Transcript
Speaker: There's something else that's really hiding the realities of modern industrial agriculture. And I think it's a story. It's the story of the Little Red Barn. The United States alone raises between 9 and 10 billion animals every year for human consumption. Upwards of 99% of them are raised on CAFOs. And you had major international headlines from every news outlet, CBS, 60 Minutes, you name it. Airing this footage, most consumers were shocked to see things that are just normal part of industrial animal agriculture. And the industry, long story short, is trying to hide and criminalize journalism.
Speaker: In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
Speaker: But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
Speaker: Today, we're joined by investigative journalist and author Will Potter, who has spent his career uncovering the abuses and atrocities of animal factory farming. His latest book is Little Red Barns, Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable.
Speaker: In this episode, we talk about the radical transformation of agriculture from the early nineteen hundreds to today. the myth of the Little Red Barn and how it's used to keep us in the dark and naive about the realities of industrial agriculture today, how big ag and corporate interest weaponize the legal system and the government, and so much more.
Speaker: Will and I won't agree on everything today. I believe animal agriculture, done well, has an essential and critical role in a better food system. But where we do find common ground is on the need to pull back the curtain on the realities of industrial animal agriculture and the destruction it's causing in communities all over the country.
Speaker: We also agree on the need to fight back against corporate power and finally the need to build bridges across the political spectrum so that we can create a better food system together.
Speaker: Well, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Emma. To get us started, the title of your book, Little Red Barns, Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable, what's in that title? Why did you choose that?
Speaker: It's the story we were all raised with. I grew up in Texas, and I had the little farm playset and was raised with Old MacDonald and pointing to animals in picture books and saying their noises and going to the fair and going to the petting zoo. And At some point in this investigation, which was really an investigation of censorship and transparency and how the industry is trying hide in criminalized journalism, I realized there's something else at play, that it's not just these overt censorship tactics. There's something else that's really hiding the realities of modern industrial agriculture. And I think it's a story.
Speaker: It's the story of the Little Red Barn. So in some ways, this investigation started there for me as a child, or you know, raised with these narratives. And growing up in Texas, I had family members who worked on factory farms and had no idea. But it kind of came full circle when I realized that the tools that industry uses to deceive us aren't just these really heavy-handed repressive tactics. They can be the Little Red Barnes on the product labels at the grocery store or in the coupon books or in the billboards themselves that are telling us a story.
Speaker: Right. And we're going to be getting into the repressive tactics that they leverage. But the Little Red Barn, basically this idea that we still live in this idyllic agrarian world where our bacon is coming from this beautiful little farm raised by this family. And, you know, the pig is in in the field when, in fact, we are very, very far from that And so you start at the beginning of the book kind of by outlining that progression, like the history of farming from like the early 1900s until today. Could you quickly walk us through that and kind of how agriculture has changed from perhaps something that was a little bit more like the Little Red Barns to what it is today?
Speaker: So like a lot of stories, there is truth in it, of the origin of it, right? That the Little Red Barns did exist. I used to live on a farm in Michigan. You drive through the country and you see the Little Red Barns. And we also have, ah as humans, a confirmation bias, right? so we'd like to believe what we think we already know to be true.
Speaker: And the reason that's so powerful in this case is really outside of our knowledge, outside of our sight and visibility as most consumers in a very short amount of time. Like you said, it's really in the last 120 some odd years, maybe even less.
Speaker: We've seen a radical, radical shift in farming and agriculture. And in my book, I focus on animal agriculture in particular. But this industrialization affected all aspects of agriculture.
Speaker: And speaking of storytelling, and the kind of story that we're told about that is that at some point farmers were told, get big or get out, is the famous phrase that the writing was on the wall and farmers knew they needed to industrialize and make more efficient systems and feed the world.
Speaker: And what I found in my research is that story also isn't true. This push to industrialize was really led by industry, not surprisingly. But a lot of the measures that were passed that led to this new system were actually intended to benefit small farmers.
Speaker: There were programs through the land-grant colleges and universities that were meant to help take that new science and technology and also new thinking about vertical integration and food systems and get that out in the hands of people that need it that are growing our food.
Speaker: And what I found in my research is that in congressional hearings and in the debate about these proposals, it was really co-opted by tech, pharmaceutical, and chemical companies who turned these universities into their kind of personal laboratories And a lot of that technology and and new thinking didn't make its way down to the small farmers. It was truly monopolized by the biggest players in the industry that used these new tools and this new legislation to further consolidate their power and really usher in an era where the small farmer was struggling like never before.
Speaker: Yeah. And you talk about that, the land-grant universities and the connection or the corporate capture by large corporations. Could you talk a little bit more about that and kind of how strong their grip is over this system and and how important also the land-grant university system is for how agriculture is developed?
Speaker: Yeah, the land grant system goes back to, you know, as an aside Abraham Lincoln used to call the Department of Agriculture the People's Department. This was a populist government program that we're trying to help feed the people and help the farmers.
Speaker: The land grant system was an extension of that. And so at these major colleges in nearly every state, there are what are called extension programs. And these extension programs are kind of an intermediary between the scientists and academics on college campuses like in Texas at Texas A&M University and College Station. The extension programs are meant to kind of take and translate and synthesize all of that and put it out in the world in a way that small farmers can actually use and understand and benefit from.
Speaker: And some of the most compelling research I found was there was a big fight over this at the time. Now it might seem business as usual that big industry has their fingers in all of these universities and is funding chemicals and pesticides and hormones and growth hormones and all of this kind of stuff.
