Industrialized Agriculture

To start off, I'd like to define industrialized agriculture. Industrialized agriculture, or sometimes called factory farming, is a farming system in which certain industrial procedures are utilized or applied to farming methods to try to make them more efficient. Basically, this is supposed to raise the largest number of animals for the lowest possible cost by relying on organized processes involving machines to keep up a steady output of the animals or fruits and vegetables. The effects of industrialized agriculture may at first glance appear to be positive, but if you take a closer look, you can see some problems with this approach. What simply started out as a pursuit of efficiency to improve production for all farms has in the long run unintentionally resulted in a decline in economic freedom for a lot of farmers and an imbalance of economic power. This ends up favoring some of the dominant firms and more major industries, rather than the individual farm producers themselves. Now, industrialized livestock has become the world's largest supplier for meat and dairy products. In a statistic from 1996, industrialized agriculture was making up more than 43 percent of the total global meat production, and in the approximately 13 years since that time, it has definitely risen! Overall, throughout the world, more and more small farmers are being pushed out of the livestock market, unable to compete with multinational corporations. There are many reasons for the influx of corporate industrialized farming, but the main reason is because the world's population has increased and there are much more people consuming these products. This probably doesn't seem fair to those that are forced to find some other form of employment because much larger companies are able to quickly produce more and more. This, in my opinion, most likely lowers the quality of everything since the focus is on getting the most for the least amount of work, instead of focusing on getting the best quality out of everything.