How did antibiotics become such a central part of modern industrial agriculture? What are the consequences? Who’s rethinking practices around antibiotic use on farms, and what are they learning? Those are the big questions journalist Maryn McKenna wanted to investigate when she started her Project Fellowship with the Knight Science Journalism program in August, 2013.
Seventeen months later, she’s a lot closer to understanding the full impact of rampant antibiotic use in meat production—and it isn’t pretty. Farm animals in the U.S. get four times more antibiotics, by volume, than humans, helping to drive myriad bacteria like staphylococcus to evolve resistance to the drugs on a scale that “is now authentically a worldwide crisis,” McKenna says. “Disease bacteria have become so resistant that we are in fact flirting with the end of the antibiotic era.”
Drawing on reporting she conducted during her Fellowship year, McKenna is writing a book about antibiotics in farming and has also produced a series of short videos on approaches to reducing antibiotic use on farms (see several of the videos below). On top of all that…