I don’t know what the editorial policy is toward factory farming at the very conservative Washington Times, but the paper apparently gives free rein to its book reviewers, even when covering politically controversial hot-button issues

On April 23, The Times ran a very favorable account of Animal Factory – The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, which reviewer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, said “reads like the script of a gripping documentary.”

It wasn’t something one would necessarily expect to read in this particular newspaper, which The New York Times has called a “crucial training ground for many rising conservative journalists and a must-read for those in the movement.”

But if a conservative newspaper can write warmly in favor of factory farm reform – something that Barack Obama promised on the 2008 trail – maybe it can emerge as a truly bipartisan issue.

Industrial-scale, corporate-backed farming, the review states, “is something that concerns us all, no matter what our political persuasion: the long-term health of people and communities directly affected by factory farms – otherwise known, in Orwellian lingo, as ‘concentrated animal-feeding operations’ (CAFOs).”

And, Rodger wrote, “each of us can introduce one organic food element to one meal per day. Organic eggs and milk, for instance, contain higher concentrations of vitamins, so you get more bang for the buck.”

A pitch for organic eggs? In The Washington Times? Who knew?

Then again, why wouldn’t conservatives be concerned about factory farming? Nearly all of the anti-CAFO activists featured in Animal Factory come from Republican backgrounds. And, as Rodger noted, the “externalized costs” of CAFOs include pollution and disease – which should worry everyone, (one reason why National Public Radio gave the book an equally positive review), and “loss of property values, plus federal subsidies, buyouts and farm bill giveaways,” which are bedrock conservative issues.

Rodgers gets her digs in at the Obama people, and rightly so. “Efforts to include leaders from agribusiness and the federal government, especially from the Obama administration, were less successful,” she correctly notes, “and their silence is a resounding absence in this book.”

“The scandal of industrial food-animal production is a direct link to the health care debate, making ‘Animal Factory’ all the more urgent,” the reviewer reminds us all, no matter what side of that burning topic we occupy. “Mr. Kirby has produced a powerful, important book to all those who care about their family’s health.”

I do not know what Ms. Rodger’s personal politics are, but I am grateful for her and to The Times – not only personally and professionally, but because it brings this important message to an extremely important group – Powerful Republicans in Washington, DC and beyond.

As for reining in the excesses of industrial animal production, maybe that is the golden bipartisan issue that has thus far eluded President Obama.

The Full Review Can Be READ HERE

A Q&A in Time Magazine Online Can Be READ HERE

David Kirby is Author of “Animal Factory – The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment.” (St. Martin’s Press).

 New Book Club to be Launched at Book Court in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn – April 21 at 7:00PM

Brooklyn-based writer DAVID KIRBY, author of the book “ANIMAL FACTORY – The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment” (St. Martin’s Press, March 2010), is having a reading and book signing at Book Court on Wednesday, April 21, 7PM at Book Court, 163 Court Street (between Pacific & Dean) in Cobble Hill Brooklyn www.bookcourt.org

The event, which is free and open to the public, marks the launch of the new Slow Food NYC Book Club.  Slow Food NYC is a non-profit group founded “to counteract fast food and fast life” and “stand against the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat.”

Animal Factory describes the rapid rise in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and their associated pollution, threat to food safety, harm to humans, wildlife and rural communities, treatment of livestock, and corporatization of the national food chain. The book follows real Americans as they struggle to defend their communities.

NPR said:

While there’s no doubt that many Americans might rather not know how the hamburgers and hot dogs we eat make their way to our tables, it’s becoming impossible for anyone to ignore the provenance of the meat that many of us buy, cook and eat every day. In Animal Factory, David Kirby turns his eye to one of the more controversial elements of contemporary American food production — factory farms, or “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), which have allowed meat producers to manufacture meat more quickly, and in greater quantities, than ever before. These large-scale operations have managed, to some degree, to make meat more affordable for many consumers; Kirby wonders whether the cost to the environment — and the health of people who live near the farms — is worth it. Kirby combines the narrative urgency of Sinclair’s novel with the investigative reporting of Schlosser’s book — Animal Factory is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. It has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues.

More information is at www.animalfactorybook.com.

But animal factory farming has changed all that.

Last week while speaking on tour at San Francisco’s Book Passage, my 20-something nephew Michael commented that he and his struggling friends now fill up on cheap meat to tame their growling bellies, more than on bread, noodles, rice and tater-tots. 

“We can go to the store and get a pork roast, cook it, and stuff our faces on it for days – and it’s really, really cheap,” Michael said. “Meat has become the new carb.”

People in the bookstore were abashed by the statement. After all, the idea of blithely pigging out on meat – because it’s cheaper than anything else – is a bit nauseating, even to the most committed of carnivores. But when you are struggling to find work and make ends meat, cheap food is cheap food. And few things today, pound for pound, are cheaper than cheap meat.

American animal protein is cheap at the supermarket because animal factories cram thousands of creatures into single confinements, feed them a steady diet of taxpayer-subsidized corn, grain and soybeans (often laced with antibiotics and heavy metals to speed up growth), get billions of taxpayer dollars in direct-payment subsidies and federal grants for pollution control, and ship their “output” off to titanic slaughterhouses where costs-per-kill are reduced to a minimum.

I thought Michael’s observation was astute. But surely it was metaphorical. After all, how could meat be cheaper than pasta? How could the something inside a sandwich cost less that then bread that holds it together?

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true.

Today, I paid a visit to my local supermarket – nothing too fancy or upscale, but with admittedly inflated New York City prices. I wanted to see how much Michael’s pork roast would cost here. It was $1.19 a pound.

Not bad, but there was even cheaper meat than that. Whole turkey was $0.79/lb and whole chicken was $0.99/lb, (sometimes it falls to $0.69/lb). Beef could be had for $0.99/lb in the form of beef shank or beef rump steak, while ham butt and whole smoked ham were also $0.99/lb. Corned beef was $1.49/lb. And though these were the very cheapest cuts, and you were often paying for bone as well, it would be much cheaper to fill up on these meats than on the grains and potatoes found in the carb aisles.

