Transfarmation, p.1
Transfarmation, page 1
Dedicated to Bo, Henrietta, and Elsie, and all who suffer at the hands of factory farming.
Better days are coming.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE: THE FARMERS
CHAPTER ONE From Chickens to Hemp and Dog Rescue
CHAPTER TWO From Chickens to Mushrooms
CHAPTER THREE From Chickens to Greenhouses
CHAPTER FOUR The Last Pigs
PART TWO: THE ANIMALS
CHAPTER FIVE The Year of Henrietta the Hen
CHAPTER SIX Felix the Pig
CHAPTER SEVEN Norma the Cow
PART THREE: THE COMMUNITIES
CHAPTER EIGHT Eastern North Carolina Communities of Color: Rosemary and René
CHAPTER NINE Immigrants: Sandra, Leticia, Marisol, and Carmen
CHAPTER TEN Refugees: Tom, Mykia, and Maykeu
CONCLUSION Harvesting Change: A Vision Toward a Humane, Sustainable, and Just Food and Farming System
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
IN THE SPRING OF 2014, I found myself sitting across from a man who was by every definition my enemy. His name was Craig Watts and he was a chicken factory farmer, raising chickens for slaughter. My career is devoted to protecting farmed animals and ending factory farming. Until that point, I’d spent my whole life working against everything Craig Watts stood for. Now I was sitting in his living room.
As I sat there, a thousand questions were swirling in my mind. I’d been trying for years to get footage from inside a chicken factory farm at a time in our country when seeing inside a chicken farm was—and still is—nearly impossible. I’d failed every previous attempt.
That day, I’d driven from my home in Atlanta to Craig’s home in rural North Carolina. Before I left, I gave my husband the address and told him, “If I don’t come back, look for me rotting away in the chicken litter.” I was convinced I was heading into an ambush, not knowing my life would soon be changed forever.
Prior to our meeting, Craig Watts had been raising chickens for twenty-two years in factory farms for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the United States. When Craig was a young adult, he had searched for a way to stay on the land that had been passed down in his family for five generations, in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. There were very few jobs in the area, so when Perdue came to town and offered him a contract to raise chickens, it sounded like a dream come true. He took out a $200,000 loan from the bank to build the chicken houses while Perdue agreed to pay him for each flock he raised. With that money, he planned to pay off the loan, as you would a mortgage.
But soon the chickens started to get sick—it was a factory farm, after all. Twenty-five thousand chickens were stuffed wall-to-wall in darkened warehouses, living on their own feces, breathing air thick with toxic ammonia. Many of the sick chickens died, and you don’t get paid for dead chickens. Craig started to struggle to pay off his loan. His paychecks got smaller, but the bills kept coming. Soon he wanted out, but he’d been trapped. Now he was all but an indentured servant, and if he stopped, he’d risk losing everything.
By the time he and I met, Craig had reached a breaking point. His payments seemed never-ending, and so did the illness, death, and despair of the chickens. He was ready for a change. Through late afternoon conversations, and much soul-searching, I realized that I had overlooked an ally. I learned that chicken factory farmers wanted to see factory farming change about as much as animal rights activists did. We had been overlooking each other all these years.
Throughout the summer of 2014, I came back many times with my filmmaker partner Raegan Hodge to learn from Craig. I walked those warehouses as Craig explained the problems, as he picked up the chickens who had died or had to be killed because they had messed-up legs, trouble breathing, difficulty walking. All of these horrors, all of our conversations, were captured on film.
In the winter of 2014, after months of filming and learning to trust each other, Craig and I did something neither of us expected to do. We decided to release the footage together. This was a huge risk. He feared losing his income, his land, and having his neighbors hate him. But he did it anyway. The New York Times broke the story. Within twenty-four hours, a million people had seen our video about the horrors of chicken factory farming. Our story went viral. Suddenly, we had a megaphone. Our unlikely alliance put the truth about factory farming on a global platform.
Too often we become so entrenched in our values, in our fight, that we don’t stop to consider what we might have in common with the so-called opposition. We jump straight to the differences. And it is often the tyranny of small differences that holds progress hostage. Craig was the very first chicken factory farmer I ever connected with, but there would be many more.
In the United States, we still hold close an image of a quaint, independent family farm. But what actually exists is industrial animal agriculture, a system that does more harm than good. If you cross the country, no matter what state you are in, you’ll find a similar story. There is a person in a poor rural county who is searching for a way to stay on the land that had been passed down in their family for generations, searching for a way to make their living off the land and live out their version of the American dream, one in tune with nature and set to the soundtrack of crickets, cicadas, warblers, and chickadees. With few jobs around, the chicken industry’s offer sounds like a dream come true. This farmer often ends up just like Craig.
