Cleaning up the CAFO Mess
The rise of factory farms in the U.S. didn't happen by accident. Corporate influence over our political system has created policies that subsidize and incentivize the industrial model and allow factory farms to pollute with impunity, even creating new revenue streams that greenwash their climate impacts. Our food system does not have to be this way. Members of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment are working to build sustainable alternatives to factory farms while advocating for policy reforms to dismantle the CAFO system and level the playing field for independent family farmers.
In the final episode of the series, hear from Frank James of Dakota Rural Action, Rebecca Wolf of Food and Water Watch, Bonnie Haugen of Land Stewardship Project and Noah Earle of Missouri Rural Crisis Center on how we got into this mess, and how to get out of it.
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How to Fight a Factory Farm is produced by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a member of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. Thank you to our intern, Anna Karns, for her assistance producing this series, and to Noah Earle for the use of his song “Fry an Egg” for our theme music. Learn more about the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment at fightfactoryfarms.org.
References, further reading and ways to get involved
Transcript
00:00:00 Frank
They want to talk about it being efficiency, but it really isn't about efficiency. It's about the preference of the policies for what type of farm, what type of production we're gonna have, and in the past decades, the preference of that policy has been for CAFOs and for large animal facilities. We're getting the type of animal production and agriculture in the food system that our policies are designed to deliver. You look at this and it's like this is the way they're set up. This is the food system we have. It's directly as a result.
00:00:32 Frank
So, if we want to change that we can do a lot in our personal lives and that's great. Everyone should do what they can. But at the same time, we have to convince our decision makers at the federal level, as well as all these other levels, to step in and say we want a different food system. We want a different system of agriculture and take away those things that are giving benefit to these large facilities and then creating programs that actually give benefit to the people who want to do it right.
00:01:17 Lilly
From the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, I'm Lilly Richard, and this is episode four of “How to Fight a Factory Farm.”
00:01:27 Lilly
Over the course of this series, we've covered just a fraction of the many problems associated with the factory farm system and highlighted a few of the stories of rural communities who have successfully organized and fought back.
00:01:40 Lilly
But we can't play whack a mole with new factory farms forever, especially as the industry continues to use government policies and money to expand as it finds new ways to undermine local control and target already marginalized communities.
00:01:57 Lilly
That's why the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment also works at the federal level, advocating for policy changes that actually get at the root of the problem. Why is our food system like this, and how do we fix it?
00:02:22 Rebecca
So, the modern U.S. food system is just really a product of US policies. I think that's pretty plain and simple. And by that same token, factory farms, water pollution, air pollution, high prices at the grocery store, low prices that farmers get, and corporate control, these too are all just real choices.
00:02:42 Lilly
That's Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food and Water Watch, who we heard from in the first episode.
00:02:49 Rebecca
American agriculture has just always been shaped by corporate interests and greed, and unfortunately fraught with lots of contradictions and exploitations. But factory farms would not have been possible without massive federal support for both livestock and corn and soy feed overproduction. They also wouldn't have been possible without environmental deregulation of the ag sector, something that we've just really seen deteriorate such that today no industry has really successfully escaped environmental regulation for air and water pollution as the ag industry.
00:03:23 Lilly
While the industry argument for CAFOs is their efficiency, factory farms are actually quite inefficient in many ways. From the disposal of waste to the use of water, land and energy, to the additional inputs needed compared to animals raised in smaller scale pasture-based systems.
00:03:42 Lilly
When animals are able to graze and forage, farmers can provide most of their diet from the farm and handle the waste from their animals in a more environmentally responsible way.
00:03:53 Lilly
In factory farms, feed is trucked in and provided to confined livestock and with thousands of animals to feed, the financial viability of factory farms depends on below-cost feed, made from a surplus of commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Here's Rebecca again on how we got to this point.
00:04:13 Lilly
If you listen to IATP’s previous series on the farm bill, some of this history will sound familiar.
00:04:20 Rebecca
So, there's a ton of other history, but we started pushing for overproduction and export through World War I, actually. This all came crashing down when Europe recovered and demand for U.S. wheat fell, so farmers no longer had an export market. So, you had low prices that then didn't stop overproduction.
00:04:40 Rebecca
Especially when farmers have already purchased equipment for inputs towards certain commodities, and so you really get this yo-yo effect on prices. In the 30s, from all that overproduction we have the human-made disaster of the Dust Bowl.