The cheapest carbs were russet potatoes, at $0.99/lb, followed by rice at $1.49/lb and pasta at $1.99/lb. Once you wandered into the prepared and frozen food sections, however, the price-per-pound really began to soar, including $3.68 for corn flakes, $4.30 for 16oz of potato chips, and $5.12 for the same amount of microwave popcorn (See chart below).

Likewise, healthy fruits and vegetables were priced higher than the cheap meats – ranging from $1.49 per pound for apples to $4.99 a pound for strawberries.

In a world where most poor people will not even taste meat this year, it is somewhat perverse to think that animal flesh is now the cheap food of choice for low-income Americans. Why should a ham sandwich cost 99 cents-a-pound for the ham, and $3.59-a-pound for the bread? What is wrong with our system when chicken-and-rice costs $0.99 for the chicken, and $1.49 for the rice?

Yes, there are more expensive cuts of meat, and you can probably find cheaper carbs if you really shop around. But the argument remains the same. With all the advantages we grant to industrial-scale animal producers (ie, subsidies, drugs and open access to processing plants), aren’t we artificial deflating the price or meat? And isn’t that leading to comparatively higher prices for plant-based foods?

Maybe if we subsidized the production of fruits, vegetables and edible grains (most corn is not grown for human consumption) instead of the production of meat and dairy, we would get a healthier, more heart-friendly return on our national investment.

Actual Prices at Key Food Grocery, Brooklyn, NY – Week of April 18, 2010

MEAT

Whole Turkey – $0.79/lb
Perdue Oven Stuffer: $0.99/lb
Beef Shank: $0.99/lb
Beef Steak Rump: $0.99/lb
Ham Butt: $0.99/lb
Whole Ham Smoked: $0.99/lb Pork Roast Shoulder: $1.19/lb
Frierich Corned Beef: $1.49/lb

CARBS

Carolina Extra Long Grain Rice: $1.49/lb
Colavita Penne Pasta: $2.49/lb
Ore-Ida Steak Fries – $2.72/lb
Chef Boyardee Mac & Cheese – $3.20/lb
Wonder Bread – Light Italian: $3.59/lb
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes: $3.68/lb
Ritz Crackers: $4.09/lb
Lay’s Potato Chips: ($3.49 13oz) $4.30/lb
Thomas` English Muffins: ($3.39/12oz) $4.48/lb
Act II Microwave Popcorn – Light Butter: ($2.79/8.6oz) $5.12/lb

FRUITS & VEGGIES

Apples: $1.49/lb
Zucchini $169/lb
Bartlett Pears: $1.79/lb
Eggplant: $199/lb
Broccoli: $249/lb
Spinach (bagged) $3.16/lb
Seedless Grapes: $3.99/lb
Strawberries: $4.99/lb
Cauliflower: $4.99/lb</blockquote>

 “Kirby combines the narrative urgency of Sinclair’s novel with the investigative reporting of Schlosser’s book — Animal Factory is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. There’s no political pleading or ideological agitprop in this book; it’s remarkably fair-minded, both sober and sobering. Like Sinclair’s and Schlosser’s work, it has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues.”– NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, “BOOKS WE LIKE”

“Kirby profiles three individuals who have been subjected to the stench, mess, environmental contamination, and health risks of megafarms. Stonewalling government agencies and evasive and hostile factory-farm owners and their corporate overseers ensure that the trio’s battles for safe air and water have been protracted, complicated, and dangerous, hence the magnitude of Kirby’s meticulously detailed yet propulsive chronicle. Thanks to Kirby’s extraordinary journalism, we have the most relatable, irrefutable, and unforgettable testimony yet to the hazards of industrial animal farming.” — BOOKLIST – JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSN (STARRED REVIEW) 

“Animal Factory is a compelling narrative in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel “The Jungle” led to changes in the meat-packing industry. It isn’t a novel, but it moves along with the urgency of a pot-boiler. What Kirby has done in this journalistic account of animal factory operations across the country is draw back the curtains that have carefully screened from the public the untidy secrets about how meat is produced on a large scale in this country. You’ll read about the cramped feeding operations where animals are fattened for market, the pharmaceuticals that go into feed, the alarming practices used to dispose of feces and urine and how animal byproducts sometimes wind up in feed.” – THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

“Kirby turns his investigative reporting skills to the human and environmental consequences of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Unlike recent books on this topic that advocate for a vegetarian lifestyle (e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals), Kirby focuses on the negative impacts CAFOs are having on not only those who live near these operations but also those who may be affected by polluted water originating from waste lagoon spills at these sites. His narrative is immensely readable and should be required reading for anybody concerned with how CAFOs are changing the nature of livestock farming.” –LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Centering on three tales of large-scale factory farming, David Kirby takes the industry to task for its destruction of the environment, its deleterious effect on the family farm and rural America, and its lies, which have led to government inaction. Kirby’s descriptions of how the animals are treated is chilling, and I can guarantee that you’ll never eat pork with a clean conscience again.” –INDIE NEXT “NOTABLES,” AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSN

“An environment in which there are lakes of putrid slush, foul odors wafting in the breeze and entire rivers turning orange may sound like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, but it’s a reality for many people who live near industrial farms – the result of keeping thousands of animals in one place in order to keep prices low. In his latest book, Animal Factory, David Kirby follows three unlikely grassroots activists who have opposed big agriculture, from small community protests to the national sustainable movement.” –LEONARD LOPATE, WNYC-FM, NPR Affiliate, New York City

“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. Animal Factory tells the story of three people who became unlikely activists against large-scale factory farms and their accompanying stench, waste and cost.” –FRANK STASIO, WUNC-FM, NPR Affiliate, North Carolina

“Animal Factory is really a wonderful book, an easy read, and one that you often wrestle with. And I think that, for those of us who are thinking about the future of our world, well, this is one of those books you must read.” –MARK STEINER, WEAA-FM, NPR Affiliate, Baltimore

”Kirby has assembled an amazingly detailed history of his subjects’ grassroots struggles. It’s an impressive feat of all-consuming, shoe-leather journalism, and his litany of unneighborly insults, like the “stinky, mocha-colored mist” that one mega-dairy inflicts on the property next door, packs a punch. His dogged pursuit of the story has made him unquestionably expert on factory farming and the resistance movement thereof. –THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, DURHAM, NC

“Kirby avoids the classic conservationist (lefty) versus business dichotomy (Republican) in focusing on people like ex-Marine turned Riverkeeper, Rick Dove. 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. Kirby’s right in saying that “Obama should go out of his way to showcase his leadership in confronting the pollution and economic consolidation of animal factory farming.”–CHANGE.ORG

FULL REVIEWS: WHAT CRITICS SAY

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO – ‘Toxic ‘Factory’: Industrial Meat and the Environment – by Michael Schaub

In 1905, novelist Upton Sinclair began publishing, in serial form, The Jungle, his expose on food safety and the mistreatment of workers in the American meatpacking industry. The book horrified the American public and set into motion a governmental response that would eventually lead to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.

