On the National Park Service website, under the heading, “Things To Do at Minidoka National Historic Site,” you will find this:

Walk through the remains of the entry station, waiting room, and rock garden. Read the names on the plaques. Try to imagine what it must have been like to be brought to this remote area. Look around and compare what you see to your own more comfortable surroundings.

Soon, this contemplative visit to the Minidoka War Relocation Center will have a much different feel–and smell.  After decades of activism to get the former incarceration camp named a national historic monument, an Idaho dairy wants to build a Confined Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO, just 1.2 miles away.

The history of America’s wartime imprisonment along racial lines is an under-told story: most Americans have read barely a paragraph about it in their high school textbooks, and young Japanese Americans struggle to glean more information from relatives and libraries.  But domestic incarceration under the auspices of “military necessity” did happen, and in some of the harshest rural climates in the United States: Jerome (Arkansas), Tulelake (California) and Topaz (Utah) are just a few.  The camps are in various stages of disintegration today, depending on the success of camp survivors and their descendants to get the federal government to preserve and maintain the grounds for interested visitors, Japanese American and otherwise.  Minidoka camp is located in Hunt, Idaho, and when it was operational (between 1942 and 1945), it formed the eighth largest city in the state.  President Clinton declared it a National Monument in 2001 and it’s now under National Park Service jurisdiction.

In 2008, the Jerome County Commissioners approved a permit request by Big Sky Dairy to begin construction of a 13,000-cow dairy CAFO.  Keep in mind that the Environmental Protection Agency defines a “large CAFO” for dairy cows as any facility with over 700 cattle.  With over 18 times that number, the proposed facility near Minidoka is a key battleground in the fight over the safety, cleanliness and environmental and aesthetic impact of super-sized CAFOs.  It’s also an opportunity to look at how Japanese Americans and other interested parties are–or are not–brought into the debate on how industrial food is produced in the United States.

Because Idaho law only permits public comment from residents living within one mile of a proposed feedlot, and none of the former incarcerees still live there, Japanese Americans were initially locked out of the public comment process.  While this absurd limitation was finally rescinded, a judge recently upheld the right of the CAFO to begin construction. A group of camp survivors and their supporters called Friends of Minidoka and the national Japanese American Citizens League have joined with local groups Idaho Concerned Area Residents for the Environment (ICARE) and the Idaho Rural Council to fight the CAFO in court; they are considering an appeal of the most recent ruling.  While the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Minidoka one of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in the United States, a lack of national awareness and mounting legal fees mean the site is still in jeopardy.

Joelle Hervic is an environmental lawyer who worked on CAFO issues in the Chesapeake Bay as Senior Attorney at Waterkeeper Alliance, an international river and waterway protection network.  Ms. Hervic expressed dismay at the proposed Minidoka CAFO.  “Not only is it completely inappropriate to have a CAFO located in such close proximity to the Minidoka historic site because it is disrespectful, but also there are serious environmental and health concerns associated with CAFOs.  Typically, these types of CAFOs store manure and other farm wastes, which are often toxic, in gigantic tanks or ‘lagoons’ that can hold millions of gallons of manure and urine.  Untreated animal manure from CAFOs is up to 160 times more toxic than raw municipal sewage. In addition, antibiotic residues, heavy metals and harmful bacteria from CAFOs can leach into water supplies,” said Hervic. Adding to the danger, the Minidoka site is known for extreme dust storms, raising concerns of cross-contamination of fecal matter and industrial waste into nearby farms and residences.

The CAFO controversy in southern Idaho is not the only place in rural America that tensions fester over what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II, and how, or even if, that legacy should be remembered.  In some instances, they have turned violent: a group of survivors and descendants visiting the former Tule Lake camp near the Oregon-California border in 2006 found their tour bus shot up with BB guns after an evening cultural program in the town of Klamath Falls.

In Minidoka, by contrast, the CAFO issue has brought together local people and former internees.  “Local people will really suffer (if the CAFO is built).  They have to live there,” said Emily Momohara, an art professor and board member of Friends of Minidoka.  Her grandparents and great-grandparents were held at Minidoka during the war.  “One farmer has started putting up American flags and helping us with our pilgrimages.  He doesn’t want his kids drinking that water either,” she said.

When these American concentration camps were thrown together in the panicked first few months of U.S. involvement in World War II, their locations were chosen for their desolation and sometimes, harsh weather conditions.  Prominent men from Japanese American religious, educational, and civic institutions were quickly rounded up and sent to Department of Justice high-security sites like frigid Bismarck, North Dakota, and scorching Crystal City, Texas.  Families, including infants, the elderly, the sick, and orphans were scattered among the 10 remaining camps.  After the war, cheaply erected barracks were sometimes sold to returning GIs for $1 each, and the land itself was given away in lotteries for returning veterans.  Baby boomer families began building lives–and farms–where Japanese and Japanese-American families were imprisoned just a few years earlier.  Some moved onto land that had been tilled and irrigated by Japanese incarcerees, forming a direct link between the camps and modern food production.

Every year there are Americans who become newly aware of the forced removal of Japanese Americans and seek to unearth information about this disturbing period of our history.  Imagine if you were to study a map and make the dusty trek to Minidoka one day, perhaps with a small bundle of flowers to leave on the memorial obelisk outside the former gates of the camp.  But as you pull up to the site, the overwhelming smell of animal waste fills the car, your lungs, your head.  The sounds of animals compete with your thoughts as you try to make sense of this place, and craft something meaningful out of your trek to this remote locale.

If construction proceeds as planned, a CAFO at Minidoka would disrespect not only those who were imprisoned but also their descendants who deserve to know the truth about what happened to their family members.  As a National Historic Site, Minidoka (like the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall) exists to teach future generations about the dangers of hysteria and hate, particularly in times of war.  This is what all Americans stand to lose if construction of a 13,000-cow CAFO is allowed just one mile from Minidoka.

