Transfarmation The movement to free us from factory farming

The depredations of factory farming for both humans and animals have been well documented, but demand for this industry's output continues to grow. It exploits animals, the environment, and workers, who are often underpaid and forced to endure dangerous practices. Leah Garcés (Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry, 2019) heads up Mercy for Animals, which aims to change the attitudes and practices of farmers, industrialists, and consumers. Garcés visits multiple farms around the U.S. where people raising chickens or dairy cattle have turned to more sustainable and economically viable options having saddled themselves with debt at the behest of food corporations and having been compelled to treat animals poorly. Some have found that hemp is amenable to the structures used for intensive chicken farming, and others have turned to profitable mushroom growing. Garcés relates her own adventures, adopting chickens who have serious health issues due to genetic breeding for large breasts attractive to supermarket shoppers. By giving birds, pigs, and cattle proper names, Garcés heightens readers' sympathies for abused creatures while making a good case for alternative farming methods.

This impassioned treatise from Garcés (Grilled)--the president of Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable agriculture--explores the dark underbelly of animal farming. She describes the meat industry's cruelty (chickens are bred to grow so large and so fast that their hearts, unable to keep up, often fail) and devastating environmental impact, noting that "farmed animals emit more greenhouse gases than the world's planes, trains, and automobiles put together." Examining how "Big Ag" hurts farmers, Garcés tells how in order to contract with Tyson (one of a handful of companies that together control over half the meat market), North Carolina farmers Paula and Dale Boles took out hefty loans to build facilities that conformed with Tyson's standards, only to find that the company's capricious payment system meant that in years when disease thinned their flocks, Tyson didn't pay enough for the Boles to make their loan payments. Garcés suggests that farmers can reclaim their independence while healing the environment by transitioning to growing such products as mushrooms and microgreens, both of which bring in higher profits than meat. Garcés makes clear how animals and humans suffer under the status quo, and she offers practical suggestions for reform, including bolstering animal welfare protections and improving labor standards for farmers. This strikes a chord. (Sept.)