Almost a century later, Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction Fast Food Nation was published, and while it didn’t have the massive immediate effect of Sinclair’s novel, it did bring the politics of food back to the forefront of the American consciousness. Schlosser went on to co-produce the popular documentary Food, Inc., directed by Robert Kenner, which recently earned an Oscar nomination for its investigative look at the practices of the American food industry.

While there’s no doubt that many Americans might rather not know how the hamburgers and hot dogs we eat make their way to our tables, it’s becoming impossible for anyone to ignore the provenance of the meat that many of us buy, cook and eat every day.

In Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, journalist David Kirby turns his eye to one of the more controversial elements of contemporary American food production — factory farms, or “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), which have allowed meat producers to manufacture meat more quickly, and in greater quantities, than ever before. These large-scale operations have managed, to some degree, to make meat more affordable for many consumers; Kirby wonders whether the cost to the environment — and the health of people who live near the farms — is worth it.

Kirby combines the narrative urgency of Sinclair’s novel with the investigative reporting of Schlosser’s book — Animal Factory is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. He follows three somewhat accidental activists: Helen Reddout, a Washington state teacher and orchardist; Karen Hudson, a farmer’s wife and engineering troubleshooter in Illinois; and Rick Dove, a Republican Vietnam veteran and fisherman who served as a “riverkeeper” in North Carolina. Each found out about the environmental and health effects of factory farms the hard way — when their respective communities were hit by illness and pollution after CAFOs opened near their homes.

Their stories, of course, are heartbreaking. Waste lagoon breaches and factory runoffs impact each community with varying degrees of seriousness. In one profoundly sad section, Kirby details the massive fish kill in Dove’s beloved Neuse River, which choked the waterways with a billion dead fish. While all of the activists are able to make some headway into the regulation of factory farms in their communities, their paths are incredibly frustrating, blocked by corporate interests and a parade of indifferent, feckless or hostile politicians.

The growth of factory farming in America obviously brings up issues of animal welfare, labor and nutrition, but Kirby’s focus in Animal Factory is purely how the farms are changing, perhaps irrevocably, the environments and the long-term health of the people who live near them. There’s no political pleading or ideological agitprop in this book; it’s remarkably fair-minded, both sober and sobering. Like Sinclair’s and Schlosser’s work, it has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues. It deserves a wide audience, despite — or because of — the fact that it might be the most frightening book of the year.

BOOKLIST – JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION – **STARRED REVIEW**

In factory farms, thousands of animals are confined and rapidly fattened for slaughter, generating millions of gallons of animal waste, which is stored in open lagoons and sprayed into the air. Kirby, author of the best-selling Evidence of Harm (2005), profiles three individuals who have been subjected to the stench, mess, environmental contamination, and health risks of megafarms. Rick Dove, a Marine Corps prosecutor, retired early to enjoy the Neuse River near his North Carolinian home but instead became a devoted “riverkeeper” after witnessing massive fish kills caused by pig-factory waste. In beautiful Yakima Valley, Washington, Helen Reddout and her husband joyfully tended their fruit orchards until a megadairy fouled their property, inducing Helen to become a “warrior activist.” The same thing happened to farmer’s wife Karen Hudson in Elmwood, Illinois. Stonewalling government agencies and evasive and hostile factory-farm owners and their corporate overseers ensure that the trio’s battles for safe air and water have been protracted, complicated, and dangerous, hence the magnitude of Kirby’s meticulously detailed yet propulsive chronicle. Thanks to Kirby’s extraordinary journalism, we have the most relatable, irrefutable, and unforgettable testimony yet to the hazards of industrial animal farming.

CHARLOTTE OBSERVER and RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER – “Factory Farms and the Flu” – By Jack Betts

A few years ago author David Kirby had never heard of the acronym CAFO. The acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller “Evidence of Harm” about the nexus between mercury in vaccines and the prevalence of autism, Kirby was researching another question that was vexing him. Why was arsenic getting into the homes and schools of a little town in Arkansas, and why were so many children getting cancer. Soon enough, “I wanted to know why we put arsenic in chicken feed,” he said the other day while passing through Raleigh.

The answers stunned him. “Arsenic makes chickens grow faster (it inhibits an intestinal fungus) and gives the skin a nice pearly tone” in grocery stores, he read. And the chicken feed that contained arsenic was increasingly fed to the birds in confined animal feeding operations – CAFOs for short. They’re animal factories, say many Americans who live near and breathe the ripe aromas associated with large-scale production facilities for the poultry, pork and beef that provide much of the diet for the residents of this country.

The more Kirby read about CAFOs and problems with concentrated feeding operations of large animals, the more he ran across the name of Rick Dove, a native of the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland who settled in New Bern after a career as a Marine Corps officer.

And when Kirby was ready to write “Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment,” he had settled on the stories of three unusual people and their families to tell what’s happening: Helen Reddout, an orchardist in the Yakima Valley of Washington, where factory dairies began operating; Karen Hudson of Elmwood, Ill., where factory farm operations led to waste spills and divisions in her community over health, economics and environmental degradation; and Dove, a conservative Republican who became a forceful advocate challenging the pollution of North Carolina’s waters by industrial hog farm operations that state and local officials ignored for years.

