Where did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading.
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When Anthony Castle moved to rural Rockwell City, Iowa, he pictured working on cars outside while his 6-year-old daughter, Hannah, played in the yard nearby. Castle’s house is on a secluded stretch of one of Calhoun County’s many narrow, unpaved roads that crisscross the cropland grid and, in winter, accumulate snow that no one bothers to clear. He and his wife Tiffany bought the fixer-upper in 2017, and he moved in a month ahead of the family to rewire it.
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Thanks to animal welfare groups, most people are now aware of “factory farms.” Concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs abuse workers, animals, the environment, human consumers and even our tax dollars. (How? Price supports and government bailouts when diseases occur.) Thanks to greedy CAFOs crowding, diseases killed one-tenth of all US pigs and millions of chickens and turkeys a few years ago.
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In the Texas Panhandle, which produces a fifth of the U.S. beef supply, communities are being choked by fecal dust from nearby feedlots. The state’s regulatory agency isn’t doing anything about it—and it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
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As the number of massive livestock farms balloons in states like Iowa, Maryland, and Nebraska, communities are scrambling to figure out how to control the pollution and waste produced by thousands — or tens of thousands — of animals. In some places, officials have opted to ban the mega-farms altogether, and the idea of a moratorium on the biggest animal farms is gaining support in local governments, statehouses, and even in Congress.
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America’s agriculture secretary has urged Britain to move past “the political science of fear” over products like chlorine-washed chicken, as an animal welfare group warned a Brexit trade deal with the US could see eggs from battery hens return to UK supermarkets.
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For nearly 30 years, a Kansas state law made it illegal to take photographs or record video in a factory farm or slaughterhouse “with the intent to damage an enterprise conducted at the animal facility.” A federal court in Kansas just ruled that people cannot be barred from conducting undercover investigations on factory farms.
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Editor's note: Sherri Dugger, executive director of Women, Food and Agriculture Network and the Indiana Farmers Union, and co-chair of the national coalition of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal, prepared these remarks for the Farmers, Soil & Climate 2020 Iowa presidential forum, held on Janury 25, 2020. Reprinted here with permission from the author.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Sherri Dugger. I co-own Dugger Family Farm in Morristown, Indiana, with my husband, Randy. I serve as the executive director for Women, Food and Agriculture Network and also for Indiana Farmers Union.
I want to start out by telling you a little about me. I like to tell people I was born to eat. As a newborn, I weighed in at a hefty 12.3 pounds. I’m certain that I tumbled into this world hungry. And, for as long as I can remember, I have always loved food. The only trouble is that I—like most Americans—never really thought much about what was on my plate. I never considered how the food was raised, what chemicals it might have in it, or the impact those chemicals would have on my body.
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On what would have been Leon Statz’s 59th birthday, two dozen plaid-shirted farmers sat in the basement of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church to talk about how they were coping with the forces conspiring against them — the forces that had pushed their neighbor, a third-generation dairyman, to kill himself.
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You probably don’t give antibiotics much thought—until you need them. But what happens if you need them, and they don’t work?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says antibiotic-resistant bacteria and fungi cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. On average, someone in the U.S. gets an antibiotic-resistant infection every 11 seconds. And every 15 minutes someone dies.
One of the big reasons infections have grown resistant to antibiotics? Industrial factory farms—which use nearly 12 million pounds of medically important antibiotics every year to stave off diseases caused by filthy, crowded conditions, and (though they don’t like to admit it), to make animals grow faster.
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