Speaker: At the time, i found a testimony from Jim Hightower of Texas, the former Ag Commissioner there, who was saying that, you know, if we really wanted these land-grant programs to benefit small farmers, we would have stuff about co-ops and about equipment repair, how to make your tractors serviceable, which as I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, they're It's been the opposite trajectory.
Speaker: One of the things I've talked to a a lot of farmers about is that they can't work on their own tech anymore. There's all these proprietary restrictions that they have to go through authorized dealers and spend tons of money on, you know, million-dollar tractors and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker: That wasn't the intention. And I think that's kind of where the story starts to divert from reality. As maybe ah just a final thought on that, something that was really compelling to me is we've all heard that speech from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about, you know, we can't tell people to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Speaker: And i was going back through some of his speeches and come to realize he was actually talking about the Department of Agriculture and these extension programs. And he said that if they were really designed for small farmers, Dr. King said it would have all of these things that I just described.
Speaker: But to tell the farmers to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps is what Dr. King was talking about. It was this bait and switch. These programs never ended up helping the people that needed them most, the helped industry.
Speaker: Yeah. And to your point on the kind of story, i feel like a story I or that we're told is this idea that the modernization of agriculture was this like natural evolution that just happens because, you know, we are moving towards greater and greater efficiency and people adopt technologies to be able to do things better. And that that's how we went from, you know, this evolution.
Speaker: small-scale, inefficient, quote, type of agriculture to the modern, highly efficient form of agriculture, when in reality, like you point out with the land grant and would love to have you touch a little bit also on the Smith-Lever Act, it was an intentional choice. We could have chosen to create programs And subsidies and support for a diversified type of agriculture that would actually help small farmers in the way that they wanted to be helped. Or we could chose to develop a system that was predicated on scaling. And that wasn't just an unavoidable natural evolution of the system.
Speaker: yeah I think that's really astute and that's a real critical point to understanding how all of this works at kind of a macro level. Even more broadly, I'll say we're taught as children, along with that Little Red Barn narrative, that there's this inevitability of capitalism.
Speaker: that we all just realize the beauty of it, of scale and efficiency and production. and that's part of the narrative here. It's portrayed as this this like natural evolution of human consciousness that we would consolidate and try to put the little guys out of business and have mass systems. And it's just not true.
Speaker: The reality is to push this industrial system, they had to manipulate public opinion. And they did that through, in some cases, groups like 4-H and youth programs because they found that young people were more open to using technology, to shifting what they saw as their parents' or great-grandparents' ways of doing things and being perhaps a little bit more innovative. So they were trying to work through four h and through youth programs
Speaker: to push these new initiatives because they didn't have the buy-in of traditional, established, older, however you want to describe describe describe it, people with more experience that have been doing this for generations.
Speaker: And so that is really where this narrative starts to fracture. This wasn't just some inevitability. It was calculated, it was manipulated, and it was pushed by industry with deep pocketbooks, not just through things like 4-H and through government, but then through media.
Speaker: It was a media campaign to get the public to shift in a very short amount of time from a culture in which most people had a connection in some way to their food, whether they were raising or growing some of it or all of it,
Speaker: or they knew the farmer, or they went down to get eggs from their neighbor, or whatever it was. Even 100 years ago, consumer society was very, very different. We didn't have the mega Walmart, or the big box stores, or even just the grocery chain.
Speaker: And so part of making that cultural shift that allowed the agriculture and industrial shift to continue is manipulating public opinion as well. And I think that's kind of where we are now.
Speaker: And I see these ad campaigns by industry that they're still pushing these ideas to get constant buy-in from people and tell them, no, no, no, don't worry, that little red barn that you grew up with is still here. We still have it on the product label. Don't worry about what we're doing right now. It's inevitable. This is a better system.
Speaker: Just keep consuming, keep purchasing. Absolutely. And could you talk about, because I actually found that very fascinating in that part in the book, about these youth programs? When did they come about and what exactly did they do to try to get the next generation on board? Yeah. So for folks, I'm sure a lot of your folks listening to this know about the youth programs like 4-H. They have some noble attributes. Right. I mean, 4-H was also one of the first programs that allowed young boys and girls to be together in kind of a social setting, talking about career development and things like that.
Speaker: Off the top of my head, I can't remember what the 4-Hs are, but that's in the book. You know, it's about family and community. Youth in general, when you're talking about social change, is always a target.
Speaker: Because if you can start switching and shifting the opinions of young people, you can usher in radical social changes. And that's where with programs like 4-H this youth outreach, not only through the colleges and universities, through the industry itself, was really critical to this massive shift in industrial agriculture. Because then young people all of a sudden aren't thinking about well, how do we maintain the soil for seven generations? How do we continue the land that my grandparents had and keep this operation alive? All of a sudden, they had bigger aspirations. How do we scale, right? How do we make more money? How do we bring in industrial systems to reduce our number of farm workers, number of employees?
Speaker: How do we start going from being a producer that's serving our community or even our state to being a global operation. And all of that really started around that time period, forty s and 50s in the United States. And a lot of it was focused on youth.
Speaker: And so we witnessed this massive industrialization of agriculture that's happened relatively recently over just a few generations, along with this huge disconnection from the land. We went from maybe just two generations ago, generally having probably direct contact in some way with farming to today. You know, there's like data like 40% of people can't even say if milk comes from a cow, like a massive disconnect that we now face that is also propped up by these fake narratives that we still hold on to around this idealized, no longer existing past.
