In the 90-minute ritual, she distributes buckets of grain and hay for the cows’ breakfast, scrapes away animal feces, fills the water trough bucket by bucket, milks the dairy cows, feeds the barnyard cats and new kittens, and shepherds sometimes recalcitrant cows out to pasture. Next, she replenishes feed and water for the chickens and lets them out into their area.

It’s a lot of work. “To be honest, I take a nap every single morning,” laughs Maffie, who is studying chemistry at Bates College. “But I’ve learned more about cows and chickens than I ever knew before.” She’s part of the Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund (ASLF), a unique month-long immersive farm apprenticeship program that provides farm internships and apprentice opportunities to students and career changers.

The ASLF was founded in 2022 by the family and friends of pioneering cheesemonger Anne Saxelby of Saxelby Cheesemongers after her sudden passing. Saxelby, a beloved figure in the cheese world, championed American farmstead cheese, leading to its rise in prominence. Working on farms was life changing for her and instilled a desire to support small producers and change our industrial food system.

“We need to educate this next generation of farmers” in order to bring about systemic change, says Susie Cover, the ASLF’s executive director. Those who enter farming-adjacent careers will also be better equipped to make change. Learning the art of affinage (the process of aging cheese), herd management like Maffie, or how to properly prune plants to encourage stem growth are experiences that students will “never get by learning in a classroom,” she says. “The hands-on part is the most important.”

“The hands-on part is the most important.”

Nearly 100 apprentices are working in 60 farms across the country; one is employed at London’s famed Neal’s Yard Dairy. Placements include produce, animal, hemp, and dairy farms, and cheesemaking and salumi operations in locations aligned with the fund’s mission and values of quality sustainable agriculture.

The program has doubled in size each year; 500 applications were received in 2024, a result of extensive outreach at agriculture, culinary, food studies, and trade programs, postings on job list serves, as well as word of mouth. However, no farm experience is required, stresses Cover, just the ability to handle the physical work and to take initiative. The ASLF is also working to become a college-accredited program.

Apprentices are paid an hourly wage of $20 for a 40-hour workweek and an expense stipend; the ASLF covers transportation and housing costs, removing barriers for prospective applicants and for farms to receive much-needed help.There are frequent check-ins with the apprentices and farms to ensure all is going smoothly.

For apprentices, not having to worry about costs is a huge relief. “To [be able to] put my all into it made me want to put more energy and effort into making the most of this program,” says Mona Ziabari, an apprentice at Fisheye Farms, a sustainably run urban farm in Detroit. A student with limited funds, she’s unsure if she could have applied.

Zibari is a food studies major at New York University and an accomplished cook who envisions a career in the culinary arts. “It is super important to learn about the food production side because I think a lot of people in our society are not educated on what it looks like,” she says.

Zibari had worked in restaurants, but she was taken aback by the physical stamina farming requires. Fisheye’s owners arranged to have a bicycle for Ziabari to bike to work from another urban farm where she is housed, and to stage at farm-to-table restaurants on her days off to broaden her understanding.

“We wouldn’t have been able to have apprentices if they weren’t paid for,” says Ryan McPherson, owner of Glidden Point Oyster Farms in Maine. The ASLF approached McPherson this year to include an aquaculture opportunity. It also added five urban farms to its roster.

McPherson was impressed by the caliber of the applicants, farms, and vetting process. He appreciates the opportunity to share knowledge, since farmed aquaculture is still a very young industry and its connection to and overlap with agriculture is not yet well explored. “It is important,” says McPherson, “to be in those conversations.” Since his farm’s two apprentices had prior terrestrial farming experience, he expects that they’re able to share insights into similarities and differences into the two types of farming. The apprentices have been grading out and redistributing seed, conducting farm maintenance, and washing and packing oysters for sale and shipping.

To Bliss Battle, an alumna of New York City’s Brooklyn Grange, the financial support signaled that “people wanted to see me succeed,” she says. Battle left art school to try farming because it “involved manual labor and being in nature.” She says she “came out way more confident in my skills, like how to use all the tools, and in production-level farming,” and developed an appreciation of growing food for mutual aid and not for profit. She was later hired at another farm by a former Grange supervisor.

Battle is now attending welding school so she can repair farm machinery. “I want to be an asset to my community,” she says. “And my sense of community has been more solidified through the work I’ve been doing as a farmhand.”

“I want to be an asset to my community.”

Ziabari’s eyes were also opened by a blend of practical knowledge and sociocultural perspectives. “I’ve been learning how culture and race intersect with food production,” she says, noting that “food deserts are prevalent” in the more diverse areas of Detroit, already a multi-racial and ethnic city.

Ziabari credits the city’s growing urban farm movement for improving food access for marginalized communities. The farms have a “progressive approach to incorporating culture,” she says, growing produce that is meaningful to residents in a nod to the city’s history.

“It’s just crazy how people don’t think about it in that way,” she says. “I’m one of them. You’re not forced to think about it unless you’re doing it, having conversations about it, or actually having to get on your knees and do the work.”

The experience Maffie gained with farms, cows and cheesemaking—her farm’s owner is developing a cheese program—fit her interest in food science.

She was also surprised at some of the lesser-known ways politics and government affect farms. She learned that farms are required to pay for the USDA inspectors who inspect their meat, which can “put a strain on both butchers and small farms,” says Maffie, because larger farms can slaughter so many more animals that the cost becomes nominal. Also, since only one USDA inspector shows up at a slaughterhouse, the animals on smaller farms wind up subject to more scrutiny than animals at larger ones. With higher volumes, employees there assist the lone USDA inspector who can’t watch each process at once.

Remarkably, while some feeder programs may be more diverse than in the past, the ASLF team was surprised that nearly 70 percent of this year’s applications came from women. Farming though is a white and male-dominated profession; the number of female farmers has held steady in recent years, according to USDA data.

“I think it is probably a backlash to the fact that it is a male-dominated field,” says Maffie. “Now, there’s a bunch of women who are like, ‘No, I want to do that, too,’ so I’m going to start setting myself up to do that.”

Surprisingly, women “outnumber males in aquaculture in Maine,” says McPherson. He bought his farms from women owners and his staff is well over half female.

“I think it is really cool that people can see [food production] as a career option, especially young women,” says Battle. She says programs such as the ASLF can have a huge impact on people’s lives. “Your formative years, you can see a subversive career path and that it is sustainable. And you can go where you want with it,” she adds.

The post This Immersive Farm Apprenticeship is Training the Next Generation of Farmers appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Choctaw Tribal Members

Choctaw Fresh

Tomika Bell (Choctaw Fresh Produce distribution manager): As Native Americans, we live in rural areas, which means we don’t have the ability to be near any kind of grocery stores or farm stands. But Choctaw Fresh gives people the ability to utilize our mobile market, and put farms in certain areas, which means we’re able to reach those people that live in scarce areas that aren’t able to have access to eating healthy. 

