Over the years Seth Watkins has won praise for the way he farms. Pinhook Farm, in southern Iowa, grows diverse crops without commercial fertilizers and with limited pesticides. It also tries to tune into the natural instincts of the livestock (such as calving in the spring, when it’s more comfortable for the cows, rather than in the winter, when it’s more convenient for the farmers).
But one thing didn’t sit right with Watkins. Most of the land he and his wife Christy farmed in southern Iowa was rented: they rented 2,790 acres, while owning 320 acres. This was over 3,000 acres that other people, especially young people, couldn’t farm. Watkins also thought that he could do an even better job of caring for the land if he had less of it to manage.
So Watkins made a decision that would be anathema to many American farmers: he chose to downsize. He’s transferred the rented farms to four younger people looking to get a break in agriculture.
He’s down to now the 320 acres he owns and about 80 surrounding acres. The overall livestock number has also gone down, from 600 cows to about 80 cows and 50 ewes. But this isn’t a story of loss overall. While the acreage and herd sizes have diminished, many things have expanded and improved since Watkins started transforming the farm away from conventional standards.
The farm now has more crops and native species. These include often-maligned plants like ragweed, which has a place on the farm as something that the sheep will happily eat; and legumes used as fertilizer, just as Watkins’ grandmother did in her day. There are more varied sources of income, including honey from bees. There are more beneficial insects, now that Watkins uses pesticides only when absolutely necessary. And the cows are healthier, which reduces disease risk and saves money.
Watkins stresses that getting smaller isn’t an option that every farmer can take. After getting out of debt, he had the means to downscale, as well as the willingness to live on reduced revenue if it meant higher job satisfaction. Now that he’s not reliant on farm subsidies encouraging larger agricultural production, he feels freer.
“I feel a lot more hope in what I’m doing now than what I’ve spent the last 30 years doing,” Watkins says. He contributed a chapter to the recently published book Regenerative Farming and Sustainable Diets: Human, Animal and Planetary Health, describing his philosophy that “nature and agriculture are mutually inclusive.”
Some people would call Watkins’ style of farming inefficient. It certainly isn’t about maximizing the amount of protein produced. But Watkins argues that industrial-style agriculture is only perceived as efficient because of what’s hidden: the harmful effects on the soil, air, and water; the subsidies and insurance that encourage over-farming; and the enormous amounts of fossil fuels needed to produce the synthetic fertilizer used for grain that in turn feeds overcrowded animals.
When all of that is factored in, Watkins believes, “we have a huge caloric loss on that land.”
He also worries about what will happen with fewer and fewer people growing fewer and fewer types of crops: “If we continue on this path, we really aren’t going to need small towns anymore. We’ll have some big farms and send our kids to boarding school and that will be it.”
The Megafarms Producing Our Food
While Watkins’ style of kinder-to-animals-and-nature farming might resonate with many people, it’s very far from the norm.
“When people think about farming, they have overwhelmingly positive images that come to mind,” like the “classic American small farm,” says Thom Norman, who recently cofounded the nonprofit FarmKind.
Yet new analysis of the most recent USDA Census of Agriculture, by FarmKind and Bryant Research, shows that animal protein purchased in the country is overwhelmingly likely to come from the largest of large farms.
According to this research, 98.1% of livestock animals in the U.S. are raised on megafarms, even though these make up only 2.6% of U.S. farming operations. The research has defined megafarms as those in the largest categories of the Census of Agriculture: enormous operations of at least 2,500 cows, 5,000 fattening pigs, or 100,000 hens used for eggs. The researchers have defined small farms, meanwhile, as selling fewer than 50 beef cows, 500 fattening pigs, or 2,000 broiler chickens a year.
Livestock raised on small farms compared to megafarms, using 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture data
“What we didn’t expect was to see quite such a large proportion of the industry making up such a tiny fraction of total sales,” Norman reflects. “These numbers are really quite shocking.”
He hopes that these numbers will be useful to many others. “We’d like people to get a better sense of and be able to parse information that they’re being given about the food industry more accurately.” When a shopper is presented with advertising images of several chickens pecking in a spacious field, this is extremely distant from the reality of thousands of birds crammed into warehouses and living in constant pain. For the many Americans who care about the conditions in which their animal protein was produced, Norman comments, “we hope that this research gives them another tool to actually purchase in a way that is more aligned with how they feel.”
And how they feel about industrial livestock farming may have to do not just with the suffering of animals, but with the suffering of fellow Americans.
Communities Split Apart By Factory Farms
Sonja Trom Eayrs wears many hats. In addition to being a family law attorney, she’s the business manager for her family’s 760-acre corn and soybean farm, in southeastern Minnesota.