Speaker: You've been investigating industrial animal agriculture for your whole career for the last two decades or so. Could you start by telling us a little bit about the ag gag laws, which was, I think, some of the original motivation behind this book?
Speaker: That's where this book really began for me. I started covering these issues as a ah civil liberties and press freedom issue as states were beginning to pass new legislation that specifically outlawed and criminalized undercover investigations and even investigations by credentialed news outlets that exposed what happens on factory farms and slaughterhouses.
Speaker: And this was in response to a wave of undercover investigations, largely by animal protection groups, some environmental groups and some journalists with news outlets as well, that really, for the first time, showed consumers the reality of that industrial system. The United States alone raises between nine and ten billion animals every year for human consumption.
Speaker: Upwards of 99% of them are raised on CAFOs or confined animal feeding operations, what I would call factory farms in kind of a colloquial sense. And that narrative of the Little Red Barn was being fractured.
Speaker: You had major international headlines from every news outlet, CBS, 60 Minutes, you name it, that was airing this footage, not just about really horrific things like sexually abusing animals, beating animals with pipes and batons, kicking and punching and...
Speaker: You name it. but also standard industry practices that most consumers were not familiar with didn't have a vocabulary about and were shocked to see you know things like gestation crates and battery cages and tail docking things that are just normal part of industrial animal agriculture and the industry long story short is they really freaked out i mean they were terrified of this And in a short amount of time, they started introducing legislation in dozens of states that would do everything from apply felonies and decades in prison to outright criminalizing the photography, criminalizing whistleblowers. And the whole suite of these tactics became called ag-gag. Ag is for agriculture and gag is to silence.
Speaker: And that was made a term kind of made up by Mark Bittman at The New York Times. The reason I was so interested in this story is because my first book, Green is the New Red, was documenting how nonviolent protest groups like environmentalists became labeled by the FBI as their stated number one domestic terrorism threat.
Speaker: And I was really concerned at the time and when I was testifying before U.S. Congress about terrorism laws that this is going to keep spreading. It's not going to stop at the so-called radicals or people who vandalize SUVs. It's going to go more and more to the mainstream. And with these ag-gag laws, that's exactly what I was seeing. So that's how Little Red Barnes really began. And it evolved into a much bigger investigation of our food systems, transparency, and really at its core, what it means to see any of this and what it means to have the right to see these systems and make decisions for ourselves about our food.
Speaker: And so for the listener, the Ag Law, walk us through how it works, especially for you as a journalist. If you wanted to try to go and investigate CAFO, how does the Ag Ag Law prevent you from doing so?
Speaker: well So there's different types of ag-gag and I'll preface this by saying I was a plaintiff in several lawsuits and through a ah big legal team, we knocked back nearly all of these on appeal. Some of them are still lingering, still being fought in different stages in court, but we've made a lot of progress in beating these back.
Speaker: But the chilling effect is I think what remains. And the chilling effect is what lawyers use to describe threats to our First Amendment that aren't necessarily always overtly criminalizing, but is creating a culture of fear.
Speaker: And I think that's what lingers. So to back up just a little bit, when AgGag was first introduced, it was about explicitly outlawing photography of factory farms without the permission of the owners.
Speaker: That didn't sit well with the public. You know, and I always think about it kind of like banning books. When you ban books, the research shows that it actually leads to spikes in interest in library circulation and in sales of those books.
Speaker: And so when the industry tried to ban photography of what they were doing, all of a sudden you had a bunch of journalists all over the world saying, well, what are you actually trying to hide? what are you trying to ban?
Speaker: So it backfired. And then the industry started to evolve a little bit and get really clever. So the latter versions of ag-gag bills that were introduced and even passed in multiple states included things like mandatory reporting requirements.
Speaker: And that says that, well, if you see something disturbing on factory farms, The industry says, we want you to tell us about that. We had no idea what was happening every single day on our farm for years, but we're going to pass this law that just says, you have to go to us first.
Speaker: You can't go to the press. You have to go to the us or to the police. So that was kind of a sneaky way of shutting down journalism as well, because that put a pressure on whistleblowers and investigators to turn their footage over to the very people who are trying to censor it.
Speaker: And in the book, I talk about what happened with that. There was a young woman who went in to the police station, turned over her footage after an investigation, and then she was arrested and prosecuted for not turning it over fast enough.
Speaker: The third type of ag-gag law was about misrepresentation. And so that type was kind of saying, well, you know, we want to expose what abuse is happening on our farms as well. But if you misrepresent yourself in applying for a job on a factory farm, that should be a felony and that should get jail time. Every step, like on its face, they seem reasonable, you know, if you're not paying too close attention to what's happening.
Speaker: But underneath them, they're really about both shutting down journalism and shutting down workers coming forward. You know, we have to remember that most people who work on farms, and especially industrial farms, overwhelmingly not Native English speakers, overwhelmingly not first-generation Americans,
Speaker: That is a pressure and a fear that they have to find a lawyer, that they're taking a great risk coming forward. And the industry was really trying to shut those voices down and make it really, really scary to talk about what the industry was doing. And so I've felt that, and I talk about in the book, I felt that both as a journalist covering this. And also felt it in these conversations where people, including the workers, want to do the right thing, but feel like it's completely out of reach because they could be prosecuted for it.