To donate to the Minidoka Committee Legal Fund, go here.

It’s also far from the first time an equipment failure has killed thousands of animals—a similar incident killed 3800 pigs less than a year ago. So let’s look the causes behind these tragedies, and what it would take to keep another incident like this from ever occurring.

One of the points I regularly make in my writing is that while factory farming is loaded with horrific cruelties, very little of it is a result of outright sadism. Instead, nearly all the pain and suffering that farmed animals endure is a result of efforts made by factory farms to cut costs to the bone. It turns out that many of these cost-cutting practices entail the infliction of great amounts of suffering.

We see the link between cost cutting and animal suffering in veal crates, battery cages, and gestation crates—which allow factory farms to pack the most possible animals into a single facility. We see it again in practices like tail docking, beak searing, and dehorning: these painful mutilations are performed to reduce injuries that occur when animals are overcrowded. And we see it yet again at slaughter: the horror stories that regularly emerge about birds and pigs being dropped into scald tanks or butchered alive have everything to do with packing plants that rush slaughter in an effort to minimize labor costs.

All of the above examples are well-known to anyone who has spent any time learning about factory farming. But, as with each of the above items, this week’s death of 60,000 chickens likewise has its roots in industry cost cutting.

At issue is the fact that, by their very design, factory farms are intended to run on autopilot. Between water pumps, feed conveyors, ventilation fans, and so forth, everything is in place to keep tens of thousands of animals alive unattended for weeks or even months at a time. There’s often  consequently no financial reason to keep a single employee on the premises, for the sake of guarding against something going catastrophically wrong. It makes no financial sense, since it’s cheaper to simply purchase insurance that would cover the cost of dead animals, in the event of a catastrophic equipment failure.

It would be comforting to think that when factory farm mechanisms break down the animals die quickly and painlessly, but I doubt that’s the case.  Yet media coverage frequently creates the impression that there’s not much suffering associated with these equipment failures. For instance, in its coverage of the 60,000 chickens who died this week, the Associated Press reports:

Andy Elmore with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture says the chickens probably died within minutes of the fans going out.

Dead within minutes? I think that’s unlikely. Perhaps I’m projecting my personal anxieties and phobias onto the situation, but I have to think the ordeal these animals suffered is something akin to being put into a dry sauna and having someone lock the door.

A friend of mine who does as much for farmed animals as anyone I know thinks that birds brought to commercial slaughterhouses may die even more painfully than those lost to equipment failures, but I think his position misses the point. If, as a society, we’re going to raise and slaughter animals in brutal factory farm environments, the very least we owe these animals is a guarantee that their bodies won’t be discarded by the tens of thousands due to equipment failures.

But if this problem is left to the market, that’s exactly what will continue to happen and nothing will change. Factory farming is a game of squeezing pennies, an industry in which everyone but the lowest-cost producers are driven from business. The number of dairy, pork, poultry, and egg producers has dropped by more than 90 percent over the past half-century.

No wonder, then, that whenever factory farms are confronted with the opportunity to spend money to reduce animal suffering, they’ll cut corners every time. In this case, rather than spend a tiny amount of money to safeguard their animals from equipment failure or fire, they spend a tinier amount of money to buy insurance that will compensate them financially should trouble arise.

So what we get is a situation where, every once in a while, thousands or even tens of thousands of animals die horrifically, because nobody is on the scene when the food, water, or ventilation systems break down. In essence, much of America’s meat, milk, and eggs are produced at factory farm ghost ships—places where animals are kept in unspeakable conditions, with absolutely no human supervision for days or weeks at a time.

That this is common practice, and is forbidden nowhere by state anticruelty laws, is an obscenity. We can debate which industry practices are too cruel to perform, but there can’t be any legitimate debate about whether it’s morally acceptable to keep tens of thousands of animals in one building, a single power outage or equipment breakdown away from a gruesome death.

Let’s do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine what it might cost to protect all these animals. It’s not uncommon for a chicken grower to keep upwards of 100,000 birds on a single property. At about 3.8 pounds of meat per bird, that works out to 380,00o pounds of meat produced every six weeks. Six weeks of 24-hour supervision comes to 1008 hours. Multiply that by the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and you get $7308.   Divide $7308 by 380,000 pounds of chicken and you get an added cost per pound of less than two cents.

Now it should be inserted here that there’s no need to have 24-hour supervision at alternative chicken and pork farms offering top-notch welfare. At these facilities, there’s no chance that an equipment failure could lead to the deaths of every animal on the premises; the animals just aren’t packed together in ways that makes them completely vulnerable. But at factory farms, having a worker present at all times is the only line of defense the animals have against a needlessly horrible death. So if you want factory farmed meat, milk, or eggs, the cost of having an employee on duty 24-hours should be the minimal price of admission.

So how do we go from here to there? Groups like the Humane Society of the United States, Mercy For Animals, and Compassion Over Killing are constantly pushing animal agriculture to phase out its worst cruelties. It’s time for ghost ship factory farms to be put high on the list of agricultural abuses that need to go.

The meat, milk, and egg industries are overseen by trade groups that exert great influence within their sectors. Unfortunately, these groups consistently come out against even the most minimal and reasonable cruelty bans. And no doubt, they’d oppose even the simple measure of initiating standards to ban ghost ships within their industries. That said, the call to ban ghost ships is something that these trade groups can’t oppose without appearing loathsome, so animal advocates need to get these organizations on record about this ongoing problem.

The time has come to outlaw factory farm ghost ships: each one is a large-scale disaster waiting to happen. In the end, deaths arising from financially motivated animal neglect are as morally wrong as deaths caused by deliberate cruelty. The sensible response to tens of thousands of animals dying due to equipment failure is not for the owner of the farm to receive a check from his insurance company; it’s for the owner to get a free ride to the county jail in the back of a squad car.

