Importance of Farms at the Industrial level and other purposes

Serena Cuoghi
Title of Professor of Biology

The domestication of animals for their upbringing by humans is an activity that has been perfected for thousands of years, and in which there is a world of complexities to solve and conditions to satisfy, to achieve an efficient productive development of its purposes, the main one being the establishment of a place for the rearing of a variable number of animals for the following purposes: 1) serve as a source of food for humans through of meats, eggs or milk; 2) obtaining raw materials for manufacturing, such as wool and skins; 3) for recreational activities, such as racing or riding horses and contact animals and 4) for breeding purposes for supply to other farms.

Among the animals that are usually raised on farms are mammals such as pigs, cows and bulls, horses, rabbits, goats and sheep, while that the most common birds are hens and chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks, although in recent decades, the raising of ostriches on farms has been a option with interesting growth, in the same way, the development of fish farms, that is, farms specialized in raising fish, has been increasing at a dizzying rate along with a very high technological implementation at your disposal, due to the great profitability of its results.

From the familiar to industrialization

The exponential population growth that humanity has had in recent centuries has led to the need to implement mass mechanisms for the production of food necessary for their sustenance, making the products obtained by small farms insufficient, which in turn had been abandoned, in most cases, after the arrival of the large factories and their promising salaries during the industrial revolution, still increasing plus the need for a model for obtaining on a large scale all the food products that provide the proteins necessary for our adequate feeding.

This is how there was no shortage of those who saw the incredible potential that the farms had if they were also industrialized, managing to reach the production levels necessary for the satisfaction of the market and generating, of course, the large expected profits, however, this has been a path on which the multiple questions, both ethical and those focused on the suffering of the animals themselves, as well as the specific conditions that cause it, thereby motivating the readoption of models on a smaller scale, which guarantee the quality of life of the animals and the least possible suffering in their sacrifice.

Care and Interaction

Owning a farm is no easy task, nor is it simply taking a group of animals and keeping them in a barn. Their care and control of all potential diseases that animals may suffer, according to their own species, and especially zoonotic ones - those that are shared between other animals and humans – these are activities that must be undertaken with extreme meticulousness and always under the proper supervision of veterinarians experts who have specialized both in the species of animals to be raised, and in the mass rearing models of the farms, since they have the technical knowledge essential to understand, analyze and decipher the multiple situations that can affect animals when they are confined to conditions that are not typical of their nature.

But not everything is negative in this system, one of the small-scale farm projects that has had the most boom in recent years, is the adoption of these as a model of life. family, with a smaller number of animals, but with a greater variety of species, thus establishing a permanent and much closer contact between the family members and animals, which also become an integrated part of the home, offering in turn in many cases this interaction to other people, contributing to their awareness of animals and their care, and even generating therapeutic support centers with the assistance that animals are capable of providing to humans with their Unconditional love.

The mechanism of self-sustainability

The creation of farms as a family lifestyle has also resulted in a greater orientation towards achieving an integral dynamic so that it is self-sustaining, through the communion between ancestral practices and cutting-edge technological contributions in environmental matters, thus generating spaces in this type of farms for the cultivation of plants necessary both for feeding the animals and the people who live there, together with the implementation of resources that allow the treatment and recovery of water and even the use of waste and fecal matter produced by all residents, for the generation of compost bins whose The resulting fertilizers serve the crops themselves, and there are even those who allocate part of this waste to processes of greater bacterial decomposition, of which they achieve get even the gas they use in their kitchens, while the rest of the energy is taken directly from the sun's rays by means of solar panels arranged on the roofs from the farm

References

Cordova, A., Ruiz, C. et al. (2009). Importance of animal welfare in animal production units in Mexico. REDVET. Mexico.

Garibai, S. v. (2003). Research in organic agriculture and its importance. I Mesoamerican and Caribbean Meeting and III Costa Rican Meeting of Farmers, Experimenters and Researchers in Organic Production. Costa Rica.

Heinzi, E., & Crimella, C. (1990). The importance of the environment in rabbit farms. Cuniculture, 15(84), 0074-77. Autonomous University of Barcelona. Spain.