“Animal Factory” (St. Martin’s Press, 2010, $26.99) has just made its debut in bookstores and online. It’s a compelling narrative in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel “The Jungle” led to changes in the meat-packing industry and prodded Congress that same year to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Animal Factory isn’t a novel, but it moves along with the urgency of a pot-boiler in recounting Dove’s odyssey from military officer to retired fisherman to strong-willed challenger of governmental indifference to the decline of the Neuse River in Eastern North Carolina.

Kirby was hooked on the North Carolina angle even before the first time he went up in a small plane with Dove over Eastern N.C. – and not only saw the farms with huge spray guns shooting liquefied feces and urine into the air, but could suddenly smell them as well. That, Kirby says, was his introduction to how some farmers illegally inject animal poop into the state’s waterways.

Dove’s story is fairly well known in this state. I’ve been writing about his work since 1996 and about the lethal impact of a toxic dinoflagellate identified by N.C. State Professor JoAnn Burkholder. The News & Observer thoroughly documented the rise of the factory animal farm in its Pulitzer Prize-winning 1995 series “Boss Hog: The Power of Pork.”

What Kirby has done in this journalistic account of animal factory operations across the country is draw back the curtains that have carefully screened from the public the untidy secrets about how meat is produced on a large scale in this country. You’ll read about the cramped feeding operations where animals are fattened for market, the pharmaceuticals that go into feed, the alarming practices used to dispose of feces and urine and how animal byproducts sometimes wind up in feed.

When you do, you’ll think seriously about becoming a vegetarian, or about willingly paying more money to purchase meat products from sustainable agricultural operations where animal handling practices, feed additives and waste disposal are less the stuff of nightmares and more attractive to health-conscious buyers.

Kirby also recounts the not-so-well-told story of swine flu and North Carolina’s connection to the recent H1N1 epidemic. In August of 1998, a new bug was discovered at an N.C. hog breeding facility that defied the then-current vaccination against swine flu. State Agriculture Department lab techs discovered a “novel influenza virus” that had characteristics of swine flu, with three human flu genes and two bird flu genes – “a triple reassortment’ virus, a worrisome and unprecedented monster of human, hog, and bird flu.” The fear was that the new virus might one day make the jump to humans.

Ten years later, in 2009, a new swine flu outbreak in Mexico spread around the world, Kirby wrote. “Six of the virus’ eight genetic components would be identified as direct descendants of the 1998 pig farm outbreak in Sampson County.”

Despite the scares, Kirby doesn’t want to try to tell states how they should grow pigs. But the state and its people have a responsibility to recognize the dangers of some animal factory practices and insist on stronger protections of the land, air, water – and food supply.

LIBRARY JOURNAL

Kirby turns his investigative reporting skills to the human and environmental consequences of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The first section details how three concerned citizens-a North Carolina fisherman, a mother in a small Illinois town, and a Washington State grandmother-became activists after seeing firsthand how CAFOs negatively altered the environment around them. The second section frames the public health and ecological issues surrounding CAFOs by looking at how they have been treated nationally. VERDICT Unlike recent books on this topic that advocate for a vegetarian lifestyle (e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals or Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Face on Your Plate ), Kirby focuses on the negative impacts CAFOs are having on not only those who live near these operations but also those who may be affected by polluted water originating from waste lagoon spills at these sites. His narrative is immensely readable and should be required reading for anybody concerned with how CAFOs are changing the nature of livestock farming in the United States.

INDIE NEXT LIST – AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION

ANIMAL FACTORY has been selected by the as one of the Indie Next List Notables for March 2010:  “Centering on three different tales of large-scale factory farming, David Kirby takes the industry to task for its destruction of the environment, its deleterious effect on the family farm and rural America, and its lies, which have led to government inaction. Kirby’s descriptions of how the animals are treated is chilling, and I can guarantee that you’ll never eat pork with a clean conscience again.”

LEONARD LOPATE – WNYC-FM, NPR Affiliate, New York City

An environment in which there are lakes of putrid slush, foul odors wafting in the breeze and entire rivers turning orange may sound like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, but it’s a reality for many people who live near industrial farms – the result of keeping thousands of animals in one place in order to keep prices low. In his latest book, ANIMAL FACTORY, David Kirby follows three unlikely grassroots activists who have opposed big agriculture, from small community protests to the national sustainable movement. 

FRANK STASIO – WUNC-FM, NPR Statewide Affiliate, North Carolina

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. ANIMAL FACTORY tells the story of three people who became unlikely activists against large-scale factory farms and their accompanying stench, waste and cost.

MARK STEINER – WEAA-FM, NPR Affiliate, Baltimore

ANIMAL FACTORY is really a wonderful book, an easy read, and one that you often wrestle with. And I think that, for those of us who are thinking about the future of our world, well, this is one of those books you must read.

THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY – DURHAM, NC, By Max Maximov

We’ve all been exposed to the phrase “factory farming” so many times that our brains reflexively take a little nap on contact—the dark underbelly of the animal processing industry is far enough away from our daily lives that it’s easier just to ignore it. Feed lots, manure lagoons, warehoused chickens, the horror, the horror— when’s lunch? But a lot of the people who happen to live near these filthy, stinking torture chambers don’t have the option to just Febreze them from their consciousness.

The disastrous local effects of factory farming are the subject of a new book, Animal Factory, by David Kirby. Kirby visits three rural localities in which fed-up citizens are mobilized to take on an industry that has literally shit all over them, choking their streams with waste and filling the air with a sickening stench. He reports on the fight against mega-dairies and hog factories in Yakima Valley, Wash., and Elmwood, Ill., but the book begins and ends here in North Carolina. The hero of that story is Rick Dove, a Marine lawyer-turned-riverkeeper who witnessed the pork industry’s devastation of the Neuse River from his home on the shore in New Bern.

Kirby has assembled an amazingly detailed history of his subjects’ grassroots struggles. It’s an impressive feat of all-consuming, shoe-leather journalism, and his litany of unneighborly insults, like the “stinky, mocha-colored mist” that one mega-dairy inflicts on the property next door, packs a punch. But exhaustiveness is also the book’s biggest weakness, as outrages against man and nature sprawl over 450 pages and begin to repeat themselves, along with a few too many summarized panel reports and blow-by-blow retellings of community meetings. Kirby is also liberal in his use of the increasingly popular but crazy-making device of writing dialogue, entire pages of it, that he couldn’t possibly have witnessed (whither thou goest, nonfiction?).