Originally published on Vegan.com

The CAFO Reader – a new book featuring essays by farmers Wendell Berry, Becky Weed, and Fred Kirschenmann, Republican speech writer Matthew Scully, journalist Michael Pollan and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among many others – gives a full picture of the environmental, social, and ethical implications of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and includes a section of essays on “Putting the CAFO Out to Pasture.” A CAFO is an Environmental Protection Agency designation for a farming facility that keeps numerous animals raised for food in close confinement, with the potential to pollute. These facilities often produce extreme amounts of waste, which ends up in toxic lagoons, sprayed on the land, and eventually in the watershed; require the use of high doses of antibiotics, thereby adding to the growth of drug-resistant bacteria; and are exempt from most animal cruelty laws. I spoke with the editor of The CAFO Reader, Daniel Imhoff, who is also the cofounder, director, and publisher of Watershed Media, about recent legislation and the future of the CAFO.

Our last interview was before Obama was elected. How do you feel now that there is Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, and a Secretary of Agriculture that is actually discussing making changes in agriculture?

You can’t help but be thrilled about the discourse that is going on right now. You have the FDA coming out with guidelines saying is that we need to limit the use of antibiotics in animal food production only to medical need. Then you have the USDA issuing new nutritional guidelines that basically say we need to eat a lot less saturated fat, AKA animal products, and a lot more vegetables, nuts, and whole grains. Then you have the Department of Justice, the Attorney General and the USDA jointly looking into concentration within the agricultural industry. I think what it really shows is that these people understand their jobs and are not afraid to do them. We might be getting towards an age of clarity and urgency. You can’t help but look at the oil spill, and say there is an exact metaphor with the industrial food system—it’s uncontainable, and it’s unsustainable, and it’s inevitable that we have to get somewhere else. And that something else is pretty much the exact opposite of what we have right now.

If CAFOs were called “factories” instead of being called farms, would they be regulated differently?

If the CAFO is legally considered a farm, or an agricultural enterprise, rather than an industry, then it is exempt from regulation of its airborne and land-borne waste. The industry has been fighting for many years to retain this agricultural status. Agriculture developed as this interaction between the appropriate number of animals creating fertility for a diverse number of crops. It was a whole closed production system. With this intensive concentration of animals it’s rare when the surrounding land can absorb the waste.

What effect do you think a change in our policies around antibiotic use in livestock would have on the way the industry operates?

It cuts right to the issue of scale. If you take away the antibiotics, then you can’t cram so many animals in such unhealthy conditions with an unnatural diet. And so you suddenly have to reduce the concentration and intensification of agriculture.

How does agricultural concentration affect farmers and consumers?

These companies want us to think that they are Smithfield Farm, and that they are taking care of their pigs. But they control the breeding facilities and production, they own feed mills and slaughterhouses. They are producing huge amounts of meat, and so the price stays low, but you either play their game or you have to make your own alternative industry from start to finish. At one of the Department of Justice workshops, a chicken farmer was saying that a bucket of fried chicken in his area costs $26.95, and he gets $0.30 for growing the chickens that went into the bucket. And in the meantime the CEOs of Purdue, Tyson, and KFC are making millions.

Farmers often feel attacked when criticism is laid on the industry. Do you have any ideas for how to remedy this disconnection?

The only way that we can help that disconnection is to bring more farmers into the discussion. For many years, what we’ve seen is corporations hiding behind this facade of the rancher or the farmer with his cows ambling around the pasture, a few hogs and a couple chickens. [In fact,] the corporations that are dominating food production right now are extremely anti-farmer. They’ve basically wiped out the small livestock producer in the United States. And anyone who remains, who can sell to these huge corporate interests is either massive or they’re a corporate contractor and they are barely surviving. What is heartening to me is to hear the Secretary of Agriculture say that one of his goals during his tenure is to generate 100,000 new farmers.

Wendell Berry’s essay, Renewing Husbandry, talks about how modern agriculture has decreased the amount of landowners and self-employed in rural areas. What effect is this having?

Wendell [says that] when you lose your small farmers, you lose your community. When you loose your community, you loose your reverence for the land. When your reverence for the land is turned over to this higher corporate economic power, then everything becomes commodified. Then we loose the beauty and our control over a healthy life, the fabric of our country. And these are the issues that are at stake here.

What do you view as reasonable goals for the food movement, specifically around changing CAFO policy?

Ultimately, I think the long-term goal is probably the elimination of the CAFO. How practical is that? Well, I don’t know. Certainly you are working from all directions at the same time. Governor Schwarzenegger signed a very important piece of legislation [that] says that anyone who sells eggs in California has to abide by the regulations put forth in Proposition 2. That means if you are in Iowa, and you want to sell eggs in California, you can’t use battery cages after 2015. I think that [it] would be a reasonable goal to have [Doctor of Animal Science and professor] Temple Grandin helping to shape the ethics and the economics of animal food production. She has a mind for trying to make things work from an animal’s perspective, and she is not unrealistic. Somehow we have to get industry out of the driver’s seat.

What about some of the techno-fixes, like genetic modifications geared toward producing animals more suited to factory farm conditions. Do you think they miss the point?

[The industry] is just trying, at all costs, to keep a bad idea afloat. Trying to engineer a featherless chicken that doesn’t need to be plucked, the hen or the sow stripped of its mothering instincts so that its not traumatized when its babies are taken away, grasses that will decrease flatulence and therefore methane production in livestock. Ultimately where we’re going now is in-vitro meat, where we don’t need animals at all, we just clone tissue, and manufacture animal flesh.

Which has been praised by animal welfare activists because there wouldn’t be animal suffering involved. Do you see this as a way of decreasing the amount of factory farms?

