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.

Many labels that guarantee humane treatment of farm animals (e.g., “humanely raised”), do anything but and are largely meaningless. Only recently did the USDA announce that it might regulate some of these labels after a push from advocates (we aren’t holding our breath). If this is the case of animal welfare labeling, consumers are right to be concerned that it is likely true of “green” labeling as well, particularly for the dairy industry, which is one of the most environmentally intensive industries on Earth. 

Farm Forward recently published a major investigative report detailing systematic animal suffering and consumer fraud at Alexandre Family Farm—a leading large-scale organic dairy company with “well over 9,000 head of cattle,” according to co-owner Blake Alexandre—whose products are covered in certification labels. The details of this investigation and the facts about large-scale dairy production should call into question the idea that the industry can be compatible with a more sustainable and humane food system. 

Farm Forward’s investigation and deceptive labeling

One of the key findings of Farm Forward’s investigation into Alexandre was this: Certifications such as Regenerative Organic Certified and Certified Humane were, sadly, insufficient to stop widespread abuse of cows and apparent environmental violations of land and water. This means that the primary function of labels—to give consumers assurances that a given product meets their values—frequently fails. In other words, humane labels aren’t there to help the consumer find better products. They’re tools for the meat and dairy industry to market their products. It’s unlikely, for example, that when a consumer sees one of these labels on Alexandre milk products in a Whole Foods Market, they imagine a field of dead cows being used as compost, or decaying cow corpses dangling into waterways, likely violating state water quality laws. Yet that’s exactly what Farm Forward’s investigation found. 

And then there’s the halo effect. Other companies that use Alexandre as a supplier, whether for ice cream, cheese, or even toddler formula, have used marketing based off of Alexandre’s humanewashing and greenwashing, and reaped the benefits. For a long time, Alexandre—and companies that have Alexandre as a supplier—have touted the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) label, a certification with genuinely high standards for cow treatment. However, Farm Forward learned from its investigation that only a relatively small number of Alexandre cows (fewer than 300 of the more than 5,000 to 9,000 cows raised by Alexandre, or roughly three to six percent) actually qualify under the label. Yet, companies bathe in the good image of Alexandre all the same, touting Alexandre’s ROC certification whether or not the actual milk used in their products came from ROC cows (as of writing, Alexandre’s ROC certification was suspended after a February 2024 audit, pending conclusion of the investigation).

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Green Guides require that marketers “ensure that all reasonable interpretations of their claims are truthful, not misleading, and supported by a reasonable basis” and that environmental marketing claims “not overstate, directly or by implication, an environmental attribute or benefit.” The FTC itself states that “…sometimes what companies think their green claims mean and what consumers really understand are two different things.” A consumer buying milk adorned with labels such as ROC and “Certified Humane” ought to have confidence that those products were actually made from properly treated cows by a company following environmental guidelines and ordinances, and free from the systematic abuse documented in the investigation. 

Large-scale dairy is incompatible with net zero

In order to understand deceptive labeling, however, we have to go back to the beginning: Why do massive dairy companies feel a need to plaster their products with misleading labels that may violate FTC guidelines? There’s a simple answer: They know the reputation of industrial dairy is faltering and are desperate to remedy the problem with claims that their industry can both expand and save us from climate disaster. And if the recent industrial dairy ad campaigns are any indication, it would seem that they are quite desperate. 

On an ultra-small scale, a sincere commitment to regenerative agriculture is compatible with reducing many of the harms of industrial animal agriculture, including harms to the climate. However, Alexandre and so many other companies that want to rehabilitate dairy farms are not small-scale; they may have thousands of animals under their care. And recent research into the ability of large-scale “regenerative” cow operations to offset as much greenhouse gas emissions as they produce is quite clear: It won’t work. The authors conclude that soil-based carbon sequestration “has a limited role to mitigate climate warming caused by the ruminant sector.” According to the study, offsetting the methane associated with global ruminant farming annually—a massive 135 gigatons—with soil-based sequestration is biophysically impossible. 