Still, his dogged pursuit of the story has made him unquestionably expert on factory farming and the resistance movement thereof.—

Investigative journalist David Kirby discusses the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms, and tracks the far-reaching contamination they cause on our air, land, water, and food. In Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment he shows the role of industrial farming in the American food system, and tells the story of people who are fighting to restore sustainable farming practices and protect our natural resources.

EUGENE WEEKLY – Camilla Mortensen

Journalist David Kirby’s lengthy tome (exceeding 400 pages) seems to take its name and its criticism of tyranny based on hypocrisy from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Each of its three stories focuses on the efforts of families battling not only big business, but bureaucracy, weak enforcement and crooked politics in order to preserve their health and their way of life, threatened by massive animal farms and the manure they produce.

 Concentrated  Animal  Feeding Operation (CAFO) is the official federal designation for poultry and livestock operations, Kirby writes, “with more than one thousand ‘animal units,’” but they are more commonly known by the name “factory farm.” 

The author of a New York Times bestseller on autism and vaccinations, Evidence of Harm, Kirby takes on the evils of factory farming in three areas of the country: the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest and the South. In each locale, the issue is different, from enormous dairy farms stinking up Washington’s Yakima Valley to lagoons of pig poo overflowing into rivers in North Carolina and causing massive fish kills, but the result is the same: environmental degradation, ill health and unhappy neighbors.

The biggest problem for those living near factory farms, aside from animal rights issues for pigs, cows and chickens crowded into small pens, is the manure. Thousands of “animal units” produce tons of poo. CAFOs get rid of the manure primarily by piling it up, storing it in “lagoons” and sometimes spraying the excess across their fields. This translates to air filled with poop particles and, thanks to leaky lagoons, contaminated waterways. As Kirby documents in cases across the country, rainy days can turn a full lagoon into an overflowing river of manure, and supposedly sealed pools can excrete waste into the watertable.

Rick Dove and other North Carolina river lovers find themselves literally up shit creek without a paddle when pig manure from CAFOs begins to kill off thousands of fish and sicken those who live, play and work near the Neuse River. Helen Reddout and her Yakima-area neighbors face dirty water and air redolent with cow feces. Karen Hudson and the townspeople of Elmwood, Ill., fight thousands of polluting pigs and, later, dairy cows. Each family struggles against the inexorable tide of waste and toxins.

Kirby avoids the classic conservationist (lefty) versus business dichotomy (Republican) in focusing on people like ex-Marine turned Riverkeeper, Dove, new to saving the rivers and the trees and the trials and tribulations polluters cause: “CAFO. The first time Rick heard a friend utter the term, he thought it must be some new kind of espresso place.” 

Or as a Washington farmer, fighting to keep more huge dairies from invading and destroying the air and water of his small rural community, puts it, “We’re your neighbors. We aren’t environmentalists.”

One of the biggest lefties in the book is Eugene-based attorney Charlie Tebbutt, then working for the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC), hired by farming families, like that of Helen Reddout, turned anti-CAFO activists in the Yakima Valley to aid them in their fight against encroaching factory farms. “‘Oh brother, get a load of this one,” Helen whispered to Mary Lynne. ‘I was expecting a lawyer in pinstripes. And what do we get? A hippie.’”

Kirby’s journalistic account isn’t trying to give an unbiased view of factory farming — his sympathies clearly fall on the side of the environment and small farmers — but his work is well-researched and thoroughly documented — so well documented in fact that some readers may at first be put off by the endnotes interjected throughout the book. 

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 — both those familiar with the factory farming debate and those new to it — into the morass of government regulations and lawsuits that surround the CAFO issue.

CHANGE.ORG – Obama Making Good Progress on Food Issues, by Katherine Gustafson

If you want to know about the worst practices of our food system, David Kirby is your man.

Author, most recently, of Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, 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.

Kirby’s verdict? “The administration is, in fact, taking serious measures to address the pollution and market dominance brought about by industrial animal production.”

While Obama’s progress doesn’t come close to matching up with his campaign promises, there’s a lot for us all to be happy about, including:

• New EPA rules requiring factory farms to comply with the Clean Water Act;
• Moves to enforce federal CAFO rules on chicken operations in the mid-Atlantic;
• Identification of animal waste runoff as a “priority” for federal enforcement;
• Closing USDA farm subsidy loopholes;
• Holding hearings on competition in the agricultural sector;
• New USDA rules for transparency in loans to contract poultry and pork producers;
• Launch of the “Know Your Farmer” program connecting local farmers and consumers;
• Scrapping the federal animal ID program that unfairly disadvantaged small farmers;
• Revising organic meat-and-dairy regulations to the consumer’s advantage; and
• Planning a “National Rural Summit,” to be announced soon.

Not bad, huh? Kirby certainly thinks so. “It’s a record of which [Obama] should be proud,” he writes. Unfortunately, though, the president and his people don’t feel much like talking about all they’re doing. They are oddly silent on all this progress, when they should be trumpeting their success from the roof of the White House.

Especially considering the public’s rapidly growing concern about the safety and health of our food supply, Kirby’s right is saying that “Obama should go out of his way to showcase his leadership in confronting the pollution and economic consolidation of animal factory farming.”

WHAT OTHERS SAY

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr:  David Kirby’s book, Animal Factory, is a beautifully written account of the danger industrial meat and dairy production represents to our health, environment and democratic process.  In a unique and captivating way, Kirby reveals the consequences of animal factories through the eyes of the citizen advocates who have fought the long and hard battle to civilize the barbaric and often criminal behavior of the meat barons. Rick Dove, Karen Hudson, Helen Reddout, Chris Peterson, Don Webb and others featured in the book are real American heroes. Their stories are compelling, true and engaging.  The time has come to end the greedy and destructive practices of animal factories. As the readers of Kirby’s book will learn, nature’s clock is ticking and much is at stake for the planet and all of its inhabitants. Each page of this book is filled with powerful information. It has all the makings of a number one best seller.