Meeting Craig would change my trajectory as an activist. We’d become close friends, collaborators, and conspirators in the decade that followed, working to dismantle factory farming piece by piece. We’d see that we’d been fooled. As Craig said: “We were red ants and black ants trapped in a jar. And then someone would shake the jar and we’d start fighting each other. But we’d never stop to question—who’s shaking the jar?” And I’d ask, “Why are we trapped in this jar?” The years ahead, we’d look to smash the jar and remove the shaker’s power. We’d look to reform our food system away from industrial animal agriculture and remove the power of Big Animal Agriculture—the great monopolies with strongholds over our political and economic systems.
If humans tried to design a farming system that was horribly cruel, dirty, and unjust, we could not have come up with anything worse than factory farming. We inflict unquantifiable suffering on billions of sentient beings—many of them proven to be more intelligent than the companion animals we share our homes with. This normalized atrocity is something I’ve had to come to live with. I don’t accept it, but I do endure it out of necessity.
Eighty billion land animals (excluding fish, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, and the like) come to live and die for our palettes and preferences, in the most horrific conditions, those that would result in jail if the same were done to a dog or cat.1 Yet instead it is simply the way business is done.
That’s not just a problem for the animals. Collectively, farmed animals emit more greenhouse gases than the world’s planes, trains, and automobiles put together. A third of our precious arable land is used to grow feed for factory-farmed animals rather than food we humans could eat directly. We spray this land with immeasurable amounts of chemicals and cut down ecologically important habitats like rainforests—mostly notably right now with the clearing of the Amazon—all to feed and “house” animals on factory farms. Put simply, industrial animal agriculture is one of the most destructive industries on our planet.
The way things are going, my children will never see a wild polar bear or elephant. In precisely my lifetime, the total number of birds, amphibians, mammals, and reptiles in the world has halved. One of the main culprits? Industrial animal agriculture.
Added to that is the fact that this food system keeps farmers in soul-crushing debt, communities sick and workers living in fear with little freedom. It truly is the most horrific system we could have come up with to deliver our calories.
But one can’t just smash a jar before thinking about solutions. What happens when you smash the jar? Where do we go from here? How do we rebuild a world of our own design? Craig and I had an idea, and we weren’t the only ones. Around the country, fed-up farmers were starting to ask: What else? What else can we do with this land, these structures, our lives?
Mike Weaver in West Virginia was another one of the first farmers I met. Fed up with the debt, death and despair of factory farming, in 2018, he gave up the business of raising chickens for good and made the transition to repurpose his warehouses to grow industrial hemp. In doing so, he employed far more people (adding jobs to the struggling local economy), used a fraction of the water and energy, provided a healing rather than harmful product to consumers, made a lot more money, and, of course, caused no animal suffering. It was an experience like no other to see this transformation taking place before my eyes. I had worked with Mike to expose what was happening on his chicken farm a couple of years earlier, and now he was on the other side, actively building an alternative, blazing a new path, and serving as a model for what the future could look like for factory farmers all over the world.
As I started to travel the country looking for solutions to end factory farming, I met farmers rolling up their sleeves, as they always do, ready to innovate, create and work hard. I heard their stories of hardship, but also hope. And farmers weren’t the only ones I met who were affected by the destructive path of factory farming and looking for a way forward. I met the communities who were also affected but had no say in the surrounding farms’ construction or ongoing existence. I observed the conflict this created between farmers and communities—another case of red ant versus black ant in a shaken jar. I also saw the animals. The animals who suffered. I looked into their eyes while they were clearly in pain. I even met those who through some cosmic grace escaped and now enjoyed their freedom in homes or sanctuaries.
Then the most unexpected of events accelerated our development of a solution: a global pandemic. The pandemic shone a spotlight on factory farming, exposing it as a fragile and cruel system in desperate need of an overhaul.
THE NEXT PANDEMIC
In the new year of 2020, my spouse, an epidemiologist who works on viruses, sent me a disturbing article. He and his colleagues were tracking a novel virus in China, seemingly emerging from wet markets in the city of Wuhan. On January 17, I wrote a blog that asked the question, “Are We on the Cusp of a Pandemic Flu?”2 At the time it was meant to be a provocative title, drawing attention to how humans’ treatment of other animals puts our health at risk. Never did I expect the answer to my question to be an earth-shattering yes.
While our lives became suspended by a virus, my work became busier than ever, albeit now it was conducted from my basement and over Zoom. The virus thrust a mirror in front of society, exposing industrial animal agriculture, the system through which 99 percent of meat, eggs, and dairy products are produced in America. We saw how this food system stood on a house of cards.
For years, global health experts have pointed to the livestock sector as the most likely origin of a pathogen that could spark a pandemic. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has even stated that in terms of infectious diseases, “livestock health is the weakest link in our global health chain.”3 In fact, an FAO report found that 70 percent of diseases that have emerged in humans in recent decades are “in part, directly related to the human quest for more animal-sourced food.”4
We may never know exactly where the virus that causes COVID-19 originated. But we’ve long known that the way we farm animals for food today—crammed indoors by the thousands, sickened by their filthy surroundings, stressed beyond belief, mutilated as common practice, and constantly drugged at low doses—creates the perfect incubator for new diseases like COVID-19 to emerge, spread, strengthen, and leap to human hosts. Similarly, the destruction of habitat to make way for animal factories raises the risk that a virus will jump from an animal raised for food to wildlife or to humans.