And yet, for decades, the broader dairy industry has been pushing smaller farmers out of business, the very farm operations that can represent a legitimate attempt at a regenerative system. 

Playing dairy roulette 

Farm Forward’s investigation didn’t just reveal that one particular company eschewed these standards, but also that the entire dairy system is flawed. Several certifications failed to see animal abuse happening right under their noses. USDA Organic requires that producers that treat an organic cow with antibiotics must remove that cow from the organic program. In doing so, the USDA inadvertently creates a financial disincentive for producers to treat suffering cows with the proper care, since non-organic milk and meat is sold at a far lower price point (see the report’s appendix); and many companies have benefited from the halo effect of Alexandre’s deceptions. What makes this all especially sad is that there are labels—Regenerative Organic Certified and Animal Welfare Approved among them—that genuinely have high standards relative to many other labeling schemes on the market. They can represent a small piece of the path toward a more sustainable and humane food system. But in the context of dairy production, the findings of the investigation have led Farm Forward to think that guaranteeing proper care of thousands of dairy cows just isn’t possible, given the unique challenges of dairy at scale and given the bad incentives. 

Alexandre’s failures are just one example of the dairy industry failing to live up to its promises. It tells us it can save the planet while treating cows humanely, while raking in unprecedented profits with its mega-dairies. How many more instances of animal abuse and climate devastation do we need to see before we stop believing that the industry that creates these harms also somehow holds the key to fixing them?

When a consumer buys milk from the grocery store—milk that they cannot guarantee came from an ultra small-scale operation with high standards of care—they are playing a game of dairy roulette. And in a world of such extreme levels of consumer deception, it becomes an easy choice to try oat milk. 

Farm Forward is a team of strategists, campaigners, and thought leaders guiding the movement to change the way our world eats and farms. Its mission is to change the way our world eats and farms end factory farming by changing farming, changing policy, and changing the stories we tell about animal agriculture. Learn more at https://www.farmforward.com/

The post Opinion: Farm Forward’s Investigation Into Alexandre Farms and the Greenwashing of Large-scale Dairy 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.

Communities living near these operations bear the brunt of air and water pollution, among other things. Animal advocates say that the way animals are raised in this system is inhumane from start to finish. Lakes, rivers, and streams experience unprecedented environmental degradation. The producers themselves, many of whom get into the business for a stable farming job, experience demoralization and unsafe working conditions. 

All of us, in some way, are impacted by industrial animal agriculture. This series of stories looks at the impacts, but also some of the ways that people are advocating against this system and looking for a way of farming that is sustainable—for communities, the environment, animals, and farmers themselves.

The post Fighting Factory Farms 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.

Good shoes are a must. Beneath my Doc Martens, the floor is already strewn with fat and meat scraps and bone fragments as the cutters heft chunks of what was very recently a living cow, deftly scraping every edible bit from the bones. The butcher pushes a massive carcass into the cutting room from the cooler, hanging from a hook on a rail. It looks like a red and yellow wall of flesh, but the cutters work it like sculptors, carving away to reveal the recognizable food within. 

This is a dying art—and an art of dying. I grab a cart filled with freshly cut steaks and roasts— wrapping and weighing, labeling and stacking. Two days a week, gunshots from the kill floor punctuate the mechanical noise of the place.

This is what it’s like to work at a meat-processing plant. 

In August of 2023, I began my time at a small-scale, family-owned, USDA-inspected plant in rural Virginia, where I worked until February 2024. I was in the middle of a season at an organic vegetable farm, realizing I preferred working with animals rather than plants (having had prior livestock farm experience). I wanted to stay involved in local food production, and meat processing was the only piece of the puzzle I hadn’t seen yet. Besides, I’ve always been fascinated by the craft of butchery and, as a hunter, I knew I’d gain valuable skills. So, I jumped into the fire.