00:04:54 Rebecca
And of course, something had to be done about this, and by 1933 we get the first ever Farm Bill, seminal social farm programs, to support farmers, the environment and fair prices. And these ideas were pricing strategies for commodities, corn and soy, for example, grain reserves, soil building payments, and we get a lot of really wonderful ideas from that time.
00:05:17 Rebecca
We had them. They started getting chipped away right away, and until 1996 we got the “freedom to fail” Farm Bill. That's what farmers started calling it because it was originally the “freedom to farm” and, of course, prices fell through the floor right away after all of these supports were chipped away.
00:05:35 Lilly
You'll notice that 1996 was right about the time that factory farms really started to take off, and the trend of commodity overproduction, low priced feed and factory farm expansion has continued since then, with subsequent farm bills continuing to reward this approach.
00:05:54 Lilly
Later, farm bills also found new ways to subsidize CAFOs directly.
00:06:00 Lilly
Some of these include government backed loans to build new CAFOs or payments from the Environmental Quality Improvement Program, or EQUIP, which can pay factory farm operators up to $450,000 to install things like manure lagoon covers, animal mortality facilities or biogas digesters.
00:06:22 Lilly
Industrial scale manure digesters used at factory farms are increasingly being sold as a climate solution because they capture and utilize some of the methane created by massive manure lagoons.
00:06:36 Lilly
In recent years, incentives for digesters and the factory farm gas they produce have found their way into climate policies, like the Inflation Reduction Act and California's low carbon fuel standard.
00:06:49 Lilly
Energy produced by biogas may be eligible for renewable energy certificates and carbon offset credits, despite its negligible climate impact and failure to address the other major pollution problems caused by the huge amounts of the more are generated by factory farms. Here's Frank James from Dakota Rural Action.
00:07:11 Frank
So, you know the way about adjuster works is they cover a lagoon either with a hardcover or soft cover, and they create an anaerobic environment that produce the bugs in the anaerobic environment, produce methane, they capture that methane, and then, depending on how they want to use it, and most of them want to get it into the pipelines, the natural gas pipeline, because that's when they get the credits. So, it has to go through a process of being cleaned. It's an industrial process, and then it either gets trucked or a pipeline from the CAFO is built to the nearest place that can inject it into the pipeline.
00:07:49 Frank
So, the funding, there's funding that's coming from the federal government through the investment, the IRA, and its tons of money. And then in South Dakota, the governor's office on economic development is pumping millions of dollars into this process as well. And so, the new dairies, like I said, it's not about milk.
00:08:10 Frank
It's never been about milk, and now it's not about milk, but it is about manure; because to make more methane you need more manure, and to make more manure you need more animals. And the biodigesters are using only work on large systems.
00:08:26 Rebecca
So, the current iteration of manure digesters, I would argue, are the latest “get big, get out scheme” in agriculture. They're really being greenwashed as this solution to the climate crisis. But in reality, they're being sold to maximize and capture methane. This technology, dubious at best, and also further demands industrial agriculture and fossil fuel infrastructure.
00:08:50 Rebecca
More fossil fuel infrastructure. So, pipelines, gas carrying trucks, so local governments aren't equipped to handle these projects with the right equipment, with the right emergency response, dealing with the new waste coming into the community, dealing with, you know, things like roads, communities are being overwhelmed. There are tough consequences with digesters that we don't always talk about, or they aren't talked about in greenwashing media, that they are helping expand factory farms, that they're helping consolidate more of the industry. They're producing these public health impacts that are on top of factory farm impacts. So, factory farms already impact air, water, climate.
00:09:33 Rebecca
With digesters, we're concerned about more air pollution in the form of hydrogen sulfide and particulate matter. We're concerned about more runoff in the form of phosphorus and nitrates that lead to things like Blue Baby Syndrome.
00:09:49 Rebecca
We are concerned about even more climate emissions coming from that expanded factory farm, herd sizes, from all of the leakage that is just part of biogas production. And if we're, again, trying to maximize methane, that's where the leakage is a really, really big concern.
00:10:08 Lilly
Methane is a short lived but powerful greenhouse gas and livestock agriculture is a major source of it, both directly from ruminant animals like cows and from the manure lagoons at factory farms. Large feedlots can even be identified by satellite as methane hotspots. But the U.S. currently has no plans to regulate emissions from CAFOs and is instead doubling down on biogas digesters as the primary strategy for managing agricultural methane.