Nigel Gibson (Tribal Council member): Food is an essential need to life. Within our community, we have a high rate of diabetes with all ages within our tribe. What Choctaw Fresh is trying to provide is a healthier way of eating, and also educate tribe members on how they need to eat regardless if they’re diabetic or not. 

Bell: We consider the land our motherland and Choctaw Fresh takes care of it by growing organic. We’re not actually disturbing our soil, which is our way of taking care of our land. I feel like the Farm Bill could help us a lot by getting a lot of our land back. We don’t have much access to a lot of good farmland. 

Gibson: To be able to expand like that would not only give us opportunities food wise within the community, but it also could give us economical help within the community because when you expand, you’re able to provide more job opportunities.

We’re always looking for economical opportunities, whether it’s federal funding or revenue from your own tribal casino. Having that kind of funding for Choctaw Fresh would be tremendous. 

Bell: Access to broadband is also an issue for us because without it we’re not able to reach out and do what we need to do out there. But, personally, I don’t believe that the Farm Bill will make a big impact on us other than the ability to get a better rate of payment for our workers. We hire harvesters, harvest techs, high tunnel maintenance workers, farmers, and anyone who’s operating from the distribution side. We started out paying them $8 an hour and have been able to find the funding to increase that to $12. If Farm Bill funding goes through, we will be able to increase that to $15 an hour. Good paying wages are really important for us to be able to retain labor workers and avoid high turnover. Being able to pay them more would help with food insecurity and food access because if we don’t have workers then we don’t have food.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Choctaw Tribal Members appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Ya-Sin Shabazz

Gulf Coast Sustainable Growers Alliance

We started the Gulf Coast Sustainable Growers Alliance as a way of organizing and keeping on point with a lot of our work around food. We also started the Just Water Initiative, which maintains a two-and-a-half acre off bottom oyster aquaculture operation.

Aquaculture is definitely a challenge our organization is addressing that could be affected by the Farm Bill. There are other challenges in terms of land ownership, land stewardship, and retention. And then there’s the water systems and irrigation systems that can help advance farming. So, those are two of our biggest problems with regards to our food work. With aquaculture, we have challenges in terms of boats, equipment, temporary water closures, and reef closures, because of water quality on the coast, which is also a problem.

Whenever there are adverse effects—anything from severe rain to bad weather to hurricanes being the worst—that does damage to the fisheries. But also just too much rain can affect the water sufficiency because of salinity levels, and things like that. There’s what’s called the freshwater inversion from the Mississippi River. So, when the rivers are high, the Army Corps of Engineers has the ultimate decision-making power, and they can open the spillways from the river into the Gulf. Water that comes in from the spillway will eventually make its way to the Gulf and that really impacts salinity levels, sometimes creating a salty deadzone. All of this can impact different fish species that are dependent on certain salt levels in the water and, therefore, affect the livelihood of fishermen.

Without support from the Farm Bill, there would be a number of challenges. This area has weathered them and will continue to weather them. We just hope to be able to make sure to the best extent possible by promoting local farmers, fresh food, and trying to continually educate the youth on the importance of food and food systems.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Ya-Sin Shabazz appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Darnella Winston

Project Director/Cooperative Field Specialist Federation of Southern Cooperatives

Our organization was born out of the Civil Rights movement in 1972, and our focus has been corporate development, land retention, and advocacy. But, lately, we’ve been working more with youth. What we’re realizing is that there’s a whole other audience out there that we’re missing, which is the next generation. And by the next generation I mean everyone from six years old all the way to 46 years old to move into the swing of agriculture. 

I tell people that the Farm Bill sets the priorities for the food and the farm. It is one of the largest bills in terms of money that comes out of the government. We have to be able to say where we want to allocate that money. We try to come up with priorities and recommendations as far as what our members and our clients would like to see. One or two of the priorities that we push for is for the microloan to go from $50,000 to $100,000 because that’s a loan rural people are able to receive. It’s not as much based on credit as it is your work and what it is you claim that you’re trying to do. One of the things that we pushed was for the microloan’s increased limit. There’s loan forgiveness within the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement lending program, which has been a slow start and we’re not sure what’s going to happen with that. But our property is an issue in the BIPOC community. And in order for us to keep saving our land, we need that relending program to be able to save that land for the next generation.

Broadband is also going to be very important for us in the Farm Bill. With the way times are going, that’s almost another way of business for the BIPOC community, but in order to be a part of it, you have to have broadband.

For example, we’re to the point now that some of the grocery stores want farmers to send them an email in the morning letting them know what the farmer is going to have that day. My father would type it up on a typewriter and mail it to them. By the time the grocery store gets it, somebody else might have sent in what they had and outbidded us because we don’t have internet.

If the Farm Bill could help us access better Broadband, people would be able to have a better understanding about local and fresh produce and where it’s grown. People want to be able to see what we’re doing. They ask, “Can we see it? Do you have a website to show us?” Having functioning internet and a website would be a total game changer, especially in the cooperative movement.

If communities like ours aren’t prioritized in the Farm Bill, it’s going to be a slow demise. It would send us back to the drawing board, trying to squeeze six quarters out of a dollar to keep the work going. We can’t totally rely on these programs because we don’t know which way they’re gonna go. We have to remember to cooperatively work together in community to try to push the priorities to the best that we can. But if we don’t get them, we still don’t give up on our work.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Darnella Winston appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Calvin Head

Farmer and Director of Milestone Cooperative Association

I’m participating in a regenerative agriculture initiative with several other farmers and youth and have served as director of Milestone Cooperative Association for about 12 years. I’m also a community organizer with emphasis on economic and community development. And, historically, I’ve been in this civil rights work almost all of my adult life and most of my young life.

One of the primary purposes of our organization right now is to offset these health issues by growing quality food, which is really not accessible here for most people. We’re helping people to understand what it is to eat healthy because a lot of people don’t really know, believe it or not. We’re also just trying to enhance the quality of life for low-income individuals and limited-resource farms.

I think the Farm Bill was written with us in mind in terms of how it’s presented to Congress, but when it comes to actual distribution and allocation, I think that the rules of the game change somehow. Historically, every time we get inside the process and we get to understand and master that process, they change the rules right away. They know who gets what. It’s the same people in the same places for the most part. They’re all well connected with who they want to help. I will just say the educational piece around the Farm Bill needs to be improved. Instead of just announcing it, let people really, really know what’s in it and how to take advantage of it—especially rural people and people of color.

We have many priorities for the Farm Bill, but where our community is really, really getting left behind is with broadband access. Having access to it where we are is really difficult. Our service providers are price gouging and taking as much advantage of us as they can because they know we have few alternatives. 

Right now, we’re limited to one small hotspot at our farm store for internet access. And everything is set up online, even our surveillance system. So, we can’t run the cash register, the gas pump, the surveillance system and the credit card machine at the same time. We’re limited and that hotspot can only go so far. So, we have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Broadband is so important in everyone’s everyday life. You’re almost third world without it. When we first got certified with the USDA Food Safety Program for our vegetable initiative, there was so much stuff that you had to go online and do.

