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Intensive animal farming, industrial livestock production, and macro-farms, [1] also known as factory farming, [2] is a type of intensive agriculture, specifically an approach to animal husbandry designed to maximize production while minimizing costs. [3]
It uses between 20 and 33% of the world's fresh water, [81] Livestock, and the production of feed for them, occupy about a third of the Earth's ice-free land. [82] Livestock production contributes to species extinction, desertification, [83] and habitat destruction. [84] and is the primary driver of the Holocene extinction.
Pasture intensification is the improvement of pasture soils and grasses to increase the food production potential of livestock systems. It is commonly used to reverse pasture degradation , a process characterized by loss of forage and decreased animal carrying capacity which results from overgrazing , poor nutrient management , and lack of soil ...
It is responsible for somewhere between 20 and 33% of the fresh water usage in the world, [57] and livestock, and the production of feed for them, occupy about a third of Earth's ice-free land. [58] Livestock production is a contributing factor in species extinction, desertification, [59] and habitat destruction. [60]
Smithfield Foods hog CAFO, Unionville, Missouri, 2013. In animal husbandry, a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), as defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is an intensive animal feeding operation (AFO) in which over 1,000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year.
The development of quantitative methods for livestock production includes mathematical modelling based in plant-herbivore or predator-prey models to forecast and optimise meat production. An example is the Predator-Prey Grassland Livestock Model (PPGL) [7] to address the dynamics of the combined grass-animals system as a predator-prey dynamical ...
Nutrients are retained in the waste timber and livestock effluent and can be recycled within the farm system after use. Biogas plants are also able to use livestock manure to create biofuels, and these anaerobic digestion systems are known to capture methane in a usable form, while concentrating nitrogen, a valuable nutrient found in the manure ...
Egg laying hens: Cage-free egg production includes barn, free-range and organic systems. The UK is the largest free-range egg producer in the Europe. [21] Free-range systems are the most popular of the non-cage alternatives, accounting for around 57% of all eggs, compared to 2% in barns and 2% organic.