Vegetarian Star

Animal Factory by David Kirby

It’s amazing the impact a little education can have on your decisions.

After spending three years researching animal agriculture for his book, Animal Factory, David Kirby eats a lot less meat, as he explained to the Washington Post.

“Before I started working on the book, I would go to the supermarket and buy meat. I was completely ignorant about where my food came from. I knew that it wasn’t Farmer Joe down the road. But I never put together the idea that if it weren’t from there, it wouldn’t be from a real farm somewhere. I pictured mechanization. But I didn’t picture what was really going on.”

Read the entire interview with Kirby at the Washington Post.

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Journalist and author of Animal Factory, David Kirby, thinks Barack Obama should fight factory farming more aggressively and suggests taking this stance could even help him win votes in the next presidential election.

Obama was helped tremendously in the 2008 election by winning over Iowa, says Kirby in an article from the Huffington Post.

Kirby says Iowa sided with Obama due to his stance on changing policies in factory farming, which many conservative Americans see as an attack on hard working small farmers and personal property.

If Obama is to retain this support, changes in factory farm policies are needed, and Kirby provides a few ways in which the United States president can help both animals and constituents.

One way to do this is by limiting subsidies to corporate farms, which receive as much as 5 billion annually.

“If right-wing opposition to corporate bailouts runs so deep, then Obama should get some mileage from his promise to end the multibillion-dollar corporate farm subsidy boondoggle,” writes Kirby.

Kirby also thinks Obama should also tackle the monopoly big corporations have over the food industry and redirect programs to help small family farmers, something also valued by conservatives.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

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Animal Factory by David Kirby

Journalist David Kirby recalls the night he slept near a pig farm during his investigations of factory farms.

Kirby wasn’t able to fall asleep that night, as all he heard were pigs fighting, screaming and squealing at each other, a sound he described as “kids being tourtured.”

Those three years of experiences that led to his book, Animal Factory, are just a few that he shared in a recent Time magazine interview, “The Problem With Factory Farms.”

What Exactly is a Factory Farm?
We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that’s not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Basically it’s any farm that has 1,000 “animal units” or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They’re never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.

What happens to the wastes from factory farms?
The manure is liquefied. It gets flushed out into an open lagoon, where it is stored until farmers can use it on what few crops they do grow. There’s just so much of it, though. I’ve seen it sprayed into waterways and creeks. These “lagoons” filled with waste have been known to seep, leak, rupture, and overtop. This stuff is untreated, by the way. We would never allow big open cesspools of untreated human waste to just sit out on the ground near people’s homes and schools. And yet because it’s agriculture, the rules are different.

Read the entire interview with Kirby at Time.

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Animal Factory by David Kirby

David Kirby, investigative journalist and author of Animal Factory, has just skimmed over a report on the USDA’s “National Residue Program for Cattle.”

According to Kirby’s summary in the Huffington Post, this report would have received an “F” from 100% of teachers.

Not only has the program not established tolerant levels for substances in meat, it has failed to recall meat after the product has been confirmed with an excess of some of these substances.

A few highlights from Kirby’s summary:

• The five main substances found were Flunixin, Penicillin, Arsenic, Copper and Ivermectin and effects of ingesting these range from as mild as diarrhea to renal dysfunction to neurotoxicity.
• In 2008, a shipment of US beef was rejected by Mexican inspectors because it tested above the Mexican tolerance level for copper in beef. The food was sold and consumed in the US, where no levels are set.
• Over 90 percent of all residues detected were in dairy cows and veal calves. Dairy cows are routinely ground into hamburger and veal calves are often fed antibiotic-laden, unmarketable “waste milk” from dairy cows undergoing treatment for infections.
• Cooking meat destroys pathogens, but not residues, which heat may actually break down “into components that are more harmful to consumers.

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Animal Factory by David Kirby

Investigative journalist David Kirby has published a book on the effects of factory farming on communities, Animal Factory.

Kirby details the lives of three individuals, using their experiences to illustrate how big business in the food system affects small people: a North Carolina fisherman who’s river is polluted by a nearby pig farm, a mother in Illinois affected by a dairy farm, and a grandmother who’s home is covered in soot and water supply is compromised from cattle waste runoff.

The book is gaining praise from reviewers across the nation. Here are just a few comments.

“Good journalists know that the key to hooking their audience on a complex social problem is to put a human face on it. And David Kirby is a good journalist. In his new book Animal Factory Kirby puts a human face on the threat of industrial meat production to humans and environmental health.” —-FRANK STASIO, WUNC-FM, NPR Affiliate, North Carolina

“Animal Factory is a valuable addition to the growing number of works like Food Inc. and The Omnivore’s Dilemma exposing the ills of mass-produced meat and dairy. Kirby uses the stories of the three families, as they move from their local fights to the national scene, to draw readers into the morass of government regulations and lawsuits that surround the CAFO issue.”
–EUGENE WEEKLY

“If you want to know about the worst practices of our food system, David Kirby is your man. Kirby has the inside track on all things factory farm, which is why Washington Post’s “On Leadership” column recently invited him to write a guest post about President Obama’s record on reform in this area.”–Change.org

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