It needs to be made mandatory that some of the resources from the Farm Bill reach us. Do you know what it would mean to have access to a new tractor to do some of the work we need done in these fields? One day your tractor is working and the next day you’re just hoping it makes it through that day. Or just being able to have some upfront money would be helpful. Most of the time, we’ve invested out of our own pockets. We’ve taken on all the risk and then we’re one flood away from bankruptcy. Getting support from the Farm Bill could give us the same flexibility that big farmers have when there’s a disaster. And you wouldn’t have to spend your life’s savings just to try to get a crop in the ground. It would have a tremendous impact. I have never as a farmer operated in the black.

There’s money allotted just for farmers in the Farm Bill and we just want our fair share. At least, before I leave this earth, I would like to see it. I would just like to see a level playing field just for once. All we want is the opportunity to work hard. Nobody is asking for a handout, just some flexibility.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Calvin Head appeared first on Modern Farmer.

 Buying trends show that pet owners are gravitating toward human-grade ingredients. “Dog food” is regulated loosely compared to human fare, allowing even meat deemed unfit for human consumption due to things such as disease and contamination and moldy grains, a recipe for endless pet food recalls. 

The pet food industry traditionally relies on factory farm byproducts for its ingredients, a practice the industry touts as more sustainable as it produces less waste and cheaper food. But dog owners distrust this mysterious supply chain. 

As shoppers seek more wholesome foods for pets, some also try to make eco-friendly choices, which seems to contradict a diet of human-grade foods, especially meat. Agriculture contributes at least 11 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and meat is the biggest contributor among foods. 

Is there a way to make healthier dog food that won’t burden the planet so much? Here is how a few companies are dishing up new models.

Farm Hounds

Family farms often struggle to stay profitable as agriculture becomes more concentrated. There were 141,733 fewer farms in the US in 2022 than in 2017, according to the Census of Agriculture. 

Livestock farmers who practice regenerative farming, improving soil and biodiversity with methods such as rotational grazing, strive to waste nothing and can still wind up with leftovers. Like the hog tails, hides, organs, and hooves that aren’t always suitable for compost. 

“From our experience, most regenerative farms don’t have much of an active market for these products,” says Stephen Calsbeek, co-founder of Farm Hounds, a company that partners with regenerative farms to make single-ingredient treats for dogs.

“It is rare to meet a new farm and hear they are already capturing and selling something we are looking for,” he says. Where items like muscle meat and organs have a route to human markets, Farm Hounds looks for trim, miscuts and excess volume.

It started sourcing scraps from places such as White Oak Pastures, a farm in Bluffton, Georgia committed to regenerative and humane farming techniques. 

Customers couldn’t get enough of the local grass-farmed treats. With that, the store’s pup-loving proprietors launched Farm Hounds, dehydrating raw items in their home kitchen, which they now sell online as well.

Over time, collaboration with a single farm grew into a whole network, with new partners continually being added to meet the demand.  

“We are talking with very busy farmers, who then have to sort out how to capture and store the products we are looking for,” says Calsbeek. “It can take six to 12 months before we see our first order.” Farms that use an offsite processor have to ask the processor to return parts they aren’t used to capturing. “Depending on how strict the USDA inspector is, it can require the farm and the processing facility to update their HACCP plan just to capture something for us.” 

For most of the farms, the added revenue from using every part of the animal has been “impactful,” says Calsbeek. Some have changed their practices. Polyface, a renowned farm in Virginia, now breeds its birds on-site, having learned that Farm Hounds would purchase the roosters (male chicks are culled at hatcheries). At times, it’s a safety net if a human market is lost; during the COVID lockdown, for example, a key buyer for one farm stopped ordering products that had already been raised. “We’ve seen farms able to hire more workers in their community due to our purchasing.”

Today, in addition to a variety of treats and chews of all sizes, Farm Hounds sells items that even make use of their own leftovers. In recent years, the company, which now has a nationwide following, has landed on the Inc. 5000 list, ranking among America’s fastest-growing independent businesses. 

The Conscious Pet

No discussion of vanishing farmland or concerns about wasting human grade food on pets is complete without a mention of food waste—when 30 percent to 40 percent of the entire US food supply gets dumped in landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the US discards nearly 40 million tons of food every year, more than any other country. 

One solution is to upcycle it. The Conscious Pet, an Austin-based company started by Mason Arnold and Jessica Kezar Arnold, makes human-grade dog food and treats by dehydrating scraps from local restaurants, breweries, and food distributors.

This isn’t stuff they glean from trash cans. 

“Think of a kitchen that trims their steaks or chicken before cooking their meals,” says Arnold, a sustainability-minded entrepreneur who hosts a podcast with Kezar-Arnold called “A Mostly Green Life”—part of a community of people focused on “clean living” and environmental stewardship. 

Initially, they partnered with a composting facility, capturing suitable meat and vegetable scraps, which they now collect directly from a variety of sources. While composting helps keep waste out of landfills, they knew it wasn’t the best use of edible food. 

So, they experimented with recipes in their home kitchen, creating products to sell in the perfect incubator—Austin, home to 500,000 pups and owners who spend the most on dog food of any major city. A city ordinance requires restaurants to responsibly dispose of organic waste, which can mean a solution such as repurposed pet food.

“The first batches looked like dog food already, just not in the right shape as it was mostly powder with a few clumps,” says Arnold. “It took us six months or so to develop the first usable recipe and, honestly, it took over 1.5 years to perfect it.”

DoggieBag, the human-grade kibble, is lightly cooked and shelf stable. The recipe uses 85 percent sustainably sourced animal protein and about 15 percent organic vegetables. Only the vitamin additives aren’t from scraps.

The zero-waste company, which uses clean energy and compostable packaging, kicked off in 2022 by offering locals a chance to own a part of it. It is currently moving to a new facility and plans to relaunch its line of products this fall, says Arnold.

“It isn’t hard to get something going, but [it] does require investment in the machinery to accomplish the process,” says Arnold. Another challenge has been the stigma around food waste. People often imagine the ruins of meals in trash cans, not kitchen trimmings and dented packaging.

“That fresh product is still consumable and delicious and could be used to make soups and such for humans, but we take it and make pet food out of it.”

With the country’s ample supply of leftovers, it’s a model that could be used in other cities, says Arnold.

“We’re excited to start partnering with others who want to implement this technology, and welcome any inquiries from people or companies wanting to do it in their town.” 

Open Farm

A new national strategy for reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030 includes “raising and breeding insects as livestock.” 

Even meat giant Tyson Foods is getting into insects for use in the pet food, aquaculture, and livestock industries.

Vying to be the next big protein are crickets, black soldier fly larvae (grubs) and mealworms, all approved for use in dog food in the US. These tiny animals yield high-quality protein, can eat food waste, and can be eaten as food. Their excrement, frass, is a rich fertilizer for agriculture.