I understand it in principle. I don’t understand how you factor the environmental footprint of that process, but its something much deeper. In this life that we’re living where we give over the power and the responsibility of growing food to somebody else, we’re separated from the very processes of life. And in that disconnection, it makes it harder and harder to understand how ultimately everything is extremely connected. What you hear from industry [is] how are we possibly going to satiate [the growing population] without intense concentration of production, and without the industrialization of agriculture? And in fact we haven’t really answered that question. And that is going to be the question for me for the next 50 years, is how are we going to create diets in each of our respective regions that become the engine for health, they power our bodies, they power our economies, and they keep our land healthy? It’s just pretty much assumed that an animal-intensive diet is good for us, and unfortunately the science shows otherwise.

Do you eat meat?

I would say that I am a less-meatarian. I am a cautious omnivore. I love to grow food. I do raise chickens, and a couple hogs.

Who do you hope will read the CAFO reader?

The idea was to show the concern, the analysis, the urgency for something different is shared by everyone. So my hope would be that anybody who considers it important might take a look and read a bunch of very different perspectives. I hope that people in Poland and Romania read it and maybe the Ukraine and Georgia, and anywhere else that the CAFO industry is beginning to set its sights.

The photo book that accompanies the essays comes out in September. What will we be seeing there?

I think what you will graphically see is the doors of CAFOs pulled back. It’s going to show what the industry doesn’t really want you to know about food production. What I’ve heard from people on the press in China is that the book has changed their view of humanity and food.

We’re already talking about the 2012 Farm Bill. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the ask could be around regulating CAFOs more effectively.

One of the most egregious current programs in the Farm Bill is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. [Through this] a single CAFO operator is eligible to receive up to $450,000 for waste treatment investment, things that if you were an industry, this would just be a cost of doing business. So the one thing we could do is absolutely stop paying for [this]. Then we certainly have to move away from a system of maximizing corn-harvest feed production toward a conservation-based approach to agriculture. And that would be taking the direct payments out of the commodity title. That money that goes to a farmer every year, whether they farm or not. Those payments [should go] toward some kind of green payments, conservation- based program. What would we do if Wendell Berry or Wes Jackson was in charge of the Department of Agriculture? I think what they would say is what we really need to change this discussion from the animal grain-based production system that we have right now and go toward a more perennial, deep-rooted, pasture-based agriculture.

What you called “getting perennial by the next centennial?”

Yeah. It’s going to mean fewer animals. It’s going to mean soil protection and carbon sequestration, and a much more conservation-based agriculture. It’s something that Big Ag and the farm community is not going to be crazy about in the short term, so it has to be incentivized. We have a great deficit in fruit and vegetable production. We import a huge amount of our fruits and vegetables, and this is the part of our diet, which the USDA is struggling to get back on the table. And they are saying that we need 13 million acres of fruits and vegetables. Hey, that should be in the Farm Bill. There’s lots of change to be had. One would hope at least that this administration could pull together the absolute best standards that the world has right now, adopt them, and force some big change.

A recent report from the American Society of Microbiologists on the growing threat of antibiotic resistance urged an end to industrial agriculture’s indiscriminate and virtually unregulated use of antibiotics as “growth promotants” in order to maintain the drugs’ effectiveness for people. Animals in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are routinely given antibiotics to help them tolerate the stressful, crowded conditions they are raised in; for an unknown reason, the drugs generally help them grow bigger, faster. Industry stands by the practice and downplays any risks it may represent to public health.

With legislation to restrict the use of antibiotics in livestock bottled up in House and Senate committees, both sides have looked to the FDA to take the lead. FDA Administrator Dr. Margeret Hamburg, as well as her deputy Joshua Sharfstein, had indicated their intention to act on the issue.

And now they have, in the form of what’s called “draft guidance.” Neither a full regulatory rule nor a law, it’s meant to establish procedures the FDA would like an affected industry to follow — and is subject to an open comment period before it becomes official guidance.

In the case of administering antibiotics to farm animals, the most important statement in this new document is that the “FDA thinks that using medically important antimicrobial drugs to increase production in food-producing animals is not a judicious use.”

While this may sound like so much bureaucratese, it represents a strong statement by the FDA and suggests further action is forthcoming. In addition, the agency declared itself to be particularly concerned about antibiotics that:

• Were approved before 2003
• Are used in food-producing animals to increase production;
• Are available over-the-counter (OTC), and therefore, can be given without a veterinarian’s involvement; and
• Are given continuously through the feed or water to entire herds or flocks of animals.

This draft, though clearly preliminary and subject to industry feedback, also gives Congress a reason to move forward on legal restrictions knowing that a scientific consensus is forming — though in reality it’s unlikely a law could be passed much before November, if at all.

The question remains just how hard Big Meat will fight this guidance. The FDA wants to bend over backwards to limit problems for livestock producers by phasing in restrictions and taking their concerns into account. But will groups like the Pork Board — which denied the very existence of the problem to CBS News anchor Katie Couric in her blockbuster report on the subject — take the hand the FDA has offered? Or will they bite it?

Or will CAFO operators simply seek to bypass any regulation altogether, by claiming that routine doses of antibiotics are medically necessary to prevent disease in close quarters? I’m contacting an expert on this topic to find out if the FDA’s draft guidance indicates such loopholes will exist, and whether industry will head for them.

We know that subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock is unnecessary. The Danes have, somewhat famously, proved it by banning the practice and significantly reduced the threat of antibiotic resistance with no long-term effects on livestock health or productivity. The American Society of Microbiologists knows it. The FDA does, too. Even over a hundred House members and 17 senators (that being the number of cosponsors attached to the pending legislation) know it. With any luck, the industry will finally get the message.

Originally published on Grist

At Farm Aid, we consider these questions seriously. After all, our mission is to keep family farmers on their land. So, what do we mean when we say family farmer? How do we identify a factory farm? Is there any real definition to these terms?

