The family farm. Rolling green pastures, a red barn, and calves running around with their moms before stopping to suckle. This is where Americans picture their food comes from. What they don’t realize, however, is how many carefully crafted laws there are to keep farming and ranching out of the public eye and away from accusation. I recently went to a family dairy farm. The reality was they owned 3,000 dairy cows, the males sold to an industrial beef farm, the mothers spent 4-5 years standing on wood, sand, and manure before being sold for to an industrial slaughterhouse, and the calves were separated from their mothers the day they’re born.
The news about what is happening and how misleading this industry is gets exemplified through Ag-gag laws. Ag-gag laws are laws that essentially prohbit any recording of what happens on these farms and in slaughterhouses. As per the persecutor’s discretion, filming what happens, even if the footage displays illegal treatment of the animals, can have you tried for terrorism. Many states have begun overturning these ag-gag laws as being unconstitutional due to the first amendment’s freedom of speech as well as offering protection for when abuse is discovered.
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Yet this year, an article came out on Food and Environment Reporting Network stating that it is now illegal to take drone footage of feedlots in Texas. You are allowed to charter a plane to film, but that is an incredibly expensive venture compared to a drone. The industry argues it is to protect themselves and their private properties. The reporters argue it is still a violation of the first amendment and keeps the public blind to the conditions the animals live in so they don’t have the opportunity to make educated choices when shopping.
What do you think? After reading personal and professional perspectives, do you believe these laws are just? Or do you believe they are in violation of the first amendment and prevent consumers from learning exactly where their food is coming from? Are they there for the small family farmers? Or the industrial agriculturalists who dominate the American meat and dairy market?
Personally, I believe this is just one of the real costs of cheap food.
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I was a little shocked when I read that the family farm you went to had 3,000 dairy cows. When I think of family farms I imagine a much smaller population of animals. According to the USDA, a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) in dairy farming is at least 700 dairy cows. This got me questioning what the term ‘family farm’ really means and what the legal standards are for naming a farm a ‘family farm’ versus an industrial CAFO.
I found an article on Agdaily that defines a family farm as “any farm organized as sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation” but that the practices and technologies are pretty much the same as non-family farms in order to keep up with the fast-paced changes in industrial agriculture. Family farms may be owned by a family but it’s likely that the people working on the farm aren’t family members. This then calls into question how misleading the entire agricultural sector can be. I think that this puts real small family farms at a disadvantage because big operations are able to hide under a disguise as being small and family oriented while the latter suffer from not meeting competitive standards.
Ag-gag laws perpetuate the harms that disguised operations pose to not only the animals, but the workers, surrounding communities, and actual small family farms. Not only are the animals likely to be suffering from the crowded and dirty conditions, but laborers and surrounding communities are suffering from bad air quality, the smell of waste, many possible routes for illness, etc. Many of these communities lack the political power to challenge industrial agriculture and can actually get into legal trouble by trying to do so, under ag-gag laws. True small family farms suffer because they are not able to compete with large operations who are protected under these laws. Ag-gag laws show that economic capital is more important than the quality of life not only of the animals, but of the workers, and the surrounding community. I find ag-gag laws to be discriminatory, disturbing and disheartening.
Sources: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plantsanimals/livestock/afo/
https://www.agdaily.com/insights/defining-the-family-farm-matters/