Her family’s experiences have also turned her into an activist and author. It started back in 1993, when the first factory farm was installed near the Trom farm. A mile away, this operation clustered 2,000 hogs. Another concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) went up next to it in 1998—the same year that her sister and brother-in-law had to give up their own hog farm, because the market for independent producers had collapsed.
From there, as across rural America, the rise of large animal confinements has been relentless, while the number of small livestock farmers has dwindled. Now, Eayrs reports, “Our family farm is surrounded by 12 swine factory farms in a three-mile radius.” That’s 30,000 hogs, with all their concentrated manure tainting the air, the water, and the liveability around them.
As her relatives started to fall ill, this encirclement of factory farms didn’t go unchallenged. In the final years of her parents’ lives, the Troms mounted three legal cases against the 11th and 12th CAFOs.
The battle was stacked against them. From the planning commission to the board of commissioners, the local government officials included people who owned CAFOs or were employed by CAFO financiers. In Eayrs’ forthcoming book, Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America, she documents how these agencies waved through incomplete applications or even changed the application requirements to favor factory-farming interests.
It wasn’t a fair fight, and it wasn’t confined to government buildings. “These lawsuits take a toll on you emotionally, socially, financially,” Eayrs says. She chokes up on remembering attending church with her father, where no one would talk to him. “He was essentially persona non grata in his own home church.” Eayrs says that she learned later that the jobs and businesses of their fellow congregants had been threatened by people connected to industrial agriculture. This continued a pattern of intimidation of the Trom family, from harassing phone calls to incessant garbage dumps near their farm.
According to Eayrs, the pattern has been repeated across the country. As livestock replace people in increasingly hollowed-out rural areas, rifts are dividing the fewer people left behind. Meanwhile, corporations have entrenched their control and seen record-breaking profits. About 17,000 cattle ranchers go out of business each year, as the prices they see fall even though prices consumers pay rise. Fewer than 10% of U.S. hogs are sold in competitive markets. Almost all chicken farmers in the U.S. are contract farmers, with little ability to challenge the corporations that dictate the terms of their food production.
“We’re essentially converting from an agrarian system to an industrial or corporate system,” Eayrs argues. “We’re going from a rural nation to a corporate nation.” She believes that it will take action at every level to turn this ship around, including individuals asking more questions about the sources of their meat, eggs, and dairy.
The Changes Needed To Restore More Power To Small Farmers
Transformation away from damaging yet profitable agricultural industries is hard. But the U.S. has done it before. For instance, the 2005 Tobacco Transition Payment Program, paid for by tobacco manufacturers, led to a dramatic reduction in tobacco growers, many of whom retired or used the financial cushion for alternative livelihoods. Finding markets would be key for this kind of managed transition away from industrial agriculture, notes Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
On a small scale, projects like Mercy For Animals’ Transfarmation are helping people within the factory farming system to get out and find viable alternatives. Large-scale funding for transition away from factory farms does not yet exist, though Senator Cory Booker keeps doggedly proposing it each year as part of the Farm System Reform Act.
The former poultry confinement turned vegetable farm of Tom and Sokchea Lim in North Carolina, … [+]
Lilliston points to other potential policy changes, even beyond the gargantuan Farm Bill, that could offer a hand to struggling farmers within the corporate system. The USDA has proposed a rule defining unfair practices within the Packers and Stockyards Act. This would allow poultry growers, for instance, more information about what prices and birds they will receive—basic information that currently is obscured from growers.
“If we don’t change the policy framework, we’re going to see even more of a squeeze,” Lilliston warns. For instance, some people have touted biogas as a cleaner-energy solution, which makes use of all that excess waste from animal confinements. But this doesn’t solve the problem of water pollution, which Lilliston notes is almost always present around a CAFO. “You still have the manure, and you still have to apply the manure,” Lilliston explains. And because the logistics of converting manure into methane are only viable at a large scale, “You’re creating incentives for the operation to get even bigger and create more waste.”
So advocating for saner policies is the most impactful way for individuals and groups to resist the snowballing of industrial farming. But this doesn’t mean that there’s no role for individual choices.
Lilliston says that where young people are able to gain a foothold in farming, they’re often interested in alternatives to large-scale corporate ag: things like direct sales to consumers, farmers’ markets, and community-supported agriculture programs. Though still a small share of the overall food market, there are increasing opportunities for consumers to support reasonably-sized farmers. Of course, this option isn’t open to everyone. “You have to be willing to spend a little more money,” Lilliston says, as well as having the time and space for cooking and storage. This is a burden on many.
But for those who appreciate more diversified and relatively modest-sized farms, like Watkins’, or who are understandably angry about the tactics of agricultural corporations, like Eayrs, there are resources to learn more about the staggering consolidation of animal farming, like FarmKind’s.