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Photograph by Sarah Macmillan, Creative Commons 2.0

Cows graze in a field in South Waikato, one of the largest dairy districts in New Zealand.

How do you alert people to the problems of industrial-scale farming?

The issues are urgent, but they are also difficult to confront: The indifference to animal welfare, the strip-mining of poor countries’ resources to feed the rich, the environmental damage and antibiotic overuse can be so hard to face that many people just turn away.

Philip Lymbery, animal-welfare activist and chief executive officer of the international nonprofit Compassion in World Farming, has struggled with this conundrum his entire career. So when he decided to write a book to spread the message of returning  animal welfare to agriculture, he chose to do not an expose or a manifesto, but something simpler and more seductive: a travelogue.

Lymbery spoke about his new book,

Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat (Bloomsbury USA), at last weekend’s Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book fair in the United States. I introduced him, and the day before, we chatted about the book and his adventures reporting it with journalist Isabel Oakeshott. I’ve edited our conversation for clarity and length.

Maryn McKenna

: Why write this book at this moment?

Philip Lymbery:  We just fought a prolonged battle to stop Britain’s first US style mega-dairy, which would have put 8,000 cows permanently indoors on concrete. The average English dairy herd is 100 cows and most of them are kept in fields most of the year. Local people, children, environmentalists, foodies, celebrities got onboard this campaign to insist that cows belong in fields, and we were successful in stopping it. However, what was clear is that, 50 years on from the first onslaught of factory farming, which really emanated from the US-battery cages for laying hens, field crates for veal, gestation crates for sows-a new wave of hyper-industrial farming, mega farming, is about to sweep across the world. I felt that we needed to tell a story of why we should resist.

Maryn

: Your group is based in England, and the book was published there before being released in the US. I wonder whether the reaction here will be different, because concentrated indoor agriculture is not just common here, but also hidden from view because this country is so big.

Philip: Indeed, you can’t go into any store here in America and buy “battery eggs”-they are marketed as “farm fresh” or “country fresh.” Whereas in Europe, it is mandatory that they be labeled as being from caged hens. That’s the first layer of secrecy that is used to perpetuate factory farming: Keep the buying public in the dark.