No Clear Lines in the Soil

In one sense, there’s not. As farming in the United States becomes increasingly consolidated and industrialized, the face of agriculture is rapidly changing. Terms like “family farm” and “factory farm” are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and the lines distinguishing between one kind of farming and another are readily blurred.

For example, 98% of all the 2.2 million farms in the United States meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) definition of a “family farm.” USDA considers a “family farm” any farm where the majority of the business is owned by the operator and his or her relatives: that is, by a family.

But this does little to characterize most family farms or the threats they face. For example, a farm itself is defined by USDA as any operation selling $1,000 or more of agricultural products in a year.[1] Plenty of people take issue with even this definition, since it’s decades old—$1,000 today isn’t nearly what it was when this threshold was first created. Beyond that, it allows for nearly anyone who’s dabbling in growing food or raising livestock for sale, regardless of whether they consider farming their primary occupation, to be classified as a farmer. In fact, over 1.3 million farms counted by USDA are operations where the owner is not looking to make a living from farming.[2] That means only about 900,000 US farms are operated by full-time farmers who derive their livelihood from the land.

Meanwhile we are rapidly losing our full-time farmers from our landscape. Since the 1970s, the number of farms in America has dropped by nearly a quarter.[3] Most of these were midsized family farms growing grain or raising livestock—sectors that were, and still are, becoming increasingly dominated by fewer, larger farms. This concentration has historically squeezed profit margins for family farmers, forcing them to “get big or get out.” The 2007 Census of Agriculture showed that 80,000 midsized farms were lost since 2002. Meanwhile, the biggest farms got larger and more industrialized, with just 6% of farms producing 75% of our food.[4] These dynamics reflect a system designed to promote only the biggest and most industrialized of farms, frequently at the expense of family farmers, our economy, health, and the environment.

As new financial pressures mount and sectors reorganize, many family farmers find themselves trapped in a system they would otherwise reject. They often lament that most people misunderstand what it truly takes to farm in the United States, feeling pressured into industrial practices that harm themselves, our soil and water, our food itself and the economies that support them.

I’ll say first that Farm Aid has a keen understanding of these dynamics, and works daily to provide resources for farmers in both crisis and transition. Our mission is to keep family farmers on their land, and our 1-800-FARM-AID hotline and Farmer Resource Network are there to help all family farmers. We’re not here to draw lines in the sand—not because we’re afraid of a little controversy, but because doing so would oversimplify the nature of agriculture in today’s world.

Our vision is not just for the farm itself, but for the whole food system. We still find it incredibly meaningful and important to distinguish between the industrial system that dominates agricultural production in the United States, and our vision for a family farm-based food system.

Defining Factory Farms and the Industrial Food System

The term “factory farm” is often used interchangeably with concentrated animal feeding operation, more commonly referred to as a CAFO. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifies CAFOs as large[5] livestock facilities that raise animals in confined settings. According to EPA, these facilities “congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland.”[6] The EPA designates 19,149 U.S. farms as CAFOs, though it estimates hundreds of thousands more facilities that confine animals, but are not large enough to be classified as CAFOs, exist in the United States.[7] These operations produce the bulk of our meat, poultry and dairy in the United States.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that CAFOs leave staggering bills behind for taxpayers, including:

• $26 billion in reduced property values from odor and water contamination;
• between $1.5 billion and $3 billion annually in drug-resistant illnesses attributed to the overuse of antibiotics in livestock production;
• $4.1 billion in soil and groundwater contamination from animal manure leakage.[8]

Yuck. These externalized costs mean that the prices paid at the grocery store are not reflective of the true costs of industrial meat production to our environment and public health. Furthermore, the very powerful corporations who dictate the sorts of production practices that are responsible for these costs are not made to foot the bill.

While the term factory farm is restricted to livestock production, large-scale industrial food production dominates all sectors of agriculture, including livestock, but also row crops like corn, soybeans and wheat and our many fruits and vegetables. Over half a century of research indicates that factory farms and other large-scale industrial farms have many negative effects on the communities that house them, including greater income inequality (meaning the rich get richer while the poor get poorer), lower community employment, population decline, increased crime and social conflict, increased need for public social services, unstable family units, and diminished civic participation, to name a few.[9]

While USDA statistics suggest most of these operations are family farms, it is likely that the family farmers caught in the industrial food system do not enjoy full ownership or control over their farm operations and managerial decisions—something many experts cite as critical elements in defining a family farm.[10] Among the largest threats to their power are contract arrangements with large agribusinesses that dictate their decisions, farm management practices and debt requirements.

Most poultry companies, for example, urge new farmers to build at least four poultry houses, based on the company’s own specifications, in their contract agreements. At about $300,000 per house, this requires farmers to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get started. The poultry company, on the other hand, gets off the hook without any risks associated with this investment. Very commonly, companies will later require farmers to make additional, costly changes to their poultry houses at the farmer’s expense. It’s clear to see who’s getting the short end of the stick in this relationship.

So do most of our nation’s farm operations have a family at the helm? Sure. But as we note frequently, the industrial system of agriculture is mostly benefiting a small handful of food corporations, processors, and other middlemen. The system is neither resilient nor profitable for the majority of family farmers who are left with a smaller and smaller slice of the pie, as just the largest and most industrial operations are able to thrive.

Factory farms and the industrial system are not inevitabilities, but rather the products of misguided policies. Our family farmers deserve and our future depends on a better system—one we call a family farm-based food system.

So with that, let’s move on to what gets us up and out of bed every morning here at Farm Aid.

Farm Aid’s Vision for the Family Farm

In the end, Farm Aid’s use of the words family farm and factory farm is meant to distinguish between how agriculture is controlled and owned and to illuminate who’s really benefiting. Like many in the field, we define a family farmer as someone who makes the management decisions, provides the bulk of the labor on the farm, and looks to make all or most of their living from farming. But we also extend our vision for family farmers and their farms to include the critical roles they play in their community, economy and environment.