When it comes to sustainability, experts say insect farming uses less land and water, and it has fewer emissions. With their high food conversion rate, insects can convert two kilograms of feed into one kg of insect mass, while cattle require eight kg of feed to produce one kg of body weight gain. Crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and two times less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein. Black soldier fly larvae, among the most efficient insect species, develop in two to three weeks.

So far, consumers aren’t rushing in. Only one US company has developed an insect-based kibble, while one that started with a bang—Grubbly Farms—has switched its promising entry into dog food to backyard chickens.

But the infrastructure is growing. EnviroFlight, a company that produces black soldier fly larvae, opened the first US production facility in Maysville, Kentucky in 2018, while Oregon-based Chapul Farms is working on various aspects of insect agriculture. Tyson plans to build a US facility that supports every stage of insect protein production from breeding to hatching of larvae. All the companies, even leading dog food brands, see insect-based pet food as a growing market.

It’s similar to traditional dog food, trading ground-up meat or fish for insects as the main protein. Grubs, the most common source, provide all 10 essential amino acids dogs require.

Adding an insect kibble made sense to Canadian dog food maker Open Farm, which put grubs on the menu in 2022, sourcing protein for its black soldier fly larvae kibble with consideration of its environmental impacts and processing. Since there’s no animal welfare certification for grubs, it  sought suppliers that adhere to the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare, ensuring healthy living conditions. The grubs are humanely euthanized with high heat.

But it turned out that “the demand was a little low,” says spokesperson Bridget Trumper. The company has discontinued its Kind Earth Insect recipe. “We hope as these options become more popular, we will be able to bring this recipe back, and introduce additional insects.”

There was a twist, however, in pet owners snubbing the unconventional animal protein.

“Surprisingly, our plant-based recipes were more popular and we will be continuing to offer those,” says Trumper. The company thinks it has to do with greater familiarity with a vegetarian diet. For now, it plans to monitor the trends and educate pet owners on the environmental benefits of alternative proteins.

“We believe, in time, pet parents will come around to the idea,” says Trumper.

Innovations in pet food can make a difference on a local scale and beyond. Farm Hounds’ use of farm waste can be adopted in other areas, and the company has gone from selling products in its local stores to a nationwide online business with a network of farm partners that has extended to other states, including California—and it ranks as one of the fastest-growing independent businesses, making the Inc. 5000 list the past two years. Food waste is another resource that could be tapped around the country to improve pet health with human-grade by-products. As Mars, the world’s largest pet food manufacturer, Tyson, and other companies add insects to the menu while researchers seek ways to breed bigger insects faster, the potential grows for reducing the impacts of factory meat farming.

The post Your Dog’s Food Probably Comes From a Factory Farm. Meet Some Folks Who Want to Change That appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The post Farmers Fought a Factory Farm and Won appeared first on Modern Farmer.

And then it got sued for it.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against JBS because its claim of pursuing net neutral emissions is not substantiated by actual changes in company behavior. Not only has the company not established an accurate enough estimate of its emissions, it has documented plans to increase production, which will increase emissions. JBS USA’s parent company reported greenhouse gas emissions of 71 million tons in 2021. This is higher than the total emissions of some countries. Concentrated animal agriculture is high in emissions because of things such as improper manure management and land used to grow feed. However, JBS’s estimate of its footprint does not include the emissions impact of deforestation—the company is responsible for clearing millions of acres in the Amazon.

This lawsuit alleges that JBS made these declarations anyway, knowing that it would be received positively by the public, creating a financial incentive. This is known as “greenwashing.”

JBS is not the only company to make extravagant climate claims. Many companies have made similar pledges. As a business, committing to reducing your emissions footprint is a good thing, when it’s done authentically. This lawsuit is an attempt to hold a company accountable for benefitting from an untrue message.

The outcome of this case could set an important precedent in the food industry and beyond.

Futurewashing

Tom Lyon, PhD, of the University of Michigan and the Greenwash Lab, says that he thinks James has a good case and could win.

“JBS hadn’t done anything to measure their existing footprint,” says Lyon. “So, if you have no idea of what your current footprint is, it’s really hard to develop a credible plan for reducing it over time.”

JBS is not the only company that has made a promise to achieve net zero emissions by a certain year. When a promise is not backed by a legitimate plan, this is a particular type of greenwashing called “futurewashing,” says Lyon.

“When we get to this futurewashing, it’s just a story about the future,” says Lyon. “So, there’s no way to verify if it’s true or not, because it hasn’t happened yet.”

There’s still a lot of gray area when it comes to the legal repercussions of greenwashing, but outside of the US, strides are being made.

This year, Canada passed a new law that requires companies to back up their sustainability claims. Companies that put forth net zero plans must also shoulder a burden of proof.

“If they don’t have any documentation to back it up, then they may be at risk of some sort of litigation,” says Lyon.

The United Nations, the Science Based Targets Initiative, and others are reaching a shared, science-backed understanding of what “net zero” can mean in the corporate world.

If James wins this case, it will mean that JBS must cease its “net zero by 2040” claims to continue selling its product in New York, potentially having a ripple effect beyond just one state.

Skepticism and grace

Maisie Ganzler, a strategic advisor for Bon Appétit Management Company, says that bold company goals need to be grounded in reality and transparency. There’s a difference between corporate greenwashing and failing to achieve a goal that was planned.

“We do need companies to make bold commitments to stick their neck out, maybe even without having all of their ducks in a row and their plans in place. But that’s very different than making a claim that is seemingly impossible, that you don’t have any plan as to…how to measure, much less how to meet.”

In Ganzler’s recent book, You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company, she writes that companies that make positive strides toward authentic sustainability can create a ripple effect toward industry change, for good and bad.

“I think that when one company sets the bar, their competitors have to come to that bar,” says Ganzler. “And a lot of positive change is made that way with true leaders raising the bar on their industry and forcing others along. But there is the shadow side of when false promises are made, it inspires other companies to also make false promises to appear competitive.”

For companies that want to be leaders in sustainability without greenwashing, Ganzler recommends setting audacious goals with specific plans to achieve them. Don’t make a promise about something that is beyond your scope to know, such as what happens at every stage in the supply chain. If those plans go awry, be transparent with your consumers about why. In her book, Ganzler details an experience she had at Bon Appétit, when she realized that its pork supplier wasn’t meeting the welfare standards to which Bon Appétit had committed. Bon Appétit had inaccurately overstated its supplier’s welfare practices, but found a new supplier and issued a press release owning up to the mistake. Instead of facing backlash, Bon Appétit was praised by the Humane Society for its progress.

As for consumers, Ganzler says everyone has a responsibility to do a little bit of research. But in the end, it’s important to approach the companies they shop from with a balanced perspective.

“[You should have] both a healthy dose of skepticism, but also on the other side, a healthy dose of grace,” says Ganzler. “You should question commitments that companies are making, but also have grace for companies who aren’t truly trying to do the right thing and may fall short.”