Speaker: In your book, you talk about some cases of violations of how things should be done with respect to like an animal that's sexually abused or beaten to death, which is obviously atrocious and horrible. And then I think maybe perhaps an even bigger insidious problem is like the atrocity of the industry best practices, especially with respect to that. And since you've had the, I would say, misfortune of spending lot of time investigating these different systems, you For the listener, could you walk us through kind of like what does the industry best practices look like across these different segments of the industry, starting maybe with like poultry?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's where that's the conclusion that I and I think you kind of inevitably reach looking at the industry's maneuvers that every time an investigation comes out and a lot of them.
Speaker: were focused at different points on those really headline-grabbing, sensational, there was a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of beating animals with pipes and bats and batons, workers joking about it, reveling in it.
Speaker: When that happens, though, the response of the industry was the kind of good apple, bad apple narrative. Oh, these are just a few bad apples. We had no idea what was going on We, the owners, this is just some low level workers. And then they're kind of cast aside and kind of thrown to the wolves in the prison system of getting punished or jail time or or whatever happens.
Speaker: The reality And I think why these videos were so damning is exactly what you said. They were exposing standard industry practices. So like in the chicken industry, that can vary, right? But battery cages are the norm now to keep birds from moving around their entire lives. a lot of times they're confined in spaces so small that it's even controversial when advocates have pushed for getting them each about the equivalent of a sheet of paper, right?
Speaker: to stand on, to give them a little bit more room. That's been fought back. When you're in intensive confinement like that, the birds can start picking at each other. That leads to de-beaking. So the industry cuts the beaks off of birds without anesthesia. Because of their tight confinement, they can pick and develop neuroses. I've been on farms and you can see the manure pits just full of birds that tried to get out and then fell into the waste pits below. And kind of more broadly what those facilities are like when you walk in, it's just this overwhelming cloud of a mix of the ammonia and the feces and animals.
Speaker: with just the accumulation of dust and the chemicals and everything that's mixing together is just truly paralyzing. And that is kind of the norm across these industries and across facilities for different types of animals.
Speaker: So in the book I talk about cattle feedlots are a bit different because they're open air, But in facilities like that where you can have thousands or even tens of thousands of cows, they're often just standing in their own muck and feces for hours and days at a time. Dairy cows are in similar facilities. Some of the worst I went to were in Yakima Valley, Washington, where the community had to file lawsuits because you have so much waste flowing out of these dairy farms that it would just run down the street.
Speaker: And at one point, the post office couldn't even deliver the mail. And for your listeners, you know, for those who aren't as familiar with some of how those systems were, like on industrial dairy farms, if you think of the Little Red Barn farm of our imagination, right, or of our past, the animals walk around in the field, they're eating grass, they're pooping and urinating that goes back into the earth. It's providing nutrients. It's kind of a beautiful contained system that the natural world has a way of recycling and and working through things even in when you're talking about poop and manure and feces, right?
Speaker: But on these industrial farms, they're on concrete slabs and that feces is now a cottage industry because it has to get moved. It gets piped. It gets pushed. It gets sent through sprinkler systems and sprayed onto fields.
Speaker: That all becomes airborne. So it's kind of hard to answer that question of like, what is the normal day-to-day reality on a factory farm? Because they're each a little bit different, but they're disastrous both for the animals and the workers and the surrounding communities. And that kind of air quality, environmental quality, and quality of life.
Speaker: The waste disposal problem, i think, is a really big one that I think people don't realize, which you just alluded to. But when you're managing this many animals at scale, there is no sound way of properly disposing of the waste because it's so much.
Speaker: Basically, anywhere where you have like a large concentration of these CAFOs, you have like this massive accumulation of poop, basically, that is getting accumulated, that people are holding in tanks like you talking about or sewage <unk>age tanks or trying to dispose somehow over massive amounts of spaces. But even when they're doing that, it's leading to all sorts of like problems like eutrophication of the local waterways and and other problems like that because the quantity is too large for what it's doing.
Speaker: And the quantity is so large that, for instance, there's some academics researched the pig farms like in North Carolina, South Carolina are kind of notorious and made a lot of headlines. And they use they call them lagoons, but they're these giant open air pits.
Speaker: And it's not just pits full of poop or feces. These animals are also pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and all the chemicals used to clean out those slats and gestation crates and all of that stuff. All of that stuff is ending up in these pits, which then leak into the groundwater and into the into the ground itself, causing that eutrophication and algae ball blooms like you talk about.
Speaker: But then also it's airborne. Because part of that lagoon management system is they wait for it to to kind of cake and crust up. They agitate it with these giant machines that are literally bigger than tanks.
Speaker: And then they spray it over fields. And I was on site when spraying was taking place in multiple states. And the spraying, causes a couple problems. One, you can't spray that much because it will just kill off cropland and make that land where it's sprayed unusable.
Speaker: But also just being in its presence. I mean, I grew up with serious asthma of COPD. I've been still doing these investigations, but it's the kind of thing it it knocks you to your knees. And I think a lot of people don't realize how these communities have been so reformed in such a short amount of time.
Speaker: And it's largely poor folks, overwhelmingly Black and brown folks and immigrant communities that are breathing this stuff in the most. In the book, I talk about meeting with people that have seen their towns go from the Little Red Barn to CAFO after CAFO after CAFO.
Speaker: And there's nowhere for that waste to go. So it drives down the property value and then they're stuck and they can't leave and the industry buys up their property. And so it's just this cycle of what I realized in this investigation is it was really hard to follow the threads of consequence from this industry because it its tentacles are very, i feel like I'm mixing all these metaphors here. I'm sorry. It's like it spreads out. It's very spiderweb, right? it it just
Speaker: Because it it affects everything. And it goes back to that story of efficiency. Because in the industry's mind, this is the most efficient way. But in the community's mind, well, it's too much waste.