Today, it’s kill day, and the slaughter crew is on the front lines of the transition from animal to food. Where I worked, they slaughtered two days a week. Pork and beef must be kept separate and are killed on different days and stored apart. The crew stuns, kills, bleeds, guts, and skins them all before breakfast.

Here’s how it works: Livestock are unloaded into the pens, and provided with water and shelter. Legally, they must be slaughtered within 24 hours of drop-off. When their time comes, they walk one at a time onto the kill floor, where they are restrained in a box-like device. This standardized equipment is designed to minimize livestock stress, and similar to the squeeze chutes used for handling back on the farm. Then, under federal law, they are rendered insensible to pain. At this particular plant, the preferred stunning method was a rifle round to the brain, but electrocution, gas, and various bolt guns are also permitted, depending on the animal and facility. Afterward, the animal is dressed; if it’s pork, it’s cooled and cut immediately.

The “suck truck” (a truck with a huge trailer and hoses) then collects usable byproducts such as hooves, hides, and viscera to be hauled to a rendering plant—one of around 300 in the country—and made into a plethora of industrial products used for anything from shampoo to dog food. It’s considered a form of biological recycling. 

Although the plants try to use as much of the animal as possible, there are restrictions. Trimmed meat and fat become burger and sausage. Organs go into pon hoss (similar to scrapple), bones are cut for soup and dog chews. Anything that can’t be consumed or rendered must be discarded.  

But beef must be aged for a week or more to help develop its flavor, mellow its texture, and reduce its moisture content. When it’s ready, the butcher brings it out to the cutting room and then the process starts again: breaking, boning, wrapping, and freezing—stored until it’s picked up by the retail or custom slaughter (private use) client.

It’s a dynamic and dirty job, but someone has to do it. One of the more than half a million workers helping to get the billions of pounds of meat on America’s tables is Britny Polk of Mount Jackson, Virginia. She’s been at the plant for six years, learning from her mother, who worked there for two decades. In addition to wrapping hundreds of pounds of meat a day, Polk manages cut sheets—instructions on how customers want their meat butchered and packaged —and much more. 

“As I’m wrapping, I get pulled away a lot to help wait on customers, answer the phones, doing bills, scheduling hogs, beef, and lambs,” she said in an email. Depending on the day, she also makes sausage and hamburger patties using a modified cookie dough machine, orders supplies, and makes sure people show up to drop off their live animal and, later, pick up their meat.

The need for these services is only growing, yet there is a constant labor shortage. “We have a really hard time finding workers and for workers to stay,” Polk said. There are unique workplace hazards here; using sharp implements and machinery comes with an elevated risk of injury. Live animals may behave erratically and even a deceased animal can kick. On busy days, the time flies, but it’s still hours of standing on a hard floor, and around constant sensory stimulation.

Heavy lifting, slippery surfaces, sub-zero temperatures, and exposure to bestial bodily fluids are all part of a typical workday. Every season can be stressful because people often celebrate with meats: spring lamb, summer grilling staples, and holiday roasts. But it can also be fun, and time flies on busy days. I worked in an environment where people were supportive and shared a sense of humor. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have participated in a part of our food system that’s too often intentionally overlooked.

It was awesome watching the butchers breaking carcasses into primals and fabricating mouthwatering cuts. My coworkers were rock stars of the food prep world, cutting it to order right there behind the counter. I miss cracking jokes while listening to music, lamenting bizarre cutting requests (New York strips ground into burger?), or wishing someone would breed a cow with more than one heart, tongue, and tail so we could keep up with demand for offal. 

