From Ethicurean:

Here’s a number to knock you out of that mid-day stupor: every year, taxpayers shell out between $7.1 billion and $8.2 billion to subsidize or clean up after our nation’s 9,900 confined animal feeding operations. That’s the finding of “CAFOs Uncovered,” a new report released earlier today by the Union of Concerned Scientists. That amount, for comparison’s sake, is nearly 400 times larger than the Farm Bill proposal for new funding for organic research and extension.

(A confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) = a factory farm.)

More good news:

That’s not it, either: author Doug Gurian-Sherman, a UCS senior scientist, estimates that another $4.1 billion in taxpayer dollars has been spent over the years to deal with leaking manure storage facilities. Rural communities get an additional kick in the keyster since CAFOs, spewing odor and flies, have reduced rural property values by — get this — an estimated total of $26 billion. And in a final blow, Gurian-Sherman emphasizes that if the government actually tried to “adequately” manage the vast amount of CAFO waste, as opposed to — well, who knows what they’re doing now, but it’s certainly not adequate — “the figure would undoubtedly be much higher.”

Read the rest here.

People sometimes accuse environmentalists and animal rights-types of wanting to interfere with the “free market,” but as this makes clear, and as people like Michael Pollan have shown in exhaustive detail, our current food system is anything but the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.