Speaker: We can't process it all. And now we're literally choking on it and drowning in it. Following this thread, I want to touch a little bit on the impacts on the community, like you're talking, of the system.
Speaker: You've spent, obviously, a lot of time in a lot of these communities across the country. What happens to people in these communities as they transition towards this world of large-scale CAFOs?
Speaker: You know, I've also done a lot of reporting on prisons, experimental prisons, activists who have been imprisoned. And what really stood out to me from town to town is how much ag towns or these factory farm towns feel like prison towns.
Speaker: And by that, I mean they are trapped communities that I think people really, especially, you know, animal activists, environmentalists, there can be a divide. I think we need to really remember that folks don't want to be working on these facilities.
Speaker: They don't want them in their town. But it's kind of like having a prison in your town. It's a source of money and jobs. And nearly everyone you know in that town has some connection.
Speaker: to it You got a brother or a sister-in-law or whatever that works down at the prison or you know somebody. It's the same thing with these industries and these CAFOs. So that creates a system where the factory farms are damaging, and I would even go so far as saying destroying the communities, while at the same time the community is beholden to it.
Speaker: And so I've seen some really inspiring fights develop where much like these AI data centers, people are resisting them. People have been trying to fight back against the CAFOs coming in with mixed results.
Speaker: You know, this is these are industries with very deep pockets and communities that are on the verge of poverty sometimes or even living in poverty. So it's an uneven fight, but these communities have been trying to fight back to the best that they can to kind of reclaim that narrative, to reclaim what it means to be a farm town, a farm community.
Speaker: I will have to say that was one of the things that really stood out to me most over, it took 10 years of different investigations to work on this book, being in some of these towns and just talking to people that, for instance, this woman Helen in Yakima, Washington,
Speaker: Just her showing me her home, showing photos of what the community used to be like, as she's sweeping up dead flies and apologizing for the smell and spraying perfume to try to mask it for us as guests, was just heartbreaking.
Speaker: These folks want to have pride in their town, and Helen took me out on what she called the poop tour of her community. And one after another, it was just too too many stories to recount. She would say, well, here's the place. Well, that this was an immigrant family living here next to a CAFO dairy farm.
Speaker: And the farm owners put up a billboard that said, we spray, spray that feces because they were trying to drive down the property value so they could buy it up and expand.
Speaker: Stories like that, that the the deck has been just so stacked against these rural communities that it's heartbreaking to see and to see it through their eyes of how much has changed.
Speaker: I want to talk a little bit more about the solutions. For me, you know part of the solution is starting to move back towards a more diversified, localized, decentralized food system.
Speaker: And it's also about trying to shorten the supply chains, trying to reconnect us as possible back to greater understanding of how our food is grown.
Speaker: Obviously, that's happening in small little ways across the country with regenerative farmers, with CSAs, community-supported agricultures, you know where people can support ah a farm ahead of time and get a basket every week with fresh vegetables, with meat subscriptions for people that eat meat.
Speaker: And to a certain extent with farmers markets that are also, you know, a way to kind of have this like direct contact with farmers. Obviously see a movement that is nowhere near where it needs to be to like pose, you know, a real threat to our mainstream agricultural system, which, as you said, you know, 99% of the meat we eat comes from CAFOs. It doesn't come from the diversified local farmer.
Speaker: But to me, that is still kind of, you know, part of the solution. And I hope that we continue to move in that direction. In your book, you talk about... Part of this movement, you see, I think you say at one point, like farmers markets as a breeding ground for extremism. You also kind of talk a little bit about like this homesteader movement, you know, this interest in raw milk as kind of being tied to racist supremacy and right wing ideology. How do you navigate that part of it? And, you know, and if farmers markets aren't a solution for you, like what would a solution look like?
Speaker: No, i appreciate that. Oh, and to clarify, i love farmer's markets. You know, what I don't love is that neo-Nazi groups have been using them around the country to push that kind of back-to-the-land mythological narrative that fascists do of...
Speaker: hey, we're out here homesteading and we're taking care of our people. So the problem isn't the farmer's market. And also the problem isn't in and of itself if you want to eat raw products or anything like that. What I talk about in the book is how those narratives are being manipulated and really pushed aggressively by far-right groups to tap into that bigger mythological past that they're pushing, which is white supremacy and fascism.
Speaker: And I think the way we navigate that is frankly quite complex. I mean, I think we have to both continue having presences in those spaces. So by all means, if folks are listening and you go and you sell your vegetables or herbs or whatever it is at the farmer's market, keep showing up. And if Nazis far-right groups start showing up, I think the response is not to seed that ground and leave, it's to try to kick them out, to try to maintain a space that actually reflects the community and community values but i think more broadly you know we have to be careful right now especially in a social media era in the book i talk about this kind of trad wife aesthetic which i understand is really can be appealing especially after covid everybody's stuck in their homes you're seeing all these social media clips like wouldn't it be great if i had my little farm and my little animals and of course they've got the cutesy farm dresses and it's tapping into like traditional gender roles
Speaker: And so there's this dangerous kind of blurry area where far-right groups are using that to make inroads to people that otherwise would have been turned off from their message outright, if that makes sense. So I think we just have to be careful And again, i lived on an 80-acre farm in Michigan. We had rescued animals. We were trying to grow food. were doing all those kind of things. I don't object to any of that. And I think those are all part of kind of the bigger mosaic of solutions to this issue. But we got to be careful about how those groups are manipulating that narrative, too.