The post New York is Suing One of the Country’s Largest Meat Processors for Greenwashing appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Two hours into the journey, the truck stopped for fuel in South Dakota. The Animals’ Angels investigators were able to approach the truck and see the ear tags for the calves. They were about one week old, and crammed together so tightly they were stepping on each other.

The truck continued to Kansas, where it stopped again for gas. At this point, temperatures had reached 100 degrees, but at no point were the calves given water or milk. The investigators could hear the calves bellowing in discomfort.

Video courtesy of Animal Welfare Institute/Animals’ Angels

There are a few issues here, says Adrienne Craig, senior policy associate and staff attorney for the Animal Welfare Institute. First is that these calves were being transported so young—sometimes just a day or two after they are born—before they had the chance to develop mature immune systems. This makes them vulnerable to disease during transport, potentially resulting in death. In this particular truck, the calves still had their umbilical cord attached, creating a risk for infection.

Second is that the conditions of the trip are stressful. The vibrations, noise, fumes, and abrupt motion of the road cause discomfort for the calves. During the 19-hour transport that Animals’ Angels investigators documented, they witnessed this truck reach risky speeds of up to 90 miles per hour, maintaining speed on curves. The investigators felt confident the calves were tossed around in the back. 

Typically, calves this age will eat every few hours or so. During the entire trip, the investigators did not see the calves get fed even once.

“We know that they’re not being fed on these journeys, because the logistics of stopping and bottle-feeding 200 neonatal calves is entirely unfeasible,” says Craig. 

When the truck reached its final destination, Animals’ Angels was not able to follow it inside to see the condition of the calves. But they drove by the next day to see where the calves were kept. It’s called a ranch, but it’s anything but idyllic—the investigators drove by and saw row after row of confined hutches filled with calves.

Product of consolidation

The long-haul transportation of newly born calves is a practice that has become common for very large dairies with tens of thousands of cows. According to research by the Animal Welfare Institute, hundreds of thousands of newborn calves are transported long distances every year to ranches where they are raised, either to be returned to the dairy as milking cows or slaughtered for dairy beef.

The problem is that the conditions of this travel at such a young age put these calves in a vulnerable situation, says Craig. Despite this, there are virtually no enforced legal protections for calves in this position.

“Some producers don’t prioritize…feeding them in such a way that they’re in the best shape to be transported these long distances,” says Craig. “Unfortunately, there just really isn’t any oversight on this.”

The dairies that participate in this practice are the ones with tens of thousands of cows, commonly called mega-dairies. It’s unclear when exactly this practice began, says Craig, but it has likely increased since dairy cows and beef cattle began being bred together to produce cows raised for “dairy beef,” dairy industry cattle that are butchered for consumption.

Dairies require pregnant cows, but at mega-dairies, many of the calves do not remain there after they’re born. Many mega-dairies ship these calves to the southwest where they are raised. Some of the females will be returned as dairy cows and the rest, both male and female, are butchered as dairy beef.

The industry dominance of megadairies at the expense of independent farms is a factor here. These systems prioritize efficiency, and transporting calves as quickly as possible is the most expedient option.

“It is certainly a product of consolidation of the dairy industry,” says Craig.

Solutions 

Waiting until the calves are older, perhaps a month old, or at least until their navel has healed from the umbilical cord, would make transport a lot safer for them, says Craig. The AWI has filed a petition with the USDA to improve regulations for interstate transport of young animals. 

Existing protections for interstate animal transport begin and end with the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, which states that animals must be offloaded for rest, food, and water if they have been traveling for 28 hours. However, this law is not consistently enforced. 

In June, Representative Dina Titus of Nevada introduced the Humane Transport of Farmed Animals Act to Congress, a bill that, if it becomes a law, would require the USDA to come up with a way to enforce the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, and it would make it illegal to transport animals deemed unfit to travel. This could be because of sickness, injury, or being too young.

Craig recommends that shoppers who are hoping to avoid supporting these kinds of practices can look for the third-party certifications Global Animal Partnership and Animal Welfare Approved on their dairy products, both of which have a minimum age requirement for transport. Another option is the Certified Humane certification, which does not have a minimum age but does have a time limit on how long animals can be on the road. You can read AWI’s full certification guide here.

The post The 1,000-Mile Journey of a Newborn Calf appeared first on Modern Farmer.

As a small farmer who formerly worked with communities to resist large corporate farms, she knew a lot about how industrial chicken operations could affect a community. She knew about the putrid smell of animal waste, she knew it wasn’t safe to drink the local water. But, in April of 2023, as she visited a midwestern farmer whose home was surrounded by dozens of industrial chicken barns producing millions of chickens, it was the sight of the trucks hurtling down the narrow roads, one after the other, that was particularly jarring. 

“If you can picture a dusty dirt road with semis barreling down, the amount of dust and dirt and God knows whatever else that comes off these trucks would literally blow into the front yard,” says Kimbirauskas. “Thinking about putting your clothes on the line, or having your windows open, that’s no longer an option because of these trucks.”

Carrying feed, new birds, and finished flocks, these trucks served as a near-constant reminder of the other things these operations bring with them—smells that make it hard to stand outside, air pollution you can feel burning your throat, not being able to trust the water coming out of your tap—the list goes on.

Just three years earlier, Kimbirauskas had gotten wind that Foster Farms was planning to move into her own home of Linn County, Oregon and decided to fight back. After a bit of digging, what she found was staggering: Foster Farms was planning three sites in the county to build concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which would collectively raise 13 million chickens per year. This visit provided Kimbirauskas with a glimpse into what she was fighting against in her own home community. 

“For me that was such an affirmation that [our] community is 100 percent going to be the target of chicken expansion,” says Kimbirauskas. “It really made me dig in and stand in my own power and agency of knowing that this is not something that would be good and beneficial for Linn County.”

CAFOs are defined by the EPA as intensive feeding operations where many animals are confined and fed for at least 45 days per year—though this is just a minimum—and where the waste from those animals poses a pollution threat to surface water. 

There are small, medium and large CAFOs, with the largest of these—housing thousands to tens of thousands of animals—embodying the truest definition of a “factory farm.” Many of the issues can be boiled down to the sheer concentration of manure they produce.

A mega-dairy CAFO can produce as much waste as a city; but whereas a city will have an advanced sewage system, CAFOs aren’t required to manage their waste in the same way.

As of 2022, there were more than 21,000 large CAFOs in the US. One estimate, informed by USDA data, suggests that 99 percent of livestock grown in the US is raised in a CAFO. Some states have particularly dense concentrations, such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Nebraska. This industry presents itself as a way to produce a lot of food while keeping costs down. But any cost saved by the consumer is a cost borne by the CAFOs’ neighboring communities, the environment, local economies, and even the contracted farmers themselves. 