I saw some truly exemplary meat: exquisitely marbled steaks, thick chops from healthy hogs—aesthetics and culinary qualities reflecting the mindful husbandry of the livestock. But that’s not always the case, as farming practices vary. Meat from stressed animals can exhibit off coloration or blood spots, and underfed animals are woefully lean or even atrophied. “There is a lot that goes into producing a good animal,” Polk said. “If you’re not feeding them appropriately, when they need it, your beef will either be way too fatty or it won’t have enough fat on it. A lot of factors go into having a nice-looking cow to process. ”

Regardless of who raises the animals and how, it’s the meat processor’s job to turn them all into food. I sincerely hope that more consumers will try to understand that there is a human cost behind their meat. “A farmer brings this live animal in and we go through every step from killing to wrapping to ensure people have food. It would be great for everyone to know how we get that product to people,” adds Polk.

There are no windows in slaughterhouses, but I aim to shed light on this crucial and underappreciated profession in the spirit of transparency, acceptance, and progress. The meat industry is here to stay and awareness is what it needs to survive.

“I think everyone should educate themselves on the process of how a living animal becomes a steak that is ready to eat. People should care because this is how you get your food,” Polk said. 

For those interested in the fascinating fields of meat science and butchery, learn hands-on. Do a season on a farm or with a deer processor. Consider a meat-cutting apprenticeship. It takes an open mind, a team player attitude, and a stomach as strong as your back, but also a love and respect for the people, places, and animals that feed us. My experience at the meat plant is summed up well by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote: “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” If you purchase meat, you are part of this system, and blissful ignorance and denial are a disservice to every being within it. It’s time for consumers to recognize their role, take accountability, and help wherever they can.

The post Inside a Slaughterhouse: The Human Cost of Your Meat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

 Miller’s life sounds bucolic however, this year has been anything but, with the farmer coming up against the Pennsylvania court system in January. Two Shiga toxin illnesses producing E.coli in children, one in New York, the other in Michigan, were traced to Miller’s raw milk products. (Miller asked that his lawyer, Robert Barnes, respond to questions about allegations of food-borne illnesses originating from his farm. Barnes, however, couldn’t be reached for comment.) 

 It also came to light that Miller was selling raw milk without a permit, which is required by state law. The state attorney general initiated legal action against the farmer to prevent him from producing or distributing his products. Miller pushed back on the basis that his clientele was private. Lancaster County Judge Thomas Sponaugle ruled that Miller couldn’t sell his raw milk products without a permit, although immediate family members were allowed to consume them. Sponaugle then clarified that his ruling didn’t prevent Miller from selling his products in other states.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, doesn’t allow the interstate sales of raw milk if the product isn’t pasteurized. This prohibition has been in place since 1987, with sales having to meet the standards of the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance. This has been unsuccessfully challenged in the past by groups such as the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which has long sought to sell raw butter interstate. But despite these rulings, to date, Miller has not been shut down.

 Pasteurization is a process discovered in the 19th century that involves heating products to 145 F, which kills off almost all yeasts, molds, and disease-causing bacteria such as Salmonella and listeria—potentially deadly if transmitted to people. Such pathogens are especially dangerous for children, reports the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Raw milk can be contaminated with any number of substances, including animal feces, bacteria from insects, rodents, or farm equipment, or drugs used to treat ill cows. Before pasteurization, raw milk products accounted for 25 percent of food-borne illnesses, including transmission of tuberculosis and typhoid. Since pasteurization, milk is traced to less than one percent of illness outbreaks. 

 The FDA lists 133 campylobacter, salmonella, and E. coli disease outbreaks in the US between 1987 and 2010 that were linked to raw milk and raw milk consumption. These outbreaks caused 2,659 cases of illnesses, 269 hospitalizations, and three deaths, according to the FDA.

 Miller says fears are overblown.  Government organizations such as the FDA are simply “trying to scare the people from drinking raw milk,” says Miller, who supports his legal battles with online fundraising. Miller is adamant that his products are more nutrient dense and tasty than pasteurized milk, in part because his cattle graze on green pastures in “God and nature.”

The health-conscious younger generation is especially supportive of Miller’s products, he says. “They’re looking for the real thing, real healing with nutrient-dense foods.” 

