Coming October 2 from the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, a new four-part podcast series about factory farms, and the farmers and rural organizers fighting to end them: How to Fight a Factory Farm.
Listen to the trailer and subscribe to the series on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Transcript
00:00:00 Barb Kalbach
In the late 90s, this guy came to our house and he wanted to talk to us about putting up a confined animal feeding operation. So he's talking to me. He's describing, you know, what they would do. They would build the – no, I'd build the building. Yeah. Well, how much is that going to cost me? And they'd bring the hogs out and we'd get to raise them. And I said, well, when they go to market, then how much do we get per hog? And he said “five dollars!” Real cheerfully. He said that real cheerful: “five dollars.” And I’m going, “five dollars?”
00:00:33 Lilly Richard
Over the past few decades, animal agriculture in the U.S. has changed dramatically. Small- and medium-scale diversified family farms, and the businesses that supported them, have been undercut, priced out and, in many cases, replaced by a corporate-controlled vertically-integrated system of industrial scale concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, otherwise known as factory farms.
00:00:59 Rhonda Perry
Farming is an incredible livelihood and farmers have to be so many things. So we are the caretakers of the animals. We have to be veterinarians. We have to be economists. We have to be soil scientists. We have to predict the weather, which of course no one really can do. And in some ways, we have to be big risk takers. You know, it is not for the faint of heart.
00:01:25 Bonnie Haugen
But big CAFOs are not simple farms. They are factory farms. The concentration of manure and water used is a big risk for our communities. The bigger the CAFO, the bigger the risk.
00:01:36 Vanessa Namken
This is not a family-owned operation. It is a multi-million dollar corporation that we are funding. They're passing off only the part that they want you to know about. And so people think that, “oh, this is what they say is the best thing that it's going to happen, and so this is why we need to do this.” And it's like, no, wait a minute. Wait a minute, you need to look at all sides of it, and once you do, then they're like, “yeah, no, that isn't good.”
00:02:03 Lilly Richard
Factory farms are notorious sites of animal cruelty and pollution. But the story here isn't about environmentalists or animal rights activists versus farmers. In the Midwest, a movement against CAFOs has been growing ever since they began proliferating in the 1990s, and some of the strongest opposition to factory farms is coming from longtime farmers and rural residents who are fighting for clean water, fair markets and a better food system for themselves and their families.
Coming this fall from the campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, a new four part podcast series: How to Fight a Factory Farm.
00:02:46 Rebecca Wolf
At any given moment in the US, there are 1.7 billion animals living on factory farms in this strict confinement, which is a 47% increase in just the past two decades.
00:02:58 Rhonda Perry
We lost 80% of the hog farmers in the country. We started with 388,000 and we lost 80% of them. In Missouri, that number was 90%.
00:03:08 Barb Kalbach
There would be 10 million gallons of liquid manure produced in those seven buildings every year that would be hauled up and down our gravel roads. Drip, drip, drip to fields in the surrounding communities.
00:03:24 Kathy Tyler
The smell is absolutely horrible.
00:03:26 Lilly Richard
From the hollowing out of rural economies to the harmful impacts on human health and the environment, we'll dig into what factory farms are, what they mean for our food system, and how something so unpopular came to dominate animal agriculture in the US. And we'll talk to a few of the people organizing to stop factory farm expansion in their own communities and to change the policies that got us here in the first place.
00:03:52 Frank James
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.
00:04:07 Rebecca Wolf
By undermining small, medium sized family farmers and encouraging operators to get big or get out, big ag corporations have just turned our food system into a cash cow for the powerful few for Wall Street.
00:04:20 Tim Gibbons
One thing we know is that the corporate model and the industrialization of the hog industry in the livestock industry in specific would not look the way it looks without huge taxpayer backing.
00:04:33 Frank James
And I just wonder what would happen if we took like half that amount of money and we funded – really, really funded – sustainable and regenerative agriculture.
00:04:45 Noah Earle
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. 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.
00:04:59 Tim Gibbons
Rarely, if ever, did anything good happen relative to our fight without people out here organizing, and you you'll see back throughout history, the major changes we've had have been largely due to people out here fighting like hell.
00:05:13 Kathy Tyler
And people need to be aware of that. They need to know that they can win.
00:05:23 Lilly Richard
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. Listen to How to Fight a Factory Farm at iatp.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
