Thanks. I don't disagree with any of that, and you especially make a good point about scale and its effect on employment.That said, I meant the terms strictly as people informally use them, and while this blog certainly isn't afraid to take on the social (and "external") costs of industrial-scale food production, I didn't want to get into that too deeply in this post. I do agree, though, that I could have alluded to that without bogging things down too much. So thanks, you've provided a service here.

Thanks also to jpeaceokc -- I should also have made that point.

Dan,

Excellent post, as usual. One small point of disagreement, though. You wrote "industrial beef is generally cheaper, it feeds a lot of people, and it employs many thousands."

For those of us living in the rural areas where CAFOs are sited, industrial beef is not cheap. In a community only a half hour to the north of where I live, 26 or so private domestic wells were contaminated-- with nitrate, ammonia, antibiotics only approved for use in livestock, and the hormone 17-beta estradiol-- by a single beef feedlot that housed 7000 head (at least, that's what he was permitted for). Thankfully the feedlot owner went bankrupt, or he'd still be operating today-- the state never fined the guy once, even though they definitively knew he was contaminating the surrounding air, groundwater, and 303(d) listed Snake River (see page 34, "Summary and Conclusions," of the monitoring project report). The neighbors had to shoulder the cost of buying bottled water to replace their contaminated well water without any help from the county, state, or federal governments. The ex-feedlot is now a Brownfields site that can't find a buyer to start cleaning it up because, in the words an employee of our Department of Environmental Quality, "the contamination is worth more than the land." And that's just one example of the environmental and public health costs of these operations-- costs the industry writes off as "externalities."

Then there's the contention that industrial beef "feeds a lot of people": that may be true, but what and how is it feeding people? In the first place, US industrial beef production and US industrial livestock production in general stock the fast food outlets that contribute to the obesity, diabetes, and cancer epidemics in developed countries. In the second place, these operations actually contribute to the problem of world hunger: unfair trade policies and taxpayer subsidies help put native farmers in developing countries out of business; American industrial food may take the place of the food those farmers were producing, but thanks to nutrient loss during storage and shipping, as well as nutrient stripping during processing, it is often of inferior qulaity. Stephanie Black's documentary "Life and Debt" makes this case beautifully in the context of the Jamaican economy.

An eye opening fact Howard Lyman, the "Mad Cowboy," told me: if we were to take the acreage we currently use to grow feed for livestock and convert it to growing food for human consumption, we could feed the world's hungry with no problem.

Finally, there's the "employment" argument. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I know there's a statistic out there showing that for every CAFO that starts up, many more small producers go out of business. The jobs that replace those owner-operator producers are menial, at best. Because they most often employ migrant workers who have few rights in this country, they pay wages that aren't high enough for employees to afford private health insurance, nor do the CAFO employers provide health insurance. This contributes to the already large financial burden that rural hospitals have to shoulder.

So, when we say industrial beef (and meat generally) is "cheap," we should probably be careful to qualify the statement: it's cheap at the checkout counter; outside of that narrow definition, it's the most expensive animal production system in the world.