As Farm Aid’s President Willie Nelson often reminds us, family farmers are the backbone of the nation and the first rung on the economic ladder. Since the family is tied to the land, they also have a vested interest in the economic vibrancy of their community, social and ecological wellbeing of place, and are natural stewards of the land. Many farmers maintain that part of being a family farm means leaving the land in better shape than they found it, increasing the chance of the next generation enjoying bountiful harvests.

Hence, environmental stewardship, community involvement and preserving the heritage of family farming also make up our ideal of what it means to be a family farmer. Not every family farmer does all of these things, but they have the potential to do so. In times of financial crisis, food scares, public health crises, and climate change, protecting and fostering this potential is one of the most important jobs we eaters can do.

Keeping family farmers on the land—all of them—is our only hope for a better system of agriculture in this country. We work every day to keep these farmers thriving, but also to grow the Good Food Movement, which encourages consumers to choose local, sustainable and humanely-raised foods, deepens relationships between producers and consumers, and incorporates the values that promote social, environmental and economic health in our food system. Every time you buy organic, locally-grown, humanely-raised and non-GMO food, you are getting us that much closer to realizing our vision for a family farm-based food system that benefits farmers and eaters alike, as well as the communities and environments that support them.

Such a vision is one we can all rally behind and here at Farm Aid, we’re happy to keep banging that drum for change.

Sources:

1. USDA ERS (2009). “Farm Household Economics and Well-Being: Glossary.” Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.ers.usda.gov/BRIEFING/WellBeing/glossary.htm

2. Included in this number are “retirement” and “rural residence” farms as counted by USDA. These farms are operated by individuals who do not consider farming their primary occupation. Numbers are taken from USDA ERS (2010). Structural Characteristics, for All Farms, by Farm Typology, 2008. Agricultural Resource Management Survey, USDA Economic Research Service.

3. According to USDA, there were 2.9 million farms in the US in 1970. By 2008, the number had dropped by one-quarter to about 2.19 million. Data pulled from Dimitri, C., Effland, Anne (2005). Milestones in U.S. Farming and Farm Policy Amber Waves. Washington, D.C., USDA Economic Research Service andUSDAERS (2010). Structural Characteristics, for All Farms, by Farm Typology, 2008. Agricultural Resource Management Survey, USDA Economic Research Service.

4. 2007 Census of Agriculture.

5. The Environmental Protection Agency provides a broad definition fo ranimal feeding operations (AFOs), which it defines as facilities that raise animals in confined settings. Defining a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) comes down to a matter of size. Depending on the animal species, usually poultry, swine, dairy or beef cattle, the number of animals confined determines whether a farm is an AFO or a CAFO, and whether it is a small, medium or large CAFO. The EPA estimates 450,000 AFOs exist in the United States, of which 19,149 are designated CAFOs. Size classifications for CAFOs are available at: www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/sector_table.pdf.

6. EPA (2007). “Animal Feeding Operations-NPDES Frequently Asked Questions.” Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/faqs.cfm?program_id=7.

7. EPA (2010). NPDES CAFO Rule Implementation Status — National Summary. Washington, D.C., Environmental Protection Agency. April 9, 2010.

8. Union of Concerned Scientists (2009). The hidden costs of CAFOs. Earthwise, Union of Concerned Scientists. Spring 2009.

9. Stofferahn, C. W. (2006). Industrialized Farming and Its Relationship to Community Well-Being: An Update of a 2000 Report by Linda Lobao. Prepared for the State of North Dakota, Office of the Attorney General. Grand Forks, North Dakota, University of North Dakota.

10. USDA ERS (2009). “Farm Household Economics and Well-Being: Glossary.” Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.ers.usda.gov/BRIEFING/WellBeing/glossary.htm

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released.  Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several ten-minute segments via YouTube because it hasn’t been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer (Tracy Worcester) by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods (the world’s largest pork producer).  Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer.  But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film.  Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly does not show their company in the most favorable light.  Right off the bat the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities.  We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots.  When this large corporation and their methods of competition had pushed the owner of a small family farm in Poland out of business, he said, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or emigrate.”

In Poland in the early 90’s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers.  Today there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by Smithfield Foods.  Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries and accruing annual sales around $12 billion.  Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms with 2-3 minimum wage jobs.  Any objective accountant might call that efficiency, but one protester in the film had another way to describe it:

Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it is called ‘tyranny,’ but when the oppressor is a multinational corporation, it is called ‘efficiency?’

It was precisely this form of “efficiency” the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply.  The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Smithfield is not alone under Worcester’s microscope: she takes large financial institutions to task as well.  In an interview with noted Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in absolutely everything–making 1/3 of all political contributions in the US.  This is a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Citizen’s United case.  Big Money’s influence, along with that of many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope of laws throughout the US and the world.  My daddy used to call this the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

That influence is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair.  As Pig Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the damages they cause–to the environment and to human health–then any small farmer in the world could out-compete them.  But they don’t, because the game is rigged.

So most of the time agribusiness will take its profits and go obliviously on its way.  But if anyone points out that this emperor has no clothes, they have scads of lawyers and PR professionals to make certain no one hears.  Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.

My family operates a grass-fed beef and lamb farm in Meredith, NY. I am on a New York state beef producers email list that shares information on beef news in New York, and when I received an email about a proposed CAFO that would house 72,000 cows, I was alarmed. Not only is the scale extremely big (it would be the largest CAFO east of the Mississippi) but it was being advertised as sustainable. I began to reach out to my personal network of academics and beef farmers and was surprised by the differing reactions. The resulting conversations and viewpoints brought to light the complexity of our current agricultural debate and the dire situation most rural economies find themselves in, especially in upstate New York.