00:10:40 Rebecca
And so, we're just spending tons of money on these digester projects to feed a speculative climate pollution market. The truth is they are just a climate scam. So, one thing I always say, if you start paying factory farms to pollute, they're never going to stop polluting. And that's what digesters and climate markets do. So, they pay factory farms to pollute.
00:11:05 Lilly
So, while current policies fail to provide environmental protections and regulate the greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution from factory farms, we are also paying for false climate solutions that subsidized their expansion.
00:11:21 Lilly
Farmers who are actually trying to raise animals in a way that protects the land see the factory farm system as working against them. Here's Minnesota farmer and Land Stewardship Project member Bonnie Haugen.
00:11:36 Bonnie
First of all, I want to say that I believe, because I think this is more important than some of the other things to know about me, I really believe that farming is everybody's bread, butter and water; because what I do on my heels truly affects the water quality and quantity, which everybody uses.
00:11:57 Bonnie
I grew up in southeastern Minnesota on a 400-acre diversified farm, which means we had some dairy, beef, hogs and chickens.
00:12:05 Bonnie
And I was fortunate enough to get a four-year degree; and lived in Fargo for seven years, Shawno Wisconsin area for seven years, Prairie du Chien for a year. And then in 1993, my husband and I bought these 230 acres in my childhood neighborhood. We have been a grazing dairy, rotational grazing dairy, on these 230 acres since we bought it.
00:12:29 Bonnie
And first of all, being a rotational grazing dairy farm is different from many farms, whether they're confinement animal feeding operations or simply confinement farms.
00:12:42 Bonnie
When we were doing the dairy, they would get new fresh forage every 12 hours. Now that we're beef, maybe a day or two before they get a new paddock, but they still rotate very often. And then they leave a lot of the manure out there, whereas the confinement farms will bring the feed to the cow and then have to haul the manure away from the cow.
00:13:03 Bonnie
So that means that typically, though we still have feed costs, and especially because of winter, we have less building and machinery needs or costs for feeding and manure spreading. That would be one big difference. Also, it's typical and like you know, remember this is generalities because all farmers are different, but typically a grazing and dairy farm will have less veterinary bills and typically will have less labor.
00:13:33 Lilly
But with the growth of mega dairies in the Midwest that are able to profit from government policies and a new revenue stream of factory farm gas, the market has been flooded with too much milk, resulting in unsustainably low prices.
00:13:48 Lilly
In 2023, farmers had to dump unprocessed milk by the thousands of gallons because of the oversupply.
00:13:55 Lilly
And once again, smaller producers were hit the hardest.
00:14:00 Bonnie
Now, we had been a seasonal dairy on this rotational grazing dairy farm since 1993 and for 30 years we shipped milk. This is the first year we decided to not ship milk. We still have the animals, but we're now a beef farm instead of a dairy farm, basically the milk prices are so uncertain and you just get tired of, maybe one year milk prices are good. We can get caught up, you know, and they might be good enough to keep you going. But not good enough to really get ahead. Big case on no quantity displaces market availability for other smaller farms, for instance, milk plant capacity is limited to whatever they've built it for, so whenever a big farm gets more percentage of that, then there's less space for us. People have asked me. Bonnie, was that tough for you? I said yes. It was disappointing for me and my farm.
00:14:58 Bonnie
But we were fortunate enough. We did not have to sell cows. We did not have to sell the farm. We did not have to leave our community.
00:15:07 Bonnie
However, what really is sad for me is that it's just another one of the farms, it’s another example. It's another happening of what happens, not just here in the Midwest, but because of the consolidation and the corporate ag, this is a worldwide problem. It's not just here in southeastern Minnesota. And that's the part that really disheartens me the most.
00:15:31 Lilly
Bonnie also echoed concerns about the impacts of CAFOs and the entire factory farm system on the land and water, including worrying levels of nitrates in her own family’s well.
00:15:43 Bonnie
Big CAFOs are not simple farms. They are factory farms. The concentration of manure and water use is a big risk for our communities. The bigger the CAFO, the bigger the risk. Manure in a pit can leak or overflow, pipes and hoses can crack and leak.
00:16:02 Bonnie
And this is a special concern in coast theology, where I live, even when a CAFO does a good job of recycling water, they take water out of the aquifer faster than it can replenish.
00:16:14 Bonnie
That's a big concern for our environmental stuff. But the other thing that I think is just as big an issue, of course, the problem is exacerbated in a CAFO farm, is where you have a monoculture and if the soils, the cropping practices, are mismanaged, that really accentuates and accelerates the nitrate problem as well as other things by the way of the water running maybe soaking in or running off.
