An Air Quality Specialist with the University of California Davis says the persistent red barn image of agriculture is misleading the public and needs to be dispelled if modern agriculture is to be free to meet the challenge of feeding the world.
Over the past 40 years the world's population has doubled and we can expect the world's population to increase by another 50 percent over the next 40 years.
Dr. Frank Mitloehner, a Professor and Air Quality Specialist with the Department of Animal Science at the University of California Davis, says, to feed that growing population, agriculture must be allowed to become as efficient as possible.
Dr. Frank Mitloehner-University of California Davis:
I think we are on the right track with respect to how we produce livestock today but we're not on the right track on how we communicate as to how we do it and why.
One of the stories that you hear our there is that in the 1950s and 1960s we had a much better agricultural production then.
Everything was greener and therefore less environmentally harmful.
The opposite is true.
We needed way more, three to four times more animals to produce the same amount of food and we did so under conditions that were not welfare enhancing.
Source : Farmscape