Taubes, Pollan, and Weston Price would probably all agree on the health aspects, especially their distaste for the highly manufactured Western diet. I've never seen a life cycle analysis of factory farming techniques versus the old fashioned ways - for example how much does grass-fed/grass-finished beef cost relative to the feedlot grain-fed variety? If you got rid of the manufactured fertilizers, processed animal feed, antibiotics and supplements would the cost of meat increase or decrease? How about dairy? I have no clue. What if you add in the cost of fouled water supplies,
increased need for expensive health care, natural gas depletion, soil depletion, .... Oh rats, I'm getting ahead of myself...

I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a system level view of this; we can't regard it as an isolated subsystem.

Chris