00:16:42 Bonnie
It's we're so interconnected, so much more interconnected than most people remember, and it's easily forgotten that we are people of society.
00:16:55 Bonnie
So, we do need to work with each other, and we're just interconnected that the better we can work together, the better we all are.
00:17:03 Lilly
Noah Earl, of Missouri Rural Crisis Center, shares many of these same sentiments.
00:17:09 Lilly
He's a musician, farmer and part owner of a small independent natural foods grocery store in Columbia, Missouri, that's managed to stay in business since 1965.
00:17:20 Noah
Which is sort of a miracle in today's landscape of grocery monopolies. And I've been farming in some capacity or other for about 20 years.
00:17:31 Noah
And sometimes I play music. So we had kind of a, you know, diverse fruit and vegetable production and then started raising our own meat because we were, you know, realize that if we wanted to eat the best quality meat that we could, it would be more affordable to raise it ourselves and also more meaningful and so gradually wee, you know, we started raising our own eggs, our own meat chickens, and then eventually, you know, pigs and sheep. And so, I realized that I had a pretty good knack for that. And it was, you know, raising animals for meat, it was a good fit for me because that grew up with a lot of animals. And I realized that I had a good feel for treating them well and humanely, while also realizing that, you know, they were going to eventually be slaughtered for human consumption, whereas a lot of people have a hard time holding those two things at once.
00:18:30 Noah
And so that's what it boils down to for me is, you know, being proud of producing something that is good for people and good for the planet.
00:18:38 Lilly
Part of what has allowed small operations like Noah's to thrive in Missouri are initiatives like MRCC's own Patchwork Family Farms, which purchases and distributes pork from independent family farmers in Missouri that meet sustainable and humane growing standards.
00:18:55 Lilly
Building a better food system means investing in alternatives to the CAFO system, but current federal farm policies tend to do just the opposite.
00:19:06 Noah
Historically, people raising cattle are not getting paid proportionately to what consumers are paying at the stores. And you know, without country-of-origin labeling, animals can come across the border cost $200 less per head. So that's not really fair for people raising food here.
00:19:26 Noah
So, you know the thing, same thing goes for, you know, people raising specialty crops. I know a lot of vegetable growers, people raising elderberries, fruit; if they have a late freeze, right when the peaches blow, they don’t have adequate insurance to cover that and to cover all the effort that it takes to maintain their orchards. You know, if you're not raising a commodity crop, then there's no there are systems in place and those commodity crops you know, are supported because that's what feeds the animals in confinement.
00:19:58 Noah
So, obviously, the Big 4 meatpackers have a stake in maintaining a low price for the commodities that they're using to feed their animals in a low-quality production model.
00:20:12 Noah
We have a food system where people are raising meat and vegetables the right way can't compete.
00:20:18 Noah
That's a problem, because those prices are not low because it's not expensive. They're low because someone's getting the shaft along the way. Not only the people that are involved in the whole production system and distribution, but also, you know, also the people that are consuming the food. And I think, you know, too often in political spheres, there's this idea that there's a golden age where everything was good and we got to hold on to what we have, but we can't actually move towards something better.
00:20:51 Noah
And you know, kind of the thing that I always cling to, you know, as the owner of a small business and farmer, is that we have to have hope that we can make positive change and you know the way to get there is baby steps.
00:21:08 Noah
It's not to say that we can, you know, overnight overhaul our food system. But why not give some incentives to improve local food distribution networks? And why not take a little bit of money away from subsidizing JBS hog farms and, you know, fund food hubs?
00:21:29 Noah
You know, we can turn the boat around, but one of the obstacles that we run into all the time is just denial that there's a problem and you know, obviously the corporations that are in control of the food system have a stake in pulling the wool over people's eyes about there being a problem.
00:21:47 Lilly
Both Noah and Bonnie, and Rebecca and Frank, who we heard from earlier, have traveled to Washington, D.C. as part of CFFE to meet with legislators, share their stories, and offer an alternative narrative to the one pushed by big meat and dairy companies.
00:22:04 Noah
And so, when I go there, I feel like, you know, I actually have something to say because a lot of these, a lot of people in politics, believe it or not know nothing about food production.
00:22:12 Noah
The Farm Bill alone is vast, let alone all of the other pieces of legislation that they are compelled to read and pass or not pass throughout the year.
00:22:25 Noah
And so, they need to be educated.
00:22:27 Noah
That we're rewarding people who are using taxpayer money to profit off of making messes that are bad for the environment, in a production model that's designed to, you know, produce a lot of poor-quality food.
