CAFOs vs. Free Range

Ask most organic egg and poultry consumers what they imagine organic chickens’ lives are like and they’ll probably describe a bird scratching in the soil, digging for bugs, and kicking up a dust bath on a quaint farm pasture.

However, in reality, many organic chickens are subjected to the same factory farm horrors as conventional birds — their entire lives spent crammed with tens of thousands of other hens in barren, fluorescent bulb-lit sheds with little access to soil or sunlight. 

Analysis of proposed $150-million salmon factory farm in Belfast, Maine

Scale of the project:  The land-based industrial fish farm being planned by Nordic Aqua Farms (NAF) would be one of the largest in the world, raising between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of salmon a year at full production. Many questions about the operation of such a facility can only be answered in theoretical models. A land-based industrial salmon farm of this magnitude has not been built and is not in operation at this point in time. 

Siting and Zoning of the

Two poles that once hoisted a clothes line stand rusting and unused in Elsie Herring’s back garden in eastern North Carolina. Herring lives next door to a field where pig manure is sprayed and the drifting faecal matter wasn’t kind to her drying clothes.

“The clothes would stink so you’d wash them again and again until they fell apart,” said Herring, whose family has lived in Wallace since her grandfather, a freed slave, purchased land in the 1890s.

The way we grow our food and raise livestock has changed significantly over the past several decades. Independent, small-scale family farms are increasingly giving way to industrial factory farms.

Factory farms have problems, one of which is their contribution to global climate change.