Buy Organic Meat

There's this magazine called Natural Awakenings that I pick up for free from my local library. It has all sorts of good environmental articles. The edition I just got has a really great article about how we should buy organic meat and dairy. I would like to share with you some very persuasive reasons why.

• Animals raised under the category of organic cannot be fed antibiotics, genetically modified foods, growth hormones, or other such drugs. These animals eat organic feed. They are shown to be significantly healthier than non-organic animals.

• There is usually more humane treatment for animals on an organic farm. They sometimes are free-range, unlike factory animals which are treated like objects and trapped in small pens or cages.

• Sustainable farms recycle nutrients by using manure as fertilizer. However, industrial farms produce so much of this manure and usually don't utilize it so it becomes a health risk, able to contaminate wells and waterways.

• A lot of organic agriculture uses methods such as crop rotation to improve the fertility of the soil instead of synthetic fertilizers. Read my post here to learn about the dangers of too much fertilizer.
  

• Organic farms use 70% less energy than factory farms. Buying from local farms also reduces the energy used by transportation. Check out my post here to learn more about buying local.
  

Organic meat does cost more, I will admit. However, that is just another incentive to eat less of it. If you want to know the reasons that we should decrease meat intake, click here. So, what do you think about organic meat? Does the cost outweigh the benefits?

This image is from Electron Blue.