A factory farm near you...

A new website from advocate group Food & Water Watch shows us where factory farms are located along with the most polluting states for each industry. It also shows number of animals in each state for each industry. You can go further in detail by clicking on the number of sites or animals by county! This is a great educational tool.

Visit: http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/

From the website, we learn:

Cattle
Nebraska (644 sites) and Iowa (552 sites) are most polluting based on site/farm number
Texas (2.6 million cattle), Kansas (2.2 million cattle), and Nebraska (2.1 million cattle) are most polluting based on number of animals.

Pigs
Iowa leads the states with most number of sites (3,876) and number of animals (13.3 million pigs). As an aside, Iowa has a population of 3 million - that's four pigs per person in Iowa.
In a distant second is North Carolina (human population 8.8 million) with 9.8 million pigs.

Dairy
California is the number one most-polluting dairy state with 1.4 million dairy cows and 1,075 dairy farms.
No other state matches California with number of animals or number of farms: Wisconsin is a distant second with 189 farms and Idaho has 318,000 dairy cows.

Broilers/Chicken raised for their flesh
Georgia houses and raises 148 million baby birds (meat birds are killed at 6 weeks of age), Alabama is second with 99 million baby birds.

Even more shocking is the number of sites - Georgia has less than a 1,000 sites for 148 million birds. That's an average of 154,000 birds per site.

Egg-laying hens
Iowa, Ohio, California and Indiana all have more than 20 million egg-laying hens. Iowa, with 33 million birds has approximately 46 sites - that's a whopping 700,000 birds per site.
Pennsylvania houses 15 million birds on 75 sites. That means, on average, each farm is housing (indoors in battery cages) 200,000 birds.

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