 The FDA stridently disputes health claims about raw milk products, such as improved asthma, allergies, lactose intolerance, gut health, and immune system. The FDA also disputes claims that pasteurization affects the taste of milk and milk products. 

Across the country, state laws on raw milk sales are as varied as a sampler quilt. Several sources provide a breakdown of state legislation, including the Raw Milk Finder and Britannica ProCon. Alabama bans raw milk sales to humans but not pets. Alaska has legalized the sale of raw milk and raw milk products, as  long as the producer has met regulatory requirements. Arizona is even more lenient, allowing retail sales. In Illinois, raw milk producers require two permits. In Kentucky, raw goat milk can be bought, but only with a physician’s recommendation. New York allows on-farm sales of raw milk. Three states Rhode Island, Nevada and Hawaii—have declared raw milk illegal. 

 Sally Fallon Morell is a Maryland raw milk producer with 25 cows who founded A Campaign For Real Milk in 1999. (Miller says that Morell inspired his father to become a producer himself in the early aughts.) Morell condemns the milk industry, saying that it has “demonized” small raw milk producers since the 1940s. Consumer pressure, however, is slowly overcoming this, and Morell says there are now more than 3,000 sources of raw milk in the country, up from 27 when she first began the campaign. These figures are supported by other unofficial raw milk sources such as Get Raw Milk. The eventual goal, says Morell, is to have “raw milk available in the stores for everybody.” 

Morell’s vision aligns with Miller’s, who is determined to flout prohibitions preventing him from selling raw milk and raw milk products such as cheeses, butter, yogurt, kefir, and colostrum to his 2,000-strong Miller’s Organic Farm Private Member Association. Miller refuses to obtain a Pennsylvania permit, as he says it would restrict him to raw milk and hard cheese sales only. State permits don’t allow sale of the many milk-related products Miller provides to his private customers, who pay a one-time fee of $35 to join his association. Miller doesn’t like what he considers a power imbalance between state and farmer that results from having a permit. “As soon as they [the government] find something out of order, they would pull your permit and you’d be stranded.” 

 Although there aren’t any immediate legal actions against Miller from the FDA or the state of Pennsylvania, the Amish farmer says that he anticipates further court battles this year. If necessary, Miller will risk jail to defend his right to sell raw milk products without government oversight. 

Miller likens the consumption of raw milk products to the constitutional right to bodily autonomy and the right to control one’s body. His customers, he says, are well informed about the food choices they are making. “They’ve educated themselves and want to make their own decisions. Why can’t this be possible?”

The post Got Raw Milk? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

And despite the name, bird flu doesn’t only impact birds. Since 2022, there have been four cases reported in humans and, more recently, more than 100 herds of dairy cattle in the US alone. The infection has also been found in both the milk and meat of these animals. This month, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency updated its testing eligibility for cattle and said it would now cover some of the testing fees, to ensure any outbreaks are dealt with swiftly. Luckily, in humans, the disease isn’t known to be fatal, but it can lead to high temperatures, breathing trouble, diarrhea, conjunctivitis and potentially more serious complications such as pneumonia or respiratory illness. 

So, what does this mean for your grocery order? Let’s break it down. 

First, poultry. Is it safe to eat?

Yes. Experts say it is highly unlikely that humans can contract the virus from properly cooked meat or eggs. This means cooking eggs until the yolk and whites are firm and chicken to at least 165°F. And to be safe, keep raw poultry away from any other foods. 

But what’s even more important is that infected meat or eggs are very unlikely to reach grocery store shelves in the first place. According to a USDA predictive model, there is a less than five percent chance that infected eggs or meat might make it to the grocery store—and the model also predicts that if that did happen, 98 percent of infected eggs could be recalled immediately. 

But what about milk?

