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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Factory farms are a threat to Iowans. We get the pollution, our farmers get the risk, and our quality of life takes a dive—all while corporate ag rakes in massive profits.
With an average of 500 additional factory farms being built in Iowa each year, we need to act fast to protect our environment, our communities and our climate.
TAKE ACTION: Join the Stop Factory Farms Lobby Day. RSVP here.
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The gut, or gastrointestinal tract, comprises the mouth, esophagus, stomach, large intestine, and small intestine and is essentially a long tube through which food travels after we consume it. It doesn’t seem like this collection of organs could possibly have a connection to soil, but it does—a deep one, in fact.
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Public health officials investigating a drug-resistant salmonella outbreak in 2015 still don't know the exact source after a pork-industry lobbying group on behalf of the farmers prevented them from visiting farms that provided pigs to a contaminated slaughterhouse.
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Vermont is suing the largest dairy in the state for dramatically expanding its operations without proper permits in 2017.
Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan announced the charges Thursday against the Berkshire-based Pleasant Valley Farms for work at its Lumbra Farm in Enosburg Falls.
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What do you think? Should meat come from animals raised on family farms by independent farmers who meet high standards for environmental sustainability, workers’ rights and animal welfare?
Or on cruel and polluting factory farms controlled by multinational meat companies?
TAKE ACTION to ban factory farms! Tell Congress to pass the Farm System Reform Act of 2019.
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According to a recent poll, at least half of U.S. consumers oppose industrial factory farming.
Now some federal legislators (and some presidential candidates) are catching up with voter sentiment. And some are stepping up with proposals to either severely restrict, or outright ban what Big Ag refers to as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).
The latest good news? A bill, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), that could, among other things, lead to the end of industrial factory farms.
TAKE ACTION to ban factory farms! Tell Congress to pass the Farm System Reform Act of 2019.
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In the spring of 2017, a European Union working group of environmentalists, academics and lobbyists was having a technical discussion on green farming practices when a map appeared on an overhead screen. In an instant, the room froze. A farm lobbyist objected. Officials murmured their disapproval.
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