Can Covid Kill the Factory Farm?
Factory farms, aka Confined Animal Feeding Operations, (CAFO’s), are where over 90 percent of our meat and dairy come from. It’s no surprise these facilities are now one of the leading reservoirs of Covid spread, given their basic business model of cramming as many beings as possible into as small a space as possible, be they the animals we kill, or the workers who process those animals. As the news began to emerge that Covid was spreading quickly in these plants, corporate owners like Tyson and Smithfield chose to keep running, despite knowing that their workers were getting sick and dying. Covid has revealed the industry’s utter disregard for the lives of the human beings working in the industry, as well as forcing us to consider what most of us put a lot of effort into avoiding: the billions of animals who never see life outside these hellish factories, as stories of farmers gassing or otherwise “depopulating” millions of animals who can’t be processed because of the shut downs fills the nightly news. There is no story that comes out of a factory farm that is not a tragedy. Covid has pulled back the curtain on an industry that depends on our collective agreement to stay blind to its universal inhumanity and disregard for life and has uncovered a system that cannot survive in a post-Covid world.
For decades, animal rights activists have called on factory farms to provide more and better living conditions for the animals, while human rights activists have called for more humane working conditions. The industry has responded by increasing the production line, forcing employees to work faster, kill faster, to keep the line moving despite increased injuries to workers themselves, and less oversight of often sick and diseased animals ending up in the food supply.
Factory farms have worked with legislators across the nation to criminalize undercover investigations into their plants that might reveal illegal violations of animal welfare, food safety, and employment standards. Why would they do this? The answer is clear. They simply can’t survive if they are held accountable. They can’t survive if they afford animals any decent amount of space or assurance that animals will not suffer egregiously. They can’t survive if they have to slow the line down enough to help prevent serious injuries to their employees, who have one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and as an extremely vulnerable population, have almost no practical recourse to address those violations. This is an industry whose workforce is largely comprised of immigrants, many of whom are illegal, (a fact well known to the industry), as well as prison laborers, refugees, and other vulnerable groups who are justifiably afraid to speak up when their human rights are being violated or when safety regulations are being shunned. This is a workforce who has for years been denied the most basic of rights, including even the right to take a bathroom break, to the extent that wearing diapers is a common and well-documented practice in chicken plants (See https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/no-relief-for-poultry-workers/). And now, this is a workforce being thrown to the wolves without adequate protection against Covid-19 so that they can produce our cheap meat. Because, well, we like our meat.
The existence of factory farms, and the cheap meat that comes out of them depends on intensive confinement of animals throughout their lifetimes, and crowded workspaces for the low-paid workers who do the grisly and dangerous work of processing those animals. Thanks to Covid, factory farms are being forced to change their conditions. One Tyson pork processing plant in Iowa was under extreme pressure from local authorities to shut down but didn’t do it until about ⅓ of its workforce tested positive, and the company feared they’d have no employees left if they didn’t shut down.
At another nearby pork processing plant, one of the workers who died from the virus had been warning co-workers and his family that the virus was being spread in the facility. No one listened. Hudsen Jagir was a native of Eritrea and crossed the border to Sudan to escape war and seek a better life. He later fled genocide in Sudan and lived in a refugee camp in Ethopia. Jagir came to the U.S. in 2010 as a refugee, first living in Missouri and then moving to Iowa. He was one of the many refugees who, having few options for employment once they arrive in the US, end up working in slaughterhouses. He was 56 when he died.
In the midst of rampant Covid spread and worker deaths, President Trump signed an executive order giving the federal government the authority to force plants to stay open under the Defense Production Act, reinforcing the industry’s own disregard for the welfare of its workforce. But even with the order, plants are struggling to stay open, or for those who have shut down, to re-open safely. The President inexplicably claims meat processing plants are cleaner than ever and safe now, despite the fact that workers continue to get sick at alarming rates.
Factory farming has been an abomination and scourge on this earth since its inception in the 1960s. It truly baffles the mind how we can continue to accept the massive abuse and egregious suffering of farmed animals like chickens, pigs, and cows who are just as sentient (conscious, intelligent, aware, capable of feeling pain and pleasure), as our beloved dogs and cats, how we continue to accept the pollution to our air and water, the emissions from animal agriculture that are a larger contributor to climate change than the entire transportation sector combined.