Recent studies of about 300 commercially available dairy products revealed inactive HPAI in one in five samples. That number seems like a lot on the surface, but there’s one key element: pasteurization. There is increasing evidence that the pasteurization process neutralizes the virus, making pasteurized dairy products safe to consume. 

In the 297 samples tested by the USDA, there was no instance of a live, viable virus in any pasteurized product. 

Is beef ok?

As with poultry and eggs, it’s highly unlikely that infected beef would make it to store shelves in the first place. However, if it does, experts also agree that properly cooked beef carries very little risk of transmitting the virus to humans. Cooking your meat to an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit (74 degrees Celsius) will neutralize avian flu, E Coli and any other bacteria. 

So, what do I need to know?

The main thing to ensure when shopping for or preparing food is that you’re following safe food guidelines. Consuming raw eggs (looking at you, cookie dough) or unpasteurized dairy products could increase your risk of not just HPAI but salmonella, E Coli, listeria or other food-borne illnesses. Raw ground beef can also be a transmitter of those illnesses, so store beef at 40 degrees F or below, and use it within a few days. It’s also best to cook ground beef to an internal temperature of at least 160 degrees F. 

If you are someone who regularly comes in contact with farms, be they poultry or cattle, following a strict biosecurity plan will help reduce the risk of transmitting infections. That means tightening visitor access to your farm, wearing clean boots and clothes and removing or controlling any standing water. In the meantime, officials are looking at several solutions to mitigate these outbreaks, including new vaccines.

The post How Much Do You Really Need to Worry About Bird Flu? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It was dark, with a sliver of a moon lending a Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland eeriness to the inherent novelty of my planned morning of activities. I pulled past the “No Trespassing” signs and found the trailer, cheerfully lit up against the dark meadow quietly swaying in the breeze behind it. 

I shook hands with the waiting stranger and grabbed one of the headlamps and a set of protective earmuffs (exposure to the sound of gunshots over time can damage your eardrums) on offer, and followed her—yes, her—into the woods, where we’d huddle in a blind for hours, waiting to see if any turkeys would show. 

Cheryl Frank Sullivan, a research assistant professor of entomology at the University of Vermont, grew up around hunting in Upstate New York, but she was never interested in it. “I studied environmental science in college, and I didn’t see until a little later how hunting could fit into that,” says Sullivan. Many folks may change their minds about a stance they took when they were younger. But hunting is a topic that inherently brings up strong emotions. And crucially, it hasn’t always been portrayed as friendly or open to women looking to join up. 

As I found out on that cold spring morning, that’s changing. 

The hunt

Sullivan led me toward the blind she had set up, telling her story. (I don’t have a license to hunt, so I could only legally observe her hunting.) Like many other female hunters, the route she took to get where she is today was meandering but meaningful. 

“For me, hunting has become a way of living and a way of being in the world and the woods,” said Sullivan as we sat in comfortable camp chairs inside a snug tent with windows we could zip and unzip as needed to see what was going on, disguise ourselves and—if all went well—Sullivan could target and shoot a gobbler.

Sullivan set up realistic (to me) looking hen turkey decoys in a patch of meadow in front of our ground hide. Hunters can also set up blinds in trees, but those are best utilized for deer hunts, or they can just completely camouflage themselves and set up next to a tree on the ground or move quietly from place to place, she says.

“Turkeys have eagle eyes, so wearing camo and staying very still is important, and they have incredible hearing, which is why I’m whispering,” said Sullivan. 

In a bid to draw the birds, Sullivan brought out a slate call, scratching the striker against the slate to imitate a turkey’s distinct vocalizations. Sullivan, who seemed familiar with all of the state’s hunting regulations, was only able to target gobblers or male turkeys.

“May is nesting season, so you can’t hunt hens,” said Sullivan. “We can also hunt from a half an hour before sunrise to noon.”

Following the rules, which vary state to state and are generally handled by a wildlife management agency, is important to Sullivan and all of the hunters she knows.