Speaker: Yeah, and I guess that was kind of really the the question I was trying to, or my quandary I was trying to get to, which is back to the land is good. It's not necessarily for everyone, but like that's a good thing. I'm glad that people, I'm glad that some people want to go homestead and I'm glad that they want to have their own cows. It's not necessarily the solution for everyone, but like that is by and large.
Speaker: a good thing. You know, how do you recognize that certain groups, not everyone, of course, but certain certain people are choosing that path while embracing, you know, perhaps a political ideology that isn't as attractive to us but at the same time, you know, are in a way fighting back against the system. Like if you choose to go homestead, you know, you are doing something. that Like that is fighting back, even if unfortunately you're maybe also perhaps willing to engage with a ideology that is somewhat regressive, i should say,
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think we need to remember that that in and of itself would not be fighting back then. You know, to me, i think the biggest fights we're facing existentially as a species right now are the rise of authoritarianism and ecological collapse.
Speaker: And just where I am right now in my career and in my work and in my personal experiences, i will not collaborate in any way with fascist and far-right groups, white supremacist groups, MAGA.
Speaker: I won't have anything to do with it. And to me, that you have to take that principled stand or our country literally may not survive the next couple of years. More on the homesteading dynamic of it though.
Speaker: I think what happens when we start thinking in that way is the American obsession with individualism starts to kick in and we start to think of this as like, well, I'm not doing X, Y, or Z. So therefore, me having my homestead and kind of, you know, i don't want to generalize, but a lot of times folks I've met over the years, that means kind of pulling out of society in different ways.
Speaker: My exposure with homesteads has been more on the like hippie, punk, lefty side of things, anarchist, of trying to like remove yourself from from complicity in those systems and trying to do things on your own i 100 understand the motivation but like i said i did that in michigan i was chopping my own wood wood furnaces for the house trying to get off the grid more trying to grow what we can what it hit home to me is i think there's a danger in getting too lured into that as the solution.
Speaker: I think it's good for us, kind of spiritually, if it's okay to say that, to like take ownership over our lives and do what we can and grow what we can and live the way we want.
Speaker: But we have to separate those kind of benefits from whether this is actually challenging macro-level systems that are threatening old life on this planet.
Speaker: And where I landed with the research and through the investigation of this book is that, like, I'm never going to tell someone to not do those things, but I think we have to keep our eyeline up right we have to raise our vision a little bit more so we're not looking at the ground we're literally standing on with our homestead but looking at the bigger system and systemic problems and the reality is we have so many billions of humans on this planet that we have to think in those macro levels because we're not all able to go get a homestead
Speaker: and to grow our own food. We literally don't have space for it. We don't have land for it. People aren't financially and able to do that, both of jobs and families. We're just not set up as a planet to handle this many people living in that way of kind of that we want to hold up from the past. So it's messy.
Speaker: You know, I think kind of where I land with a lot of questions and people always want to ask, like, what do we do? And as a journalist, I always hate that because i both feel not equipped fully to tell people what they do with their own lives. And I feel like that's not my role in the story, but I would encourage people, if you're hearing this and you want to ask me that question on the podcast, I would say the research says the the best things you can do are to reduce or mitigate or eliminate your consumption of animal products from an environmental sustainability standpoint.
Speaker: That doesn't mean it's the best thing to do for you and your family. It doesn't mean it's the best way for you to live your life. All the people I talk to in this book, the journeys are different. You know, for me, I got exposed to these issues, seeing undercover video at a punk show in Texas in the 90s.
Speaker: And that just, that changed everything. And then after seeing these facilities and being on slaughterhouse floors, like I just can't do it anymore. So I made that personal decision not to eat animal products.
Speaker: But I've talked to people I respect that are featured in the book that are just trying to reduce or to be selective about where they're purchasing from. And the short answer is like all of that has a place.
Speaker: I mean, frankly, not to be grim, but like the problems are so big. and so existential that we're facing right now that I'm not going to knock someone for trying to do something to move in the right direction. But I think we have to have our eyes up over how big this problem is and what changes really need to take place.
Speaker: Absolutely. I do want to push back a a little bit on what you just said. Certainly, as Americans, we eat too much meat. We all know the stats. However, i think that there's this narrative that I think has gone a little bit too far around the idea of like animal agriculture can't feed the world. It is inherently less efficient.
Speaker: If you look at the U.S. and you look at the world, i think it's like two-thirds of all land is land that is not appropriate for row cropping. or for vegetable farming, and that often is scarce in water.
Speaker: And in that context, the right kind of animal agriculture is actually the most efficient way of growing food that we can eat.
Speaker: And I'm just coming back from New Mexico, for example. New Mexico obviously doesn't have a lot of water. Vegetable farming takes a lot of water. And I was on a farm, for example, where like they were 90% of their whole water consumption coming from a well was going to vegetable farming. So they've chosen to shift towards a animal agriculture where they're basically rotating sheep to the fields, vastly decreasing the amount of water that they're using.
Speaker: And very appropriate in the New Mexico context where you have very sparse vegetation that can't really be harnessed for human food in any other way, but which, you know, animals can walk around and eat and convert into energy that we can eat. So, yeah, so that would just be my ah little bit of pushback.
