The summary says:
We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock
This the source of the problem, not the effect.
Yes, it does turn out that dosing meat animals with antibiotics even when they are not sick will increase their weight (and hence production) by about 10%, This is a small increase-- but the margin on meat production is low enough that it makes a difference in profitability, and hence if some of the farms do it, pretty much all of them follow.
So, we're losing the ability to use antibiotics because we're spraying them across the landscape, not to cure sickness, but as a fattening agent for cattle.
and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised.
This is actually a much smaller use of antibiotics. But, yes, the idea is that we can save money by not bothering with sanitation and health in cattle, but instead just dose them with antibiotics.
Anonymous wrote:
As ranching employs a significant number of people in some states, and agrobusiness has great clout with Congress, this just isn't going to happen. Plus, the average American is not going to accept such a sudden stop to his high meat intake.
Actually, it's a very small effect-- eliminating antibiotic use on cattle would have only a trivial effect on price. The problem is that the low margin on meat production means that if one cattle-production factory does it, everybody has to do so to keep up.