Factory Farming vs. Small Traditional Farmers (Book Reviews)

What's really going on at the local farm you drive by at 55 mph? Or that farm thousands of miles away that produced the meat you're eating for dinner? The difference can be astounding, as explained in two books: The Meat Racket and Gaining Ground.

As doctors, we often discuss the negative health impacts of poor farming choices such as feeding cattle grain and antibiotics in confined feedlots, injecting them with hormones, and using muscle growing medications like Zilmax; using any means to produce more meat faster. These practices don't only occur at the expense of the animal and our health from eating it; there's an increasingly negative impact on the family farm. America's industrial farming system has caused a steady economic decline in rural America that will only be reversed when we consume more local, quality meat and produce.

“A fascinating look at what has happened in the past decades to the meat business as huge companies essentially staged a takeover while no one, except struggling farmers, paid mind.” (New York Daily News)

“An engrossing report on the industrialized American meat business…a richly detailed examination of factory farming, which has reshaped small-
town life for the worse. . . . An authoritative look at a ruthlessly efficient system.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred))

The Meat Racket looks behind the scenes at Tyson Foods, a multi-billion dollar company that mutated the American meat industry into a highly centralized factory production system controlled by fewer than half a dozen mega-corporations. In less than a century, corporations have gobbled up every profitable step in the factory meat-raising process, from hatcheries proving genetically "optimized" chicks, to feed mills, enormous slaughterhouses, and chicken nugget processing plants. The only step in the process left to farmers is the least profitable one: raising the animals (which still are legally owned by Tyson).

While companies like Tyson have become incredibly profitable, using their power to push up the cost of meat, the farmers they use teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, earning less for the same production each year. Tyson's practices have created a revolving door of bankruptcies for farmers. However, as long as Tyson can find another farmer, the government will back another million dollar loan for cavernous chicken houses and use our money to pay it off when that one goes belly up.

All effort in the factory farm system is focused on more production for less money, regardless of the reduction in quality or health (of the animals and us). Everyone needs to look behind the curtain to see how most food is made these days.

"One fateful day in 1996, after discovering that five freight cars' worth of glittering corn have reaped a tiny profit of $18.16, young Forrest Pritchard vows to save his family's farm.

"What ensues--through hilarious encounters with all manner of livestock and colorful local characters--is a crash course in sustainable agriculture." --

"You will be on the edge of your seat...[A] highly recommended page-turner for anyone interested in farming and food."
(Sally Fallon, Weston A Price)

Gaining Ground tells the story of a young farmer in the mid 1990s trying to find his way naturally raising livestock outside of the industrial farm system, while attempting to save the family farm. He blazes a trail for a new (but really old, traditional) way of farming in a world that has forgotten cattle are made to eat grass, not corn.  Forrest discovers that pigs aren't animals that like to live in filth. They are amazing soil tillers in search of bugs, roots, and anything edible, leaving behind the ingredients for a lush restored pasture once allowed to move on to a new patch of land.

Forrest's farming adventure is both funny and insightful. Mistakes are made and lessons are learned. His story allows us to appreciate our local farmers' endless (not always profitable) work to provide us with high quality, healthy food for our families. The increase in farmers' markets and local farms selling directly to customers is evidence of consumers demanding better and farmers answering the call. More farmers out there are trying to provide our families with food that contributes to our health rather than wreaking havoc on it. All we have to do is buy it.