Speaker: To clarify a couple points on that, over 96% of mammals on Earth are either humans or animals raised by humans to be food.
Speaker: We are completely overrunning the entire planet, which is inherently not sustainable. For the amount of species loss, we're in the midst of another great extinction event.
Speaker: Animal agriculture, according to all of the academic research, is squarely responsible for that. In the book I talk about, we have to parse out what consumers we're talking about. So I do talk about, like in especially in more impoverished communities, it's not reasonable to talk about, hey, everybody needs to go plant-based because it doesn't make sense for them, they don't have access to it, and they might not survive if they try to do that.
Speaker: If we look at where most people, I mean, I think most people reading this book or listening to this podcast, if in the U.S., were not in situations like that. And in fact, the largest study of its kind that was through Oxford in 2018, published in Science Magazine, was talking about, it looked at over 38,000 farms, hundreds of different, both plant-based and animal products. And what they found was that animal products were take up a disproportionate over 80% of the resources to create them. And then in terms of caloric output, only put out about 18%.
Speaker: And the way that works is because, you know, if you're growing up fruits and vegetables and crops for human consumption, it goes straight to humans. Otherwise it has to be fed to animals that are then raised and then killed. So i would push back on that, that the animal agriculture is inherently inefficient. All of that cropland the vast majority of cropland goes to feeding animals on these CAFOs.
Speaker: To me, that is an important distinction because the current system, we are growing row crops, corn and soy on cropland that are we're then transporting across the country to CAFOs where it's fed to cows, you know, on concrete.
Speaker: That system is incredibly inefficient. However, i think a system in which animals were on the landscape and in the U.S., again, two-thirds of the landscape is only appropriate for animals. It's not appropriate for row crops. The soil isn't fertile enough. It's actually quite an efficient form of agriculture because animals can walk around and basically harvest the sun and turn it into energy for us.
Speaker: Also, if you look at the population of cattle in the U.S. today, it's not that different in numbers versus bison pre-American settlers. And as we know, like the bisons played an integral role in a making our soil and our country so fertile because of their movement across large landscapes, you know, trampling the soil and basically increasing the fertility and like the grass coverage of the landscape. And so the incredibly fertile soil that we have today that we're rapidly destroying comes actually from the impact over hundreds of years of the bison that we had in about the same numbers a few hundred years ago that we have cattle today. in the country.
Speaker: But that's just apples to oranges. i mean, there's nothing that we can compare between bison of 100, 200 years ago to cattle in the U.S., particularly because cattle ranchers are using this argument to try to advocate, and have been for decades, of why they should be able to graze their cattle on public lands. Because they say, well, we should just let them go. It's better. Look at what what the bison did. They were able to to graze over hundreds and thousands of acres, and we should allow our cattle to do that, too.
Speaker: And they're just using it as a push so that they can have their cattle grazing on public lands instead. I mean, cattle in particular are some of the worst contributors across all metrics to climate change.
Speaker: Some of least efficient in terms of that caloric output as well. But even if we like set aside all of that, it's a question of scale. And I haven't seen any credible research that suggests that we can feed or even replace a factory farm system, creating 10 billion animals a year, being fed to humans with this kind of free range or this other model. It's just not realistically feasible to do that.
Speaker: So that's why I think we have to look at plant-based alternatives that are consuming less space, less resources, fed directly to people and are not encroaching on public lands. Well, I think consuming a lot more water in some cases. but i think where we can But I think where we can agree is that however we transform our agriculture, it's going to require large shifts and a lot of political and societal will to do so.
Speaker: With respect to if you believe in like kind of livestock as being part of the solution, It does require kind of challenging the entire kind of urban development of our country and you know how cattle can move through the landscape and how can we create large contiguous acreages. You know, if you're talking about moving towards a plant-based diversified system, that is going to require massive change of what is currently grown. I mean, like, you know, 90% of everything we grow in America is just corn and soy. That's not even edible by human beings. Right, because it's fed to the animals.
Speaker: Right, exactly. So i think what we can agree on is that like massive changes need to happen. Can I ask why does it seem more feasible to have cattle roaming like bison than it would be to grow different crops?
Speaker: Because a lot of the scientific research, including from Oxford and many other places, what they were coming back with is if you switched that cropland, which, like you as you said, it's all being raised for animal consumption.
Speaker: If you converted it to cropland for human consumption, it would have dividends beyond that conversion because it's also allowing surrounding wildlife areas to recover, biodiversity to increase.
Speaker: i mean, the science on this is just overwhelming. And in the book, I talk about this is one of the challenges of it. it's The science of it is too much. But I find it surprising that folks want to focus on, oh, that's too difficult to convert that cropland.
Speaker: But the idea of remaking our entire culture so that we're all living on farm small homesteads and buying local doesn't seem impossible. So to be clear, I don't think we should transform our system in a way where everyone's living on homestead. And I also think it's a both and. I think in the better food system that I can see, you would have a small scale localized vegetable production all across the country serving local markets.
Speaker: And then in the areas outside of, but again, vegetable agriculture requires a lot of water. Not more than animal agriculture. It does. There's no comparison. Vegetable farming requires way more water than livestock farming on grasslands.
Speaker: what But what are you basing that off? The water that is used to grow the crops fed to animals or the full totality of the water used in CAFOs? Because that's two different things.
Speaker: I'm comparing vegetables, like so the the water used to grow the vegetables versus the water that is needed in a grass-based livestock system. So a system in which the animals are on the grass, eating the grass, and then you have to you have to give them water to drink. That's the comparison I'm making.