Our family opposes the proposed CAFO for many reasons, some of which include animal welfare, a possible decrease in the allure of local New York state Beef, and the fact that we encounter many issues of inadequate infrastructure, such as long waits for slaughter spots for our cattle and lambs. We also pay high taxes and get very little back in the way of help from the state. In fact, sometimes we feel as if the state is trying to put us out of business. Currently New York has no true beef market and many of our calves get shipped out west to feedlots, disadvantaging many beef producers instate. Not only that, we have a general dearth of independently-owned USDA processing plants that makes many direct-sale farms impossible. This CAFO promises to source its cattle from local dairy and beef farms, and this makes it popular with some beef producers because currently we have no such system. As someone who has gone to many a livestock auction, I am skeptical of this, as there is no reason that they cannot fudge “local.”

The fact that Bion Environmental Technologies, Inc., the company behind the proposed CAFO, is being welcomed with open arms by a struggling upstate community belies the need we have for infrastructure that would support a vibrant and profitable rural economy. I would love for New York state and the federal government to find a way to promote more USDA slaughter houses, or help young people utilize the almost 3 million acres of unused pastureland in New York alone.

The question that lingers is what sort of tax breaks, subsidies and infrastructural support Bion Environmental Technologies, Inc will receive. Bion would serve as a “closed loop” ethanol plant. Corn would be shipped from the Midwest via Lake Ontario through Oswego’s port and turned into ethanol. The byproducts would be fed to cattle and the manure from the cattle would be used to create energy for the ethanol plant. When asked if state or federal tax dollars were going to be used for the project, Bion’s response was veiled but telling: “A number of state and federal programs exist to provide support for the creation of jobs, generation of renewable energy and the improvement to agricultural infrastructure and markets. Those are public programs available to entities that meet their eligibility requirements and Bion will seek to avail itself of those programs…” Obviously, Bion wants to cash in on government subsidies that promote corn and ethanol production and the 72,000 beef cattle would be a profitable byproduct of the ethanol production.

With government monies focused on buzz words like “sustainable,” we must start to define what real food means to us. It must nourish our bodies and treat animals with dignity, but also give a decent wage to farmers and reinvest money into rural America in long-term and meaningful ways. We have to rethink what true sustainability is and focus on helping rural economies, but this cannot be done without rethinking government policies that favor corn and ethanol.

Photo: BugMan50

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.”

Most of the meat industry’s pain was from a faltering economy that was creating countless “recession era vegetarians.” An August USDA report showed that beef, pork, and chicken production had all dropped substantially. That month, meat giant Tyson Foods warned its investors that quarterly sales had dropped 3 percent from a year before.

The end of burgers and fries as the quintessential American meal may be at hand. In America, the furthest you can possibly get from a McDonald’s is just 107 miles. But it appears the industry has overbuilt, and franchises are closing up left and right. In a sign of the times, one failed KFC was converted to a marijuana dispensary.

Nowhere was animal agribusiness’ pain more keenly felt than in the milk industry. American dairies were failing at such a rate that one observer predicted that a third would go out of business in 2009. To deal with the glut of milk, government and industry combined to organize a mass slaughter of more than 100,000 cows. Dairies spent 2009 looking for every excuse to cut herd sizes, and keep only the most productive cows. Overall, it appeared likely that more than 1.5 million cows would be slaughtered in 2009. The dairy industry’s pain was borne disproportionately by organic farmers, as cash-strapped consumers switched back to cheaper factory farmed milk.

Happily for US dairies, the USDA once again came riding to the rescue, this time with a $290 million taxpayer-funded bailout. Imagine if that money had instead been spent to subsidize the production of healthful fruits and vegetables, instead of producing more unwanted milk and nasty government cheese. Adding to the industry’s woes, agribusiness giant Cargill announced an invention that could dramatically reduce demand for milk: a plant-based substance that can be used to produce gooey, stretchy, totally realistic cheese.

The chicken industry likewise tightened its belt in 2009, eliminating its national chicken recipe contest. The grand prize—which once stood at $100,000—had been slashed to $50,000 before the contest was cancelled outright.

The pork industry had a horrifying year. Smithfield Foods’ CEO, Larry Pope, said, “I sort of feel like the world has been against us for 12 months.” In November, America’s 22nd largest pork producer abruptly quit the business. The company had an inventory of more than 30,000 breeder sows. USA Today reported in November that, starting in late 2007, pig producers were losing about $23 on each animal they raised.

Business was comparably bad at feedlots, with nearly all hemorrhaging cash. Twenty percent of feedlots were up for sale in 2009, but, given the beef industry’s bleak prospects, there were no buyers. When National Beef attempted to raise $276 million through an IPO this year, they were forced to withdraw the offering for lack of interest. The future looked even worse for ranchers in the UK, where it turned out the minister put in charge of rescuing the beef industry is a vegetarian.

Excerpted from Vegan.com, Read the rest here

It sounds like a bad Halloween prank, but unfortunately, feeding cattle chicken litter—the material that accumulates on the floor of chicken growing facilities—is everyday practice in feedlots. Surprisingly, this unhealthy and inhumane practice is legal and poorly monitored, creating unacceptable risks to human and animal health.

Consumers Union and Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), a Chicago-based animal welfare organization, have filed pre-Halloween grassroots petitions signed by more than 37,000 individuals with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking the agency to end the practice of feeding chicken poop to cows. FACT, with the endorsement of Consumers Union and 11 other national organizations, filed a formal citizen petition in August 2009 asking FDA to ban this practice. The petition is part of FACT’s Filthy Feed Campaign.

“It seems ghoulish, but it is a perfectly legal and common practice for chicken litter to be fed to cattle,” said Michael Hansen, PhD, a senior scientist with Consumers Union.