The only justification there ever was for the abomination of factory farming was that it was somehow necessary to feed people, that it was efficient. But this is perhaps the greatest lie of the industry. Fifty percent of the earth’s land mass is now devoted to animal agriculture. The consequences of that are hard to fathom in terms of habitat loss and resource consumption. And animals are terribly inefficient calorie converters. For example, for every 100 calories we feed to a cow, we get about 10 calories back in edible meat. We raise more crops to feed the animals than we would need to feed ourselves if we just ate the crops directly. Animal agriculture uses many times more resources than plant-based agriculture to produce a comparable amount of food, making animal agriculture (not just factory farms) terribly inefficient.
Yes, because of factory farming, most people can afford fast food. But does anybody think that’s a good thing, as diseases like heart disease, Diabetes, obesity and many cancers, which are linked to diet, are on the rise, especially in the low-income and marginalized communities targeted by fast food restaurants? People need food, yes. But what they really need is healthy food, not food that contributes to chronic illness and early death.
On one hand we talk about meat and dairy as being “essential food items,” but on the other hand, we have overwhelming evidence that animal products are not only not essential- we can all not only survive but thrive on a plant-based diet- they are a leading contributor to our society’s most deadly and widespread diseases including Diabetes, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, obesity and all its related health complications, just to name a few.
When we look at other cultures, we can see that the healthiest people in the world don’t consume animal products. Take the Blue Zones, for example. These are regions around the world that have been studied by scientists because they have the healthiest, longest living populations, and one commonality among them all is that they eat little to no animal products.
Feeding people cheap meat isn’t helping anyone. It’s a terrible system. But it is a massive and entrenched one. And it’s hard to stop a behemoth train in motion. Covid, however, has done just that, by shutting down plants, and giving us all pause and the unique opportunity to question this failed experiment at feeding the world.
As we come out of this pandemic, we will be forced to make many changes in the way we live our lives. It will be a long time before anyone goes to a big arena music concert. Some people, like national treasure Dr. Anthony Fauci say the handshake is dead. Twitter says many of their employees will work from home for good. There are some aspects of life that will return to normal, in time, and some that will not return ever.
We look at the wet market in China where we think this virus originated, and it seems obvious these places should simply cease to exist. Previous viruses like the H1N1 flu had their origins in American factory farms. Looking behind the walls of the factory farm, as we are all now doing, seeing the way the animals are treated, the way the workers are treated, all of their lives devalued, all of them exploited, seeing the true impact this industry has on the earth, on our health, it seems logical that factory farms should also cease to exist.
Thankfully, factory farming simply cannot survive the kinds of changes that would be necessary for it to hang on. Factory farms exist because people want cheap meat. So the industry gives us what we want by minimizing and externalizing costs at the expense of animal welfare, worker safety, environmental protection, and human health. As soon as we require factory farms to improve conditions, they go out of business. This is an industry that is out of options. Covid has killed its business model.
Factory farming can’t withstand our scrutiny, and it can’t survive the changes that would be necessary to keep its workforce safe. Factory farming is one of the most evil, cruel industries mankind has ever invented. Meat is not an essential food item. To the contrary, it’s killing us. It’s killing the planet. We can transition all of those workers’ jobs into jobs growing our food, into harvesting our food. We can transition our economy away from animal agriculture and towards a more sustainable, healthy, and humane regenerative plant-based agriculture. It is entirely feasible.
There has never been a better time to make the shift. Let’s create a new food system that nourishes us all, a food system that is not dependent on torturing and exploiting sentient beings be they human or non-human, that is not dependent on poisoning the planet. Covid is doing its part to kill this industry. Let it die. So that we all may live.
Tracey Winter Glover, JD, is a lawyer and author of the book Lotus of the Heart. She is the Executive Director of the intersectional vegan advocacy group Awakening Respect and Compassion for all Sentient Beings and is also the founder/president of Sweet Peeps Microsanctuary.