Speaker: That's not the system that we have. No, that's what I'm saying. So in the better system, you would have localized vegetable production that would feed the local markets. And then you would have in the areas that are not appropriate for row crop farming because the the soil isn't fertile enough that have grasses, you would have animals on the grasses.
Speaker: And then in the, you know, even more like forested areas, you could have a little bit of a combination of like kind of agroforestry practices combined with just natural forests. So to me, it's like you want everything. You like you want a diversified system.
Speaker: I would also add that for vegetable farming, you need compost. And for compost, you need manure. And so there's inherently some need for... It doesn't have to be animal waste.
Speaker: What else could it be? plant matter. I mean, like you can compost from anything. It doesn't have to be animals. Doing green composting. I think what you're talking about is green composting where you like very rapidly harvest cover crops and like can be done in certain contexts, but you could not grow vegetables for our entire population using that thing. Like you need animal more for compost or synthetic fertilizer, which comes from oil Yeah, but I mean, what is this based on? i mean, we're we're talking about how difficult this transition would be when the system we're in right now is literally killing all life on the planet.
Speaker: So it just feels like we need to put this a perspective of, yeah, I mean, ah but we can debate what type of compost to use, but if we're not looking at the primary culprit within the food system of contributing to climate change, species loss, extinction events, that's animal agriculture.
Speaker: So we can reduce it and reducing it would certainly be better. But like I said, I would encourage folks to check out Little Red Barnes. There's over 3,000 sources in the back of peer-reviewed academic research that this is just not possible without a shift to a plant-based diet.
Speaker: And i certainly can agree with you that our current animal industrial system is completely broken and that we need to move towards something better. And I also, to find some common ground, agreed that, you know, we need people advocating for everything that's different. we need to We need to be pursuing different options. And I think anyone that's striving towards that in whatever way they are, whether it's by choosing not to eat meat, whether it's by choosing to buy local, whether it's by you know, choosing to reduce your consumption overall is part of the solution.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think I would remind folks that like at the end of the day, what's most important to me and what i was working on this book is that we have the right to make those decisions. We have the right to information, both information of investigators and journalists exposing what the industry is doing, similar to Upton Sinclair over 100 years ago that are being criminalized as terrorists.
Speaker: But also the data collection about some of these points is explicitly being criminalized by the industry as well. AgGag later expanded to things like the Western Watersheds Project collecting water samples adjacent to properties with runoff, water runoff from these animal CAFOs because the water impact is so far beyond just the consumption of the water, but it's the pollution the surrounding waterways.
Speaker: And that's being criminalized. So I would say to folks listening to this, like if you want the full story and the full scope of what's taking place so that we can make informed decisions, not only as consumers, but as voters in trying to make policy change.
Speaker: We have to keep the industry in account and hold them accountable for this kind of authoritarian push to criminalize journalism. Absolutely. I totally agree. And maybe to finish us off one last question. i know, Will, that you've spent many, many years writing in this book and that it was, you know, at times a very challenging journey. What's next for you?
Speaker: Oh, appreciate that. Not as a spoiler, but the way Little Red Barnes kind of ends was some really deep questions about what it means to bear witness as a journalist. To me, that's what this project was, you know, bearing witness to what happens in these facilities, bearing witness to the communities and the people affected.
Speaker: And I've been struggling quite a bit because that's being criminalized. It feels like journalism and investigative journalists are increasingly becoming extinct. It feels like we live in a culture that at the top level, there's a disdain for facts and critical thinking and discussion and debate.
Speaker: And so that's a long way of saying I'm not moving away from journalism, but I'm shifting a bit. In the fall, I'm launching a new project called How to Live in a World on Fire. It grew out of my own experiences.
Speaker: with PTSD and depression and covering crises and conflict around the world and trying to answer that question and to answer some the other questions that we're engaging with here of like, well, what do we actually do?
Speaker: And i don't want this to be a show where I'm prescribing that to people, but giving folks a platform to try to hash this out. not just on food, but on on everything, truly on that macro level of how do we keep going as things get worse, as the climate crisis intensifies, as authoritarians intensify their tactics. I think we need to really double down on some of the themes we talked about in this conversation about community trying to do the best we can, even if we can't be perfect, trying to challenge ourselves and helping each other through it.
Speaker: There's a grim road ahead and there's no, I think a lot of people don't want to talk about that, but things are going to get rough. And we're already seeing that now with climate change. And so How to Live in a World on Fire is going to be talking about how we get through it together.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, Will, for this conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. My pleasure. Thank you so much also for kind of the role you play bearing witness and sharing the truth with the world, which is something that is so desperately needed and important.
Speaker: I appreciate that. And likewise. Yeah, and also for having conversations even when there's some disagreement because I think kind of going back to like a lot of the themes of this conversation in general, we need to talk across sometimes divides and have dialogue. Absolutely.
Speaker: I think that's the the key here. I mean, we any disagreements we have, like in the context of this this episode, I think are really tiny compared to the disagreements we have to the people operating these systems of power that are controlling the food system and also our daily lives.
Speaker: And I always try to remind myself of that, you know, and I would encourage folks to do the same. If you have a dinnertime conversation with your family or community, just try to focus on how much you have in common.
Speaker: That's what I was doing in farm communities. And I think it it serves us because underneath all of that, maybe we don't have the specifics, but the same general values and motivations are there.
Speaker: I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate this conversation. My pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker: Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
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