Cafo pig farm

Introducing: How to Fight a Factory Farm

September 16, 2024 | Source: IATP | by Lilly Richard, Anna Karns

How to Fight a Factory Farm is produced by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a member of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment. Thank you to our intern, Anna Karns, for her assistance producing this series, and to Noah Earle for the use of his song “Fry an Egg” for our theme music. Learn more about the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment at fightfactoryfarms.org.

Transcript

00:00:00 Barb Kalbach 

In the late 90s, this guy came to our house and he wanted to talk to us about putting up a confined animal feeding operation. So he’s talking to me. He’s describing, you know, what they would do. They would build the – no, I’d build the building. Yeah. Well, how much is that going to cost me? And they’d bring the hogs out and we’d get to raise them. And I said, well, when they go to market, then how much do we get per hog? And he said “five dollars!” Real cheerfully. He said that real cheerful: “five dollars.” And I’m going, “five dollars?”

00:00:33 Lilly Richard 

Over the past few decades, animal agriculture in the U.S. has changed dramatically. Small- and medium-scale diversified family farms, and the businesses that supported them, have been undercut, priced out and, in many cases, replaced by a corporate-controlled vertically-integrated system of industrial scale concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, otherwise known as factory farms.