Large CAFOs cause myriad problems that are currently being experienced by communities across the country. These issues include environmental pollution, drinking water poisoning, air pollution, and plummeting property values. In drought-ridden states such as New Mexico, CAFOs add insult to injury by contaminating the water and using more water than the dwindling aquifers can handle. In Winona County, Minnesota, more than 1,300 people can’t drink their water because of nitrate pollution.

There have been many instances of serious illnesses believed to be linked to living close to CAFOs, such as cancer and miscarriages, and respiratory issues such as asthma and sleep apnea are prolific in CAFO-adjacent communities. In North Carolina, living near a large CAFO has been associated with increased blood pressure. In Iowa, a study found that children raised on swine farms had increased odds of developing asthma.

Large CAFOs are often built in communities of color. This frequency with which polluting industries are built in these communities is evidence of ongoing environmental injustice. 

While the industry often associates itself with the picturesque image of American farming, the fact is that industrial agriculture has created the immense consolidation of US farms, driving farmers all over the country out of business. CAFOs are often built in clusters near each other—when a CAFO is built, more will likely follow.

The factory farm industry is expanding all the time, but communities across the country have become advocates to stop this expansion—both at individual sites, and on a systemic level—in the hopes that, one day, no one has to pay the price of factory farming. 

Foster Farms is coming to town

Linn County is tucked into the western part of Oregon and home to many family-run farms. But, in 2020, Foster Farms arrived in the county, planning to build CAFOs holding tens of thousands of birds at a time. Foster Farms is a poultry company that sells chicken and chicken products in chain grocery stores across the country. 

In Linn County, there was no public announcement of Foster Farms’ arrival.

“One of the stories that we hear time and again is people didn’t realize or don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late,” says Kimbirauskas. “That is a tactic of the industry because nobody wants to live next to one of these things. So, they’re going to be trying to get in as quietly as possible.”

It started in 2020, when a woman working at a local feed store noticed a customer come in with Foster Farms company branding on his coat. He was a land scout, and he was in the area to try and determine suitable land for chicken operations.

She asked him some specific questions about the locations they were considering. One, she learned, was right next to her house. The land scout told her they planned to put up a buffer between the site and one of the bigger houses in the area, so they wouldn’t get complaints. But, she knew, there was also a smaller house on that road—her house. Would that house get a buffer?

Well, he told her, they don’t have enough money to do anything about it. 

Foster Farms’ behavior aligns with larger trends—data shows that CAFOs are disproportionately built in low-income areas.

After this upsetting conversation, the woman reached out to Kimbirauskas. Kimbirauskas is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to fighting CAFOs, because she’s seen similar situations play out all over the country. Growing up in Michigan, the rapid consolidation of dairy farms due to industrialized agriculture led her family to the very difficult decision to sell their dairy. Today, Kimbirauskas is the Senior Director of Agriculture and Food Systems at the State Innovation Exchange (SiX). Before that, as chief executive officer of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP), she had worked with communities across the country who were dealing with health and environmental issues as a result of living next to CAFOs. 

Kimbirauskas and other concerned members of the community found that there was no information available at the state level about what was going on, so the first thing Kimbirauskas began doing was submitting public records requests.

“Through those public records requests, we found that there was not two but three sites that were being proposed, which would have totaled roughly 13 million chickens within a 10-mile radius, and that was per year,” says Kimbirauskas. 

Something had to be done.

Site fights

The battle against factory farms happens at multiple scales. Some of the big-picture advocacy happens at the state and federal level, where advocates are trying to make systemic changes. Other battles happen directly over individual proposed or existing CAFOs—these are known as “site fights.” 

Site fights aren’t easy to win. But it is possible. Barb Kalbach, president of the board of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), has experienced it firsthand. In 2002, Kalbach lived on a small farm in Adair County, Iowa—a rural community that today has a population of less than 8,000. She heard through the grapevine that just 1,970 feet up the road from her property, a massive hog CAFO was being proposed. She called a realtor she knew who lived nearby who confirmed it. The operation would consist of 10 buildings holding 7,200 sows, producing 10 million gallons of liquid manure every year. Kalbach’s farm had always been surrounded by other farms. But no regular farm produces that much manure.

Kalbach called the Iowa CCI, which had been fighting social justice issues affecting Iowans since the 1970s.

“I called the office. That was on a Friday, and they sent out on Sunday an organizer. And in that two-day period, I called all the neighbors, anybody I can think of in our community that probably wouldn’t like it very well, this confinement, and we all met over at our little local country church.”

When organizing against a CAFO, simply not wanting one near you isn’t a good enough reason to keep one out. CCI didn’t do the work for them, says Kalbach, but advised them on things they could do, such as looking for evidence in their plans that the facility wouldn’t be able to meet the environmental regulation requirements. Proof of this kind is easier said than found.

Kalbach and her neighbors went to commissioner meetings, did research, wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper, created petitions and sought signatures. The actual turning point came to Kalbach as a phone call in the early hours of the day.

“At four o’clock in the morning, one of the guys called me and he said, ‘I’ve got a great idea,’” says Kalbach. To get permitted, this operation would have to create a manure management plan for the 10 million gallons of liquid manure per year. “The guy that called me said, ‘let’s get all the farmers within a 10-mile radius to sign a document that states they will not accept the manure.’” 

The idea was to show the Environmental Protection Commission (EPC) that all of the manure would have to be transported at least 10 miles before anything could be done with it. The CAFO would not be able to claim that nearby farms were going to use the manure as fertilizer.

The CAFO was permitted anyway. The community appealed this decision, and during this period, they brought forth everything they had—including the list of neighboring farmers who agreed to reject the CAFO’s manure. And they succeeded. In the end, the vote went in favor of the community.

“[The EPC) voted finally and we won five to four,” says Kalbach. “He was smacked down and we did not have a factory farm built by us.”

Site fight victories show what’s possible. But when denied a site, industry begins looking elsewhere. The danger is that the next community may not be as successful in resisting. And that’s why many advocates are also looking for systemic change. 

“Site fights, especially here in the state of Iowa, are never going to be adequate…We need to upend the system of prioritizing CAFOs over everything else,” says Michaelyn Mankel of Food & Water Watch Iowa.

Iowa is densely populated with CAFOs. In the last 25 years, the number of waterways in Iowa that are polluted has increased significantly. Iowa Public Radio reports that Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country, and it leads the nation in the highest rate of new cancers. Kalbach says she believes these are connected. 

Iowa is known for its sheer density of swine CAFOs, producing one out of every three hogs raised for consumption. As a result, Iowa has to deal with more hog waste than any other state in the country. The impact is felt in both rural and urban communities.

“I think it’s a little easier in urban centers, like Iowa City and Des Moines, to feel like things are a little more normal, and that the scale of the problem isn’t quite what it is,” says Mankel. “But driving through rural Iowa, and visiting small towns, it’s really destroyed so much of our state.”

There has been a campaign for a moratorium on new or expanding CAFOs in the Iowa state legislature since 2017. It has not been passed.