Chicken litter consists primarily of manure, feathers, spilled feed and bedding material that accumulate on the floors of the buildings that house chickens and turkeys. It can contain disease-causing bacteria, antibiotics, toxic heavy metals, restricted feed ingredients including meat and bone meal from dead cattle, and even foreign objects such as dead rodents, rocks, nails and glass.

Few of these hazards are eliminated by any processing that might occur before use as feed. The resulting health threats include the spread of mad cow disease and related human neurological diseases, the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the potential for exposure to toxic metals, drug residues, and disease-causing bacteria.

“The FDA must step in and ban poultry litter as cattle feed once and for all,” said Richard Wood, FACT’s Executive Director. “Cows deserve better than toxic leftovers.”

Tell the FDA that poultry poop doesn’t belong in your food.

The industry has been pushing the American media and our politicians to refer to the virus instead as “novel H1N1,” which is indeed a scientific way to reference the flu. But “swine flu” has stuck because this is a virus that has passed between humans and pigs. It is uncertain still how the virus evolved and from where exactly, but as we are producing a glut of pork in the US it is not far off to consider that keeping thousands of pigs in close confinement in order to create cheap meat could be exacerbating the potential for disease.

When the news broke about the flu, many in the media focused on the personal aspect of avoiding getting ill, followed the illness as it took victims, or otherwise detailed the ways flus have played out historically. A few bloggers on sustainable food issues, like Tom Philpott at Grist, questioned the proximity of the virus outbreak in Perote, Mexico, 5 miles from a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) producing meat for pork giant Smithfield in the state of Vera Cruz.

But now, as the World Health Organization expects a second wave of the flu to hit the northern hemisphere in the fall, it is worth considering some of the looming questions on how CAFOs could be contributing to the occurrence of disease.

Environmental Health Perspectives’ (EHP) cover story this month by Charles W. Schmidt focuses on the issue in detail, reigniting questions surrounding our country’s current standard animal industry practices:

…one potential source of the original outbreak—swine farming in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—has received comparatively little attention by public health officials. CAFOs house animals by the thousands in crowded indoor facilities. But the same economy-of-scale efficiencies that allow CAFOs to produce affordable meat for so many consumers also facilitate the mutation of viral pathogens into novel strains that can be passed on to farm workers and veterinarians, according to Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.

“When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains,” Gray explains. “The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs—which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals—there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.”

So how would we in the US know if there were sick pigs at a 2,000 sow facility? The EHP article also follows up on the $1.5 million dollar USDA surveillance program assigned to look for novel flu strains in pigs, which is relying on voluntary samples. From that article:

[distinguished professor at Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Jürgen A. Richt] asserts that without more industry cooperation, the USDA’s surveillance program is “dead in the water.” In other words, he explains, producers won’t submit their animals for analysis without a guarantee of indemnification, meaning economic protection to recover losses should the virus be discovered.

In addition, Schmidt writes,

CAFOs fall through regulatory cracks when it comes to sampling for novel viruses that could make people sick. [Associate director for epidemiologic science in the Influenza Division of the CDC Carolyn Bridges] explains that producers have little incentive to test for swine influenzas, in part because they aren’t included on a list of 150 “reportable illnesses” that, when detected, must be documented with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

CAFO operators like to claim that their facilities are biosecure — sealed off from the world and therefore unaffected by it — where workers shower before and after entering, wear protective coverings over hair and clothing, and visitors are highly restricted. But this biosecurity could also be seen as an incubator for the creation of super viruses. As the article points out, animals in these facilities are given eight times the antibiotics that the average American human consumes, therefore increasing the risk for confined livestock with antibiotic resistant immune systems to pass novel viruses unchecked among herds.

So far, four swine herds have been identified as having H1N1, one in Alberta, Canada (which was destroyed without compensation to the owner when discovered) one in Québec, Canada, and two herds in Argentina’s Buenos Aires Province. But American pork farmers are terrified of the possibility of herd loss and trade sanctions on the already hurting industry, and as such, actively have sought to keep inspectors out.

The CAFO workers — according to EHP, there are an estimated 54,000 working in swine and poultry CAFOs in the US — could be a crucial link in the spread of disease. If a worker acquires swine flu, it would probably go undetected, as the systems in place currently do not vaccinate or observe them for the flu. It is not a stretch to suggest, then, that new super viruses emerging in these environments could be passed to unaware, impoverished and even sometimes illegal CAFO employees, unlikely to complain to the Occupational Safety Hazards Agency (OSHA) for fear of losing their job. The disease then has the potential to spread to their communities and beyond. Again, from EHP:

OSHA typically exempts facilities with fewer than 11 employees from routine inspection unless otherwise requested by employees or other agencies. Yet, like many other modern production facilities, CAFOs are largely automated, so a typical factory farm housing 2,000 sows requires a crew of just 7 people, according to Don Butler, director of government relations and public affairs for Murphy-Brown, the livestock production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. And [Steven Wing, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] adds that CAFOs in some regions are often staffed by black and Hispanic workers who might fear racial harassment for reporting safety infractions to OSHA, as well as low-income workers of all races who worry about keeping their jobs in the industry and access to health care, housing, and other services provided by their employers.

When asked how OSHA regulates zoonotic disease risk at CAFOs, a spokesman at the agency said its purview applies exclusively to bloodborne pathogens via the Bloodborne Pathogens Standard (29 CFR 1910.1030), which excludes respiratory infections such as swine flu.

So where does this leave the public? Information has been lacking on these and other issues relating to the consequences of our industrial food system for far to long. It is possible that the USDA and the rest of the Obama administration has dropped the ball on investigating this issue — and that there will come a harsher version of the flu with no understood origin this fall. But the public deserves the facts about the consequences of industrial agriculture. And those facts, in the light of day, could force this administration to stop dragging its feet when it comes to building a sustainable food system.