Alice Waters: Nature did not intend for animals to live and die in a factory assembly line.  In David Kirby’s startling investigation Animal Factory, he gives a human face to the terrible cost our health and environment pays for this so-called ‘cheap food’. This is a story that is seldom told and rarely with such force and eloquence.

Robert S. Lawrence, MD, Director, Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Animal Factory, by David Kirby, documents the scandal of today’s industrial food animal production system in the same compelling way Upton Sinclair alerted Americans to the abuses of the meat packing industry in his 1906 The Jungle. The well being of animals produced for human consumption, the fate of rural communities, the health of farm workers, and the protection of the environment are daily compromised for the sake of profit.

Deirdre Imus: Ol’ MacDonald had a farm – until America’s corporate animal factories plowed it under, packing living, breathing, sensate creatures into sewage plant conditions for your gustatory pleasure.  Now, you’re next.  Bon appetit.

Steve Ells, Founder, Chairman & Co-CEO, Chipotle Mexican Grill: Hurray to David Kirby for exposing the horrific conditions that are so prevalent at America’s factory farms.  When I first confronted the realities of factory farming some ten years ago, I knew that I did not want Chipotle’s success to be based on the exploitation that I saw.  While few people actually have the chance to see firsthand where their food comes from, Animal Factory provides a vivid account of the system and the harm it causes.

Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production: This book puts a human face on a well hidden national scandal: the effects of large-scale raising of animals on the health and well being of farm workers and their families, local communities, the animals themselves, and the environment which we all share.  By examining how CAFOs affect the lives of real people, Kirby makes clear why we must find healthier and more sustainable ways to produce meat in America.

Bill Niman (Founder, Niman Ranch) and Nicolette Hahn Niman (Author, Righteous Porkchop:  Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms): The industrial production of farm animals is a grim saga of pollution, health risks, and animal misery.  Yet in Animal Factory David Kirby has put together an ingenious book that is highly readable and engaging.  The heroes of his book are fighting for a better America — one in which waters are safe to drink, air is safe to breathe, and traditional family farmers are the sources of our food.  Anyone who reads this book will be drawn into their cause.

David Wallinga, MD, Food and Health Director, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy: Animal Factory tells how big agribusiness’ industrial meat production is leaving our communities foul with unhealthy air, awash in untreated sewage, and increasingly buffeted by bacteria made resistant to the antibiotics. Anyone in search of why America’s health care system is going bankrupt will find part of the answer in these pages.

Frederick Kirschenmann, President of Kirschenmann Family Farms: David Kirby’ s new book points to a deeper story than may be apparent to some.   It is easy to blame the farmer, or blame the industry for the unintended consequences of our food system. But there are deeper systemic issues which give rise to these problems that we now need to address. Our “fast, convenient, and cheap” food system gave us benefits that many found praiseworthy.  But we failed to anticipate the unintended costs to health, to communities, and to the environment.  Perhaps it’s time to reinvent a food system that is resilient, affordable and health-promoting for both people and land.   Perhaps Kirby’s new book can serve as part of a wake-up call for us all to become food citizens to that end.

APRIL 7, 7:00 PM – SAN JOSE, CA
Reading and Book Signing
Parents Helping Parents
1400 Parkmoor Avenue, Suite 100.
MORE INFO HERE – RSVP to: www.php.com/events

APRIL 8, 6:00 PM – SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Reading and Book Signing
Book Passage, Ferry Building
MORE INFO HERE 

APRIL 12, 7:00 PM – LOS GATOS, CA
Reading and Book Signing
Borders Bookstore
50 University Avenue, Los Gatos, CA
MORE INFO HERE

APRIL 14, 7:30 AM (EDT) – NEW YORK CITY, NY
”Imus in the Morning”
WABC-AM Radio, Fox Business News Channel, Syndicated

APRIL 15, 5:30-7:00 PM – DAYTONA BEACH, FL
Live Audience Interview and Radio Simulcast
President’s Speaker Series
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, College of Aviation Atrium
Live call-in and simulcast at 1150AM WNDB
MORE INFO HERE

APRIL 21, 7:00 PM – BROOKLYN, NY
SLOW FOOD NYC Book Series – Inaugural Event
Reading and Book Signing
Book Court, 163 Court Street, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
MORE INFO HERE

APRIL 27, 6:00-8:30 PM – NEW YORK CITY
Educational Program – Animal Factory Reading and Q&A
National Autism Association – New York Chapter
Rebecca School, 40 East 30th. Street, NYC
MORE INFO HERE

APRIL 28 (TBA) – OBERLIN, OH
Lecture and Q&A with Students
Oberlin College of Arts & Sciences
101 N. Professor St., Oberlin, OH

MAY 4, 6:00-7:30 PM – WASHINGTON, DC
Panel Discussion and Book Signing
Sponsored by Animal Welfare Approved
Letelier Theater, 3251 Prospect Street, NW,
Upper Courtyard – Washington, DC 20007
Reception to Follow 
MORE INFO TO BE POSTED HERE

MAY 29, 5:00 PM – CHICAGO, IL
Book Signing following Autism Talk
Autism One – Generation Rescue Conference
Westin Hotel at O’Hare Airport
WWW.AUTISMONE.ORG/CONTENT/WORLD-CHANGES-MAY

JUNE 8-10 – LOS ANGELES & SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Hold for Events and Book Signings in LA and SoCal
More Info TBA

JUNE 11 – LA PAZ, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO
Keynote Speech
Waterkeeper Alliance Annual Meeting

Kirby to Speak at Book Court in Brooklyn 
April 21at 7:00PM

 WHO: Brooklyn-based writer DAVID KIRBY, author of the book “ANIMAL FACTORY – The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment” (St. Martin’s Press, March 2010).

WHAT: Reading and book signing of ANIMAL FACTORY, which NPR compared to Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser, saying that, “ANIMAL FACTORY is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. It has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues.”