Despite the lack of success in Iowa, moratoria movements are one way that some other states and counties have prevented new CAFOs being built or expanded. At a federal level, Senator Cory Booker’s Farm System Reform Act could make moratoria a reality across the country. While site fights are important, they are not always successful. In states such as Iowa, which is densely saturated with CAFOs, only systemic change will move the needle. 

“I think those folks, who are the [majority] of Iowans who are not farmers, are starting to understand why they should care about this,” says Jennifer Breon of Food & Water Watch Iowa.

Consolidation and systemic advocacy

Being near a megadairy CAFO is a visceral experience. In Clovis, New Mexico, organizer for Food & Water Watch Alexa Moore said the smell was like that of a normal farm cranked up to 10 times the potency. That smell, caused by the high concentration of manure, is more than just a bad scent; these fumes carry ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which cause respiratory issues. Just walking through the parking lot of a Walmart, Moore’s throat was burning.

Moore’s stop in Roswell was part of a roadshow to three towns with a heavy factory farming presence: Clovis, Roswell, and Las Cruces. At each of these communities, Moore and fellow organizer Emily Tucker hosted a showing of the film “Right to Harm,” a documentary that demonstrates some of the ways communities are resisting factory farming across the country. This roadshow aimed to build awareness of the issue, and foster conversation around some of the systemic changes that need to be made, and talk about the situations in the surrounding area. Some of these locations are also near airforce and military bases, which have caused pollution as well. They found some residents knew there was water pollution, but they didn’t realize how much of it was due to the large CAFOs.

“A lot of people just assumed that all of the water contamination was from those military bases,” says Moore. 

Along the way, they were cautioned by locals not to drink the water. At a taproom in Roswell, Tucker asked the server for a glass of water. 

“I’ll just get you a bottle,” the server replied. 

In a state that experienced a decades-long drought, New Mexico doesn’t have much water to spare. But here, factory farms use an estimated 32 million gallons of water every day. This puts a particular squeeze on smaller farmers, who simply can’t farm without water.

“What we are seeing is a lot of our smaller farmers aren’t able to continue to dig wells. So, we’re seeing aquifer levels drop, their wells are going dry, and the small farmers aren’t able to compete with these big corporations who can keep drilling and keep drilling,” says Moore.

Moore’s own family feels the strain directly. “My cousin is a farmer. He lives down in Alamogordo. He’s a small family farmer, been in the family for five generations,” says Moore. “And just this year, they lost their well water and so he can no longer farm, which is a huge part of his income.”

Large-scale dairies also outcompete more sustainable operations on price, driving them out of business. In the past 20 years, New Mexico has lost half of its small-scale dairies. In this context, a small dairy is less than 500 cows. Large dairies can have tens of thousands of cows.

Consolidation isn’t just a symptom of the factory farm problem, says Sean Carroll, policy and organizing director for the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota. It’s the root of it.

“Our system is so consolidated,” says Carroll. “But that’s a system that we created through choices made by policymakers. We can make different policy decisions that actually create a system that is better for farmers [and] better for rural communities.” 

A member organization of the HEAL Food Alliance, the Land Stewardship Project has had about 40 successful oppositions against CAFOs in just as many years. But it also engages in policy work at the state and federal level. Real change can be affected through a balance of both, says Carroll. 

“At the local level, people’s voices have a lot of power,” says Carroll. “At the same time, so much of the drivers of this system are decisions that are made at the state or the federal level.”

One of the greatest ways to battle industrial animal agriculture is by bolstering sustainable farm systems through policy. For example, the USDA is currently re-evaluating its Packers and Stockyards Act. Anyone can contact their legislators to voice their support of policies that can create long-lasting change.

“We can and need to change the language of the law so that farmers have actual legal avenues to challenge price discrimination from consolidation,” says Carroll.

Additionally, the Farm Bill is a giant piece of legislation passed once approximately every five years, and it affects everything to do with our food system. One of the Land Stewardship Project’s priorities for the Farm Bill is to stop using conservation funding for factory farms. Millions of dollars of this funding goes to large-scale CAFOs instead of helping smaller farmers expand their sustainable practices. 

The use of conservation funding for large-scale CAFOs is something that community advocates around the country know all too well. Often, this takes the shape of anaerobic digesters at large CAFOs, which convert animal manure into methane gas, to be used as energy.

Rania Masri, PhD, co-director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, says that biogas gets touted as a clean energy solution when really it’s the complete opposite.

“That concept, in and of itself, sounds great, but when we look into the details, we see that in North Carolina, biogas promotion is specifically designed to financially incentivize and increase the profit of industrial agriculture,” says Masri. “So, in that way, what it ends up doing is increasing methane production rather than decreasing it, increasing pollution in communities rather than decreasing it, and threatening communities with the possibility of methane explosion.”

Organizing against false solutions

In places where clusters of large-scale CAFOs are already established, organizers try to prevent existing CAFOs from expanding. In recent years, this has included advocacy against building anaerobic biogas digesters at large CAFOs. 

Federal and state governments have put forth biogas technology as a way to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. But advocates such as SRAP and Friends of the Earth say that biogas production does not erase the environmental impact of CAFOs. Instead, this industry creates a market for the manure systems that are most detrimental to human health. 

By incentivizing manure production, biogas encourages mega-dairies to grow in size. 

In areas such as California’s Central Valley, parts of the midwest, and eastern North Carolina, advocates are speaking up against digesters. In this work, communities have to go up against not just industrial animal production giants, but also Big Oil—which has a direct interest in seeing the biogas market grow.

“It’s important that when you’re organizing about this stuff, you’re super clear with the community members about what you’re going up against,” says Leslie Martinez, community engagement specialist for Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability (LCJA). “You’re going up against Goliath.”

LCJA addresses systemic injustice, particularly in California’s rural and low-income regions, and biogas is one of the issues on which Martinez works closely with community members. Martinez is based in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where there is a high concentration of mega-dairies. In the small towns throughout the valley, people may live next to as many as two dozen of these operations. No one knows the negative impacts of living next to mega-dairies better than people who actually do. They experience the air and water pollution firsthand.

“Communities who live next to dairies have a lot of expertise,” says Martinez.

And yet, this technology is part of both state and federal plans to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. New Mexico recently passed a bill called the Clean Transportation Fuel Standard, intended to support the development of clean energy in the state. 

California has its own Low Carbon Fuel Standard, something that has turned out to bolster mega-dairy CAFOs by supporting the development of anaerobic digesters. To resist the impacts of digesters, it’s important to know how the rules surrounding the industry are made.

“If you’re an organizer, I think step one is to figure out how decisions get made,” says Martinez. “But [it’s] also important to talk to someone who has been through this, who has been through a regulation so you can also understand the weird politics about it.”

Martinez and LCJA have had individual victories against CAFO expansions, but when it comes to biogas advocacy, it has been difficult to get the California Air Resources Board to take the community’s concerns about public health into consideration. 

“It’s business as usual,” says Martinez. “But what about the fact that this business as usual is bad?”