Women have always hunted 

An army of female hunters may seem modern, but recent studies show it’s anything but. 

For millennia, the notion that men hunted and women gathered dominated the academic study of early human life. The popular imagination followed, and for many years, the idea that society would function better if men and women would do what comes “naturally” to them—in other words, stop trying to wedge your way into boardrooms and onto battlefields, ladies—seemed like common sense in many circles. 

But science and new discoveries have overturned that paradigm. New research out of the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University shows that, around 200,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began their slow trudge toward space travel and excessive screen time, women were responsible for hunting, right alongside the men. 

The findings published in PLOS One found that, in 79 percent of societies across the world for which scientists were able to find direct evidence, women were hunting with purpose and their own tools. Girls were actively encouraged to learn how to join the hunt. 

Sullivan’s approach to hunting—as a way to respect and care for the land and the intricate ecosystem and food chain that it supports—reflects a consistent shift in the culture of hunting, says Mandy Harling, director of education and outreach programs at the National Wild Turkey Federation [NWTF], a foundation dedicated to wild turkey conservation throughout North America.

When the organization was founded in 1973, hunting heritage was foundational to NWTF’s mission. Since 2012, when it launched a refreshed preservation push, the NWTF has conserved or enhanced more than four million acres of wild land for turkeys and hunters, and it has opened public access to hunting on 600,000-plus acres of land. 

Conservation and hunting, while at first glance perhaps unlikely bedfellows, share many of the same goals, says Harling. 

“Clean water is essential for all living things on earth, and where there is clean water, there are turkeys,” says Harling. “We work with partners to create healthier forests and watersheds. And when we manage a forest for wild turkey habitat, we also improve the land for all wildlife and the humans who live around it.”

Getting women interested in and invested in hunting is also part of the NWTF’s long-term strategy.

“We formally began organizing women in outdoor programs in 1998,” says Harling. “We have found that the conservation aspect is an important aspect of the culture of hunting that attracts women.”

While only 10 percent to 15 percent of hunters in the US are currently women, that number is on the rise, with the number of women applying for hunting permits almost equaling that of men and more organizations set up to train women hunters. Some states such as Maine have programs specifically for women organized by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. There are also nonprofits such as Doe Camp Nation and companies such as Artemis and Wild Sheep which offer retreats and training programs for would-be women hunters. 

Maya Holschuh, a 25-year-old Wilmington, VT resident who started hunting at 21, says the practice has been empowering and transformative. 

“I feel like it’s a much more ethical way to consume meat. I know how the animal died, I know it lived a great life in the wild and I know it wasn’t raised in captivity and pumped full of hormones,” says Holschuh. 

On my first foray into the hunting world, there were no kills. The experience left me with the same feeling I get after the first day of skiing every year: I connected with the natural world on a deep level that I somehow forget I know how to plumb on other nature excursions. I was OK with my performance, but I could do better next time. I know what I’d change. It left me sated but wanting more. 

I love eating meat. But I want to eat less beef because I know that continuing to support cattle farming with my burger habit is more destructive to the ecosystem and surrounding community than, say, shooting one deer or a handful of turkeys and eating their meat for an entire season. I opt for organic, grassfed everythin, and have developed a taste for wild meat thanks to my generous hunting friends who are always willing to share their hauls.

Hunting seems like the next step in my CSA-joining, farmer’s market-shopping food journey. Will I run out and get a hunting license? I haven’t yet. But I’m intrigued by the idea of joining my sisters in arms. 

Sullivan has introduced countless women to hunting and fishing, and she has instructed groups on weekend retreats through associations such as Vermont Outdoors Woman and Vermont Outdoor Guide Association. 

“If you want to learn to hunt, reaching out to an organization that guides women is a great place to start,” says Sullivan. “You’ll get guidance on technique but also learn what kind of licenses and gear you’ll need. Plus, you’ll be creating a network of other female hunters who are eager to learn.”

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