Out With the Animal Cruelty. In With … Mushrooms? These Farmers Are Leaving Factory Farming Behind

Some farmers have turned from livestock to crops to avoid the financial pitfalls and thorny ethics of industrial agriculture

Farmer Tom Lim had been raising poultry for 20 years when the company he worked for as a contractor terminated him without warning, leaving him saddled with debt and unsure of where to turn. “My heart just dropped,” he said. “I didn’t know where to make money to pay off our loans.”

Lim was born in rural Cambodia, where his parents tended rice fields with water buffalos, raised a smattering of chickens and grew vegetables around their home. That lifestyle shaped his love of farming, but was a far cry from what he found himself doing as an adult, raising 540,000 chickens a year in North Carolina for Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the largest meat producers in the US that supplies chicken to Walmart, Costco and KFC.

The longer he stayed in industrial-scale poultry farming, the more aware Lim became that it “hurt the environment” and that “many poultry farmers get sick due to breathing inside the [chicken] house”, he said, referencing the ways that the ammonia in factory-farmed chicken waste harms ecosystems and human health alike.