WHERE: BOOK COURT, 163 Court Street (between Pacific & Dean), Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 875.3677, www.bookcourt.org

WHEN: Wednesday, April 21, 7:00PM – FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

WHY: This is the inaugural event of a new Book Series sponsored by SLOW FOOD NYC, a non-profit group founded “to counteract fast food and fast life. We stand against the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat.” http://www.slowfoodnyc.org

MORE INFO: ANIMAL FACTORY describes the rapid rise in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and their associated pollution, threat to food safety, harm to humans, wildlife and rural communities, treatment of livestock, and corporatization of the national food chain. The book follows real Americans as they struggle to defend their communities. More information is at www.animalfactorybook.com.

 ###

 Discussion Will Also Touch Upon Autism and Healthy Food. Kirby to Speak on April 7 at 7:00PM

WHO: New York-based writer DAVID KIRBY, a Bay Area native and author of the book “ANIMAL FACTORY – The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment” (St. Martin’s Press, March 2010).

WHAT: Reading and discussion of ANIMAL FACTORY, which NPR compared to Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser, saying that, “ANIMAL FACTORY is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. It has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues.” Kirby will draw parallels between this and his first book, “Evidence of Harm,” about the controversial topic of vaccines and autism.

WHERE: Parents Helping Parents offices, Sobrato Center for Nonprofits, 1400 Parkmoor Avenue Suite 100, San Jose, CA 95126. 

WHEN: Wednesday, April 7, 7:00PM – FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC – Please RSVP at http://www.php.com/events

WHY: Parents Helping Parents (PHP) http://www.php.com is a non-profit resource center that provides lifetime guidance, support and services to children with any special need, their families and the professionals who serve them. Many parents of children with autism read David Kirby’s first book, EVIDENCE OF HARM, and have drawn parallels between its characters’ fight to defend their children, and the characters in ANIMAL FACTORY, who are fighting to defend their communities.

MORE INFO: ANIMAL FACTORY describes the rapid rise in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and their associated pollution, threat to food safety, harm to humans, wildlife and rural areas, treatment of livestock, and corporatization of the national food chain. The book follows real Americans as they struggle to defend their communities. More information is at www.animalfactorybook.com.

DIRECTIONS: From 280 North, take the Race Street exit.  Follow the signs to Meridian Avenue.  (Turn right on Race Street).  Make the first left onto Parkmoor Avenue.  Turn left into the first parking lot. From 280 South, take the Meridian Avenue exit North.  Make the first right on Parkmoor Ave.  Make the first right into the parking lot.

###

http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2010/03/factory-farm-leadership.html

 Obama on factory farming: Something to crow about

When asked to write about President’s Obama’s leadership qualities on the hot-button issue of animal factory reform, I frankly expected to file a somewhat negative piece.

After all, back in 2008, Obama won Iowa partly due to his aggressive stance against confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms. But he hasn’t always lived up to the lofty ideals of those heady days.

“When I’m president, I’ll have a Department of Agriculture, not simply a department of agribusiness!” Obama vowed to roaring crowds in small-town Iowa. The candidate’s white paper on Iowa factory farms said, “CAFOs pose significant threats to air and water quality,” and added: “Rather than letting CAFOs off the hook, Obama believes they should be subject to the requirements of the Clean Air Act and Superfund just as any other polluter.”

Today, conventional wisdom in anti-CAFO circles holds that Obama’s record — as opposed to his soaring rhetoric — has come up short, a heap of ignored pledges and reneged promises.

But as I began delving into Obama’s recent record on factory farms, and spoke with administration officials about reining in the more excessive CAFO excesses, the more I realized the administration is, in fact, taking serious measures to address the pollution and market dominance brought about by industrial animal production.

The problem is, Obama and his team are apparently not very able — or not very willing — to advertise just how aggressive they’ve become. Which begs the question: What good is leadership if you don’t brag about it?

Obama should go out of his way to showcase his leadership in confronting the pollution and economic consolidation of animal factory farming. Doing so is not only sound policy; it might prove politically popular.

As candidate, Obama vowed his support, among other things, for:

• Capping farm-income eligibility for subsidies at $500,000
• Banning large-scale farms from breaking up into smaller “paper corporations” to get around subsidy limits
• Enacting a “packer ban” to halt the anti-competitive practice that allows slaughterhouse companies to own the animals they slaughter
• Confronting other anti-competitive biases in the animal agriculture marketplace
• Cracking down on air and water pollution from animal factory farms
• Forcing animal factories to adopt and follow stringent “manure management” plans
• Banning the use of non-therapeutic antibiotics as growth-promoters
• Supporting “local control” that allows counties to decide whether or not they want CAFOs in their area
• Linking local food production to local food consumption
• Convening a “National Rural Summit” within 100 days of taking office, in part to address the impact of Agribusiness mega-monopolies on small and medium-sized family farms.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? The laundry list inspired activists at the time, but now has them lamenting those items that Obama has NOT accomplished. To date, there’s been little action on a packer ban, anti-biotic reform, or local control. And the first 100 days came and went without the promised rural summit.

Even more dispiriting, anti-CAFO advocates complain, was the administration’s weak leadership on farm subsidies, which tend to benefit the largest producers over smaller ones.

Obama has twice proposed capping income eligibility in the FY2010 and FY2011 Federal budgets, only to sit back while those reforms were eviscerated by farm-state Democrats. And, activists bemoan, he reversed his own position on banning CAFOs from breaking up into “paper farms,” to get around existing income limits.

So what kind of leadership, skeptics ask, is that?

In fact, Obama has begun fulfilling his CAFO-reform promises in more ways than most people realize. It’s a record of which he should be proud.

So far, EPA has proposed rules to enforce factory-farm compliance with discharge regulations under the Clean Water Act and is obliging reluctant states to comply with federal water rules. It’s also begun to combat damaging nutrient levels in Chesapeake Bay, will bring more Delmarva chicken operations under federal CAFO rules, and has named animal waste runoff a “priority” target for federal enforcement.

At USDA, some farm subsidy loopholes are being closed, including one allowing absentee owners to collect on property they do not personally manage, and another that links to IRS data to determine individual income eligibility (something that helps stem the “paper farm” problem, officials say).