00:22:42 Noah
So, you know, just baby steps in the direction of like, let's not support that. Let's incentivize doing things better than that instead of actually that incentivizes doing things the wrong way because it's like, oh no, we'll clean up your mess for you; and taxpayers don't know that that's happening. They just think whatever is happening is inevitable.
00:23:03 Lilly
The members of CFFE Advocate for common sense reforms like shifting Farm Bill conservation funds like EQUIP away from CAFOS and into actually sustainable and regenerative practices.
00:23:16 Lilly
With updating and enforcing antitrust laws to rein in the power of the big meat companies and restore market competitiveness, and actually applying environmental regulations to factory farms to stem the tide of toxic pollution.
00:23:33 Bonnie
We're not anti-farming. We want to support farming. However, we would like to be responsible and have a say into whether there's a factory farm in our neighborhood or not.
00:23:45 Bonnie
We remind us that what we do matters. As a farmer, I do not want unnecessary regulation, but if my actions are negative for society or the environment, I should be regulated and held responsible. But, in particular for the CAFOs, they are more of a business than a farm, so they should really be held to stricter regulations.
00:24:06 Lilly
Other proposals include restoring the type of commodity management programs that were discontinued after the 1996 Farm Bill, a way of ensuring fair prices for row crop farmers and ending the effective subsidization of CAFOs through underpriced feed. And a bill recently introduced in Congress and supported by CFFE, called the Industrial Agriculture Conversion Act, would help CAFO operators transition out of the factory farm model to more sustainable and humane farming. Whether plant based or pasture based.
00:24:42 Bonnie
I think a national moratorium would be a great thing. I think we have enough big CAFOs right now and let's put a pause on it. There are a couple of congressional people that have been proposing that and I think that would just be a great thing to put pause on this. Let's hold it.
00:25:02 Rebecca
At Food and Water Watch, we championed the Farm System Reform Act at the federal level since its inception. And actually, Senator Cory Booker, the lead on this bill, credits his understanding of the issues of factory farming to his visits to Iowa and North Carolina.
00:25:17 Rebecca
So, in 2019, we worked with him to introduce this bill that would place a moratorium on large factory farms, help farmers transition away from the model and enforce antitrust laws while actually making these integrators liable for their pollution. This has been a really important bill. It's been changing the conversation around our need to transition away from factory farms and helping galvanized communities across the country to join into this fight.
00:25:42 Rebecca
I think sometimes folks feel like it can be difficult to imagine these alternatives because the industrial system is all around us.
00:25:49 Rebecca
But we have a long history, a long movement history, of farmers and community members fighting back against corporate overreach. You know, corporations have just been setting farm markets and policies, and people should continue to join farmers, join food chain workers to help break up big ag’s stranglehold and rebuild a food system that works for everyone.
00:26:17 Rebecca
So, we're working toward a regional diversified food system with more farmers on land who feed our communities. And fighting back against the factory farm model. So you, you know, you saw in the farm crisis in the 80s, some of our members in CFFE building a movement to save the family farm and stop factory farms. So, there's a really long and experienced history here. And just like factory farms didn't come from nowhere, and neither did this movement and we will continue to fight factory farms.
00:26:49 Frank
This is the food system we have, so if we want to change that, we can do a lot in our personal lives and that's great. Everyone should do what they can. But at the same time, we have to convince our decision makers at the federal level as well as all these other levels to step in and say we want a different food system. We want a different system of agriculture.
00:27:08 Frank
And take away those things that are giving benefit to these large facilities and then creating programs that actually give benefit to the people who want to do it right.
00:27:22 Noah
You know, we can actually we can, we can do this. You know we can, we can cut into Tyson's bottom line and Hormel and together and with bringing more people into the fold raising animals the right way. There's room for, there's room for this to succeed.
00:27:41 Noah
And so, I will say that it feels meaningful, and you know we hope that we move in the needle a little bit. Because, as I said, vast change can occur just by baby steps being taken.
00:27:55 Noah
I know it's possible.
00:28:05 Lilly
“How to Fight a Factory Farm” is produced by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a member of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. Thank you to our intern, Anna Karns, for her assistance producing this series, and to Noah Earl for the use of his song “Fry an Egg” for our theme music. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform and share the show with a friend.
00:28:32 Lilly
Learn more about the campaign for family farms and the environment at fightfactoryfarms.org and support IATP's work at iatp.org/donate.
