesses, the brothers’ agricultural obediences have, to use modern language, different ideological foundations—nothing in the monastery is done without prayer and hope in God’s will, and everything is directed toward the acquisition of humility and peace of soul.

. . .