As an organizer, Martinez has experienced how things like this frequently get presented through a narrow lens, such as focusing on creating methane gas without acknowledging community impact. She recommends organizers and communities push for a more holistic approach. A good question to keep coming back to when speaking to industry or government officials is, ‘how would that impact community?’

“The other thing I encourage organizers to do is to stop thinking about things in silos. The bureaucracy creates things in silos to make it difficult for communities to make change, and at the end of the day, we know that there needs to be comprehensive reform around how we are doing dairies in California.”

Becoming an advocate

When Mary Dougherty first heard of the plan to build a 26,000-hog CAFO in her home of Bayfield County, Wisconsin, she was concerned. Other parts of Minnesota had been through this. In Kewaunee County, there were more cows than people and nitrate pollution made the water unsafe to drink in many private wells. It’s still that way, today.

Dougherty knew it was bad news. What she didn’t know was what to do about it. 

She had never thought of herself as an organizer or an environmentalist. She ran a restaurant. She published a cookbook. She was a mom to five kids. Of all the hats she wore, organizer wasn’t one of them.

“I had no idea about any of this stuff,” says Dougherty. “Literally zero—less than zero probably. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

But she had to learn. There are only about 16,000 people in Bayfield County, so the idea of there being more hogs than humans was frightening. The town of Bayfield is perched on the edge of Lake Superior. Even though she didn’t think of herself as an environmentalist, many people in Bayfield shared the same love for the lake and the surrounding landscape. The acute threat posed by CAFO pollution had to be addressed.

Now senior regional representative for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Dougherty first got involved with the organization because it was who she reached out to for assistance.

“I got involved with SRAP because I called for help,” says Dougherty. “I have such a really deep appreciation for the space [people are] in when they call because I was in that space in 2015.”

Industrial agriculture is more “industry” than “farming,” says Dougherty. “Industry is hiding behind a beloved American archetype of the American farmer. And they are causing great harm across this country, because they’re not farmers, they’re industrial operations that come with all of the risks that accompany all industrial operations.”

The impact of this is two-fold—it leads to people supporting large-scale corporate farms because they think they’re supporting the family farmer. But it also means that these operations aren’t subject to the same regulations and monitoring as manufacturing industries. As agricultural operations, large CAFOs get away with more self-reporting and self-regulation.

Dougherty receives calls about impending CAFOs, and in places where CAFOs are already established, anaerobic digesters for biogas. 

For the average person to begin organizing against a CAFO or digester is like going into a whole new world where they don’t speak the language, says Dougherty. This new world is filled with things such as public records requests, zoning codes, and manure management plans.

Having been through the situation herself and supported others in similar situations, Dougherty says the most important thing to do first is listen to the community. She calls this a “tell me more” approach.

“What the Community Support program does is … hold space for folks, as they orient themselves to this huge fight they’re gonna find themselves in,” says Dougherty. 

When things were beginning in Bayfield, these early conversations were like the community’s compass rose. They asked themselves questions such as “who are we” and “what do we value?” And only then, says Dougherty, could they move on to “what are we going to do about it?”

Bayfield residents came together on the common ground of wanting to protect Lake Superior and the surrounding landscape. And what they did about it was they started a petition to enact a moratorium on siting CAFOs in Bayfield County. 

“This is ground that we all can stand on and agree, yes, this works for us. And once we’ve defined that ground, then we go on to the work of how we’re going to protect this place.”

The county board of supervisors passed the moratorium, stopping the clock temporarily. During that time, the board set up a study committee, which ended up recommending two ordinances that would further regulate any future CAFOs in Bayfield County. The 26,000-hog CAFO was not built in Bayfield County—but it did find another home in Burnett County.

Bayfield’s victory shows what communities are capable of. And the re-siting of the CAFO in a neighboring county demonstrates why so many advocates are pushing for systemic change as well. 

Back in Linn County, Oregon, Farmers Against Foster Farms was working towards both—a bill to protect not only its county but give other Oregon counties the ability to defend themselves as well.

In Oregon, the story is not over

Finding out about the planned chicken operation galvanized Linn County residents—many of them farmers themselves—to organize into a group called Farmers Against Foster Farms. They made a website and an email listserv, created yard signs and a Facebook page. The three planned sites were a concern, but they also wanted a way to address the issue more generally, before future sites were even chosen.

Starla Tillinghast, a Linn County farmer and member of Farmers Against Foster Farms, knew that many of the issues they were concerned about, such as environmental pollution and health effects, could be partially addressed with “setbacks.” A setback is a legally required distance between a CAFO and a property line. Oregon’s was on the lower end—a couple of dozen feet. Tillinghast began looking at other agricultural states to see what their required setbacks were. Other states had greater setbacks, and Tillinghast thought that this information could help Oregon follow suit.

“I went and looked up setbacks all across the nation, and I wrote that out in a table,” says Tillinghast. “I brought it to the planner, and I brought it to the county commissioners.”

When they went to the Linn County commissioners with their concerns, they were faced with this issue: Oregon counties did not have “local control” or the ability to make decisions about these matters at the county level. When decisions about CAFOs are made at the state level, it makes it easier for industry to get a toehold in desirable areas.

They campaigned in coalition with other groups and, in August 2023, Oregon passed Senate Bill 85. One of the things it did was give counties local control. Another key part of its passing made it illegal for corporate farms to access groundwater without a permit, which Kimbirauskas suspects led two of the three potential Foster Farms sites to pull their permit applications. The third was granted and then paused—to be under review until October 2024. 

In December, the county commissioners voted in favor of a one-mile setback for any new or expanding CAFOs—a huge victory for the group.

But after the decision, there was a lot of pushback. The county commissioners, who had passed the decision but had yet to codify it, reopened the topic for public comment and set another meeting for June, wherein the commissioners would either uphold the previous decision or walk it back.

The comments poured in. The Albany Democrat-Herald reports that nearly 200 people wrote in, both supporting and opposing the setback rule, most in opposition being members of a Facebook group called “Families for Affordable Food.” This group mischaracterizes what the setback would actually do, implying it would hinder new farms and ranches in the area, when the focus is actually on large livestock operations.

It wasn’t just people in Linn County who wrote in, nor even just in Oregon. People wrote in from the Midwest and the East Coast, above Oregon in Washington and below in California, signifying the cross-country nature of the resistance to factory farming.

“The whole nation is watching us,” said Commissioner Sherrie Sprenger. “It’s a big deal.”

In the end, they voted to maintain the one-mile setback, but only for poultry CAFOs. This is a victory for the group, as well as an indication that more work will need to be done to make the case for holding that setback for dairy and hog CAFOs as well.

“I feel uneasy…This story may not be finished,” wrote Tillinghast to Modern Farmer in an email. “But probably no [Foster Farms] CAFOs in Linn County for 2024 anyway.”

The post Factory Farms Make Bad Neighbors. Meet the People Who Are Fighting Back appeared first on Modern Farmer.