It’s happened again and again, and it’ll happen in the future. It’s not a question of if, but when. Because big farms lead to big flu.5
Indeed, public health experts have sounded the alarm for decades about the risk of a pandemic. Bill Gates called the COVID-19 pandemic a once-in-a-century event.6 While it’s true that the last devastating pandemic happened around one hundred years ago, the chance of another is unaffected by the one we are having now. It’s like a game of dice: rolling “snake eyes” doesn’t bear on whether you’ll roll ones again. We’re rolling the dice faster than ever, and now we know what happens when our luck runs out.
COVID-19 has taken an extraordinary toll on human health and the economy. This fact should be reason enough to reimagine our global food system. Combine pandemic risk with the multitude of other harms that industrial animal agriculture inflicts on our health and the environment—chronic disease epidemics,7 antibiotic resistance,8 climate change,9 and deforestation10—and we’ve got what amounts to the most pressing public health and ecological crisis of this century.
The United Nations sums up “the world’s most urgent problem” in one word: “meat.”11
With meatpacking workers standing shoulder to shoulder while the rest of the nation stood six feet apart, it was no surprise that slaughterhouses became COVID-19 hot spots. The first story to hit the headlines came from a Smithfield slaughterhouse in South Dakota early in the pandemic. This plant became one of the nation’s largest hotspots for COVID-19. Within months, every major poultry company was reporting processing problems owing to worker outbreaks and related worker shortages.12 The higher rates of COVID among slaughterhouse workers (many of whom are people of color or recent immigrants) spotlighted the compounding effects of racial inequity—how living on the margins exposes someone to greater harm from illnesses like this. Tragically, few populations are more vulnerable than these workers and their families.
When it comes to the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat, the price at the grocery store or restaurant is never a fair reflection of the true cost. In factory farming, risks and liability are mostly externalized by the industry, and most often to the most vulnerable among us. This damage, this harm, is borne by many—from the workers to the animals to the farmers. The industry makes extraordinary profits off this harm by externalizing risk and liability. Externalities are the root of the business model, and they’ve driven the spectacular success, power, and wealth of this industry. But because these costs are hidden from those who purchase the products, consumers don’t affirmatively consent to the harm caused by eating animals and their products.
The workforce in slaughterhouses, the communities living around factory farming, and, in recent years, refugee communities who’ve been brought in as the next generation of farming communities are some of the most affected. These vulnerable communities lack political and social capital, and they have few choices and little ability to fight against the harm that factory farming imposes upon them.
In slaughterhouses, some immigrant workers have documentation and some don’t, but regardless of their situation, if they complain they take risks. When people die on the job, the federal agencies don’t respond 85 percent of the time, according to Civil Eats.13 Agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work in the country, ranking third among all occupations in fatal injuries together with forestry, fishing, and hunting. According to Civil Eats, animal confinement workers are subject to long-term lung and acute respiratory injuries from their work environments and are exposed to asphyxiating gases from manure.
Black communities in the South, many of whom are descendants of enslaved people, are also disproportionately affected by factory farms. Maps of North Carolina clearly show higher clusters of factory farms surrounding historically Black and low-income rural communities. Studies indicate that in some communities in North Carolina, for example, there are ten times more concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in low-income and Black and Brown neighborhoods than in higher income, whiter areas.14 This is a clear example of environmental racism, a form of institutional racism where environmental hazards and harms are disproportionately distributed in and around communities of color. Where once these communities enjoyed the land that meant so much to their families’ freedom and history, that enjoyment is now ruined. Now they are surrounded by hog and chicken farms, unable to even leave their homes without suffering the smells, flies, and even spray from the farm’s waste.
As the pool of people willing to take on the perils of working in factory farms and slaughterhouses diminishes, the industry has begun to recruit a new, unsuspecting crop of factory farmers: refugees fleeing persecution in war-torn countries. From Burma to Cambodia to Laos, families looking for opportunity and escape come to the US and take on factory farming, only to find themselves trapped and unexpectedly in danger again.
Though farmers, workers, and animals have been suffering for decades, the system responsible for their collective oppression was thrust into the public eye during the pandemic. The attention it received was unprecedented, as was the desire for change.
TRANSFARMATION
During this time of great loss and uncertainty, the people closest to factory farming—farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and communities living next to factory farms—who had already begun to build a new way, accelerated their efforts. They were tired of feeling vulnerable to the fragility and oppression of factory farming.
In late 2019, Mercy For Animals, the organization I lead, launched a new project. We called it the “Transfarmation Project,” and it aimed to be a platform where we could support farmers wanting to make the transition from animal agriculture to plants. It built on the work Craig and I started all those years earlier. But it ended up being so much more. In the years that followed, I would continue my curious journey through rural America, meeting farmers and together rolling up our sleeves to set out a road map for a new rural economy—everything from hemp to mushrooms to lettuce and whatever other innovations we could dream up.