And just this month, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder held the first of five promised hearings on competition in agriculture. “One of the greatest threats to our economy is the erosion of free competition in our markets,” Holder proclaimed. “And we’ve learned that some [farmers] believe the competitive environment may be, at least in part, to blame.”

USDA has also announced new transparency rules for loans to contract poultry growers, which will also be extended to pork growers; launched the “Know Your Farmer” program to link local producers and consumers; increased funding for conservation efforts; tabled a federal animal identification program too onerous for small farmers; and rewritten organic meat-and-dairy rules to require that animals must pasture-graze at least 120 days-per-year and receive at least 30% of their dry food intake from pasture.

Also this month, a USDA official told me the administration will soon announce its long-promised “National Rural Summit.”

Not all of the rural agenda has been addressed. But assuming that Obama wants recognition for his leadership, one would expect him to tout these achievements a bit louder. Opponents have surely taken notice. Why not rally the proponents as well?

This is not a story about junk bonds or shady hedge fund schemes. It’s a story about industrial-scale cow-poop and the potentially deadly, explosive methane gas it produces.

Today, rising 20 feet or more in the air above the sprawling cornfields of eastern Indiana are several giant bubbles filled with bovine intestinal gas, trapped within the expandable synthetic liner that was supposed to seal a 21-million-gallon “waste lagoon,” stopping seepage into the soil and groundwater below. 

For several years now, neighbors have genuinely feared living around the expanding crap-bubbles – located at the now-bankrupt Union Go Dairy, in the tiny farming hamlet of Winchester, east of Muncie near the razor-straight Ohio border. The dairy, a confined animal feeding operation, or CAFO, is typical of industrial-sized milk factories, which store huge amounts of liquefied waste in open pit lagoons.

I wrote about the plight of Winchester residents in my new book, “ANIMAL FACTORY: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment”:

In the summer of 2008, residents of Randolph County saw one of the strangest sites anyone could remember seeing in a long, long time. Rising high out of the cornfields nearly 20 feet into the air were six massive brown bubbles, growing by the day. It was the synthetic liner of a dairy lagoon: Gasses had built up underneath the liner, bulging the material way up into the air. People were genuinely afraid that the whole thing was going to blow. 

Allen Hutchison was one of them – The “bubble trouble” lagoon was very near his house. Instead of shutting down the dairy, IDEM actually approved a proposed expansion on the facility. Meanwhile, the whole time that the gas-filled old liner remained in place, IDEM never checked any of the neighbors’ wells, nor did they require the dairy operator to increase his own groundwater testing. Hutchison and his neighbors grew increasingly worried not only about giant methane bubbles exploding into apocalyptic balls of fire, they also lost sleep over the potential contamination of their wells.

The crap-bubbles of Winchester have now gone national, as documented in a great March 25 article by Laura Etter of the Wall Street Journal, who writes that the failing dairy’s owner, Tony Goltstein, hatched a risky and questionable plan to deflate his bubbles and soothe his neighbors’ ragged nerves.

“He’s game to pop the bubbles before the manure pool overflows and causes an even bigger stink. His neighbors aren’t happy with the plan,” she wrote. “Not to worry, said Mr. Goltstein as he stood at the edge of the manure pit, puffing on a cigarette and gazing at the bubbles glistening in the sun. “I have no fear popping them.”

Goltstein told state officials that he and his son would blithely paddle out onto the waste lagoon, armed with a Swiss Army knife to rend the bubbles open. Etter said that the officials were considering the idea, but my contacts in Indiana tell me they have thought the better of it.

So wither the gigantic crap bubbles? It’s an excellent question. Even more pressing is the question of who will pay to replace the lagoon liner or, in the event of an unthinkable, nauseating and potentially deadly bubble burst, who will pay to clean up that ungodly mess?

“How are they going to safely burst those bubbles?” Barbara Sha Cox, a local anti-CAFO activist told me. “I mean, are there any professional lagoon bubble poppers out there? How do you do this safely? It’s a huge concern for the county and four our health.” 

Barbara Sha Cox has been warning about CAFO cleanups for years, and urging the state to adopt a “financial assurance package” for factory farms – essentially putting down a bond in the event that a catastrophic event carries an astronomical cleanup price tag.  

Union Go Dairy has filed for Chapter 11 protection and is undergoing bank foreclosure proceedings, meaning Goltstein will never be able to cough up the $200,000 or more needed to fix the science-fiction style problem.

Ms. Sha Cox predicted this predicament, and she is rightly furious with the state. “My question to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) was, since Union Go is in foreclosure and bankruptcy, and has a law suit against them, if IDEM approves the plan and the bubble blowing causes damage to neighbors’ property or livestock, who will be liable?” she told me.

“They are not sure. They said it was a ‘legal question?’” she continued. “Well, it seems to me that if we had a financial assurance plan we would not be facing this issue.”

If factory farms want to operate, they should have a bond to cover any future environmental disaster they might cause. Apparently, Governor Mitch Daniels – the former Budget Director in George W. Bush’s White House, doesn’t see things that way. He thinks taxpayers should foot the bill – and it has happened before.

“Muncie Sow, in Delaware County, was closed and the facility was allowed to be sold to another party without proper closure and environmental clean up,” Barbara Sha Cox said. “When IDEM finally made the move to clean up the area, the cost was over $200,000 at taxpayers’ expense. Then, of course, the rest of the pollution went down the river while killing the fish and polluting a recreational area. The CAFO owner has not appeared in Court.”

Meanwhile, this is not the first time that Union Go has disturbed the tranquility and well-being of its neighbors. As I write in ANIMAL FACTORY:

Another time, Allen Hutchison discovered that the USDA had come out to the dairy and put out poison bait for the thousands of starlings that swirl around mega-dairies, creating a nuisance and health hazard for cows and people. No one had told the Hutchisons of the plan. They found out about it one night after waking up to the screams of dozens of dying birds – all over their property.

The next day, Allen counted 87 stiff and lifeless starlings that he put into plastic bags for disposal. It took all morning, and no one from the dairy or the USDA offered to help. Allen has also found cow hides in his yard that he must pick up and dispose of because of the health risk of dead animals parts in the yard.

No one paid for that ghastly cleanup, except for Allen Hutchinson.