Most Americans - and a growing number of people around the world - now eat meat that was grown on factory farms. The brutal, inhumane conditions in which factory farm animals are raised calls into question not just the ethics of eating meat but the very foundations of the democracy we like to believe we live in. CAFOs - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations - crowd tens of thousands of animals together in their own filth, pumping them full of antibiotics and feed that their bodies are not designed to digest. Meanwhile small family farms, still practicing the traditions of sustainable animal husbandry, are being squeezed out of existence by a handful multi-national producers, leading us into this not-so-brave new world where farms are factories, animals are production units and multi-generational farmers are replaced by unskilled migrant laborers.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Daniel Imhoff, editor of The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, which provides a compelling vision of "putting the CAFO out to pasture," and creating a new world where food systems become healthy, humane and sustainable again.
Daniel Imhoff is the editor of The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories and the photo-format companion volume, CAFO (Concentrated Animimal Feeding Operations): The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. He is a writer and independent publisher whose many books include Food Fight, Farming with the Wild, Paper or Plastic, Building with Vision, and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature. He lives in Northern California.
To learn more about supporting sustainable family farms in Oregon: http://www.friendsoffamilyfarmers.org/
- KBOO