A few weeks ago, we introduced our readers to Patrick Holden, a farmer and the director of the UK-based Sustainable Food Trust. This weekend, Patrick is bringing together hundreds of scientists, advocates, business leaders, and journalists for a three-day conference in San Francisco on the True Cost of American Food. He points out that while food in the developed world is cheaper than at any other point in history, the resources required to grow and make it—and the environmental and health impacts of doing so—are costing governments and taxpayers a great deal.

This week, we’ve asked Holden to talk about industrial meat production and its costs to society.

What are some of the costs of industrial meat production that you’d like to see quantified and why?

The cost that’s most potentially interesting to the public is the health cost. Because everyone is interested in their health. And if it becomes clear that one of the most significant hidden costs of our industrialized livestock system is the impact on public health—and that we as a society have adopted a policy of “cause the damage now and pay more later” and that we pay literally with our health—it is potentially really serious.

Antibiotics resistance is one of the most pressing issues. It is recognized internationally that we’re on the threshold of a post-antibiotics era and while we can’t prove that antibiotics used in livestock systems are the leading cause of this, with 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. going to livestock in some way or another—under the spurious title of “therapeutic,” when actually the truth is they’re being used mainly for growth promotion purposes or to suppress diseases which would otherwise make those systems unviable—you can see that this is starting to be of government interest. Imagine a situation where all the antibiotics of last resort—which are propping up public health everywhere in the world—become useless. And we’re quite close to that now.

We’d also need to look at the cost of infectious diseases linked to industrial livestock production, the quality of the meats not being as health promoting as grass-fed meat, residues of various kinds finding their way into the meat, and the cost to the environment—both of the production itself (particularly water pollution resulting from nitrate pollution) and of the cropping systems that feed the livestock (more nitrate pollution from the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used to grow acres and acres of corn and soybeans). Another major cost is greenhouse gas emissions, which impact climate change.

I’m not saying just getting the data and monetizing the data is a panacea which is going to solve this. But, in this era, good data is important and it’s regarded as important by governments, for instance. We hope that this conference will be adding to the sum of good data out there.