Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
has over 500 members. We're proud of our work with Niman Ranch,
which has helped keep hundreds of small, traditional pig farmers
in business. We've also been active in regional political battles to
decrease the power and presence of factory pig farms in Iowa.
Communities aren't just sitting around—we are organizing
against this threat to our welfare. For example, on the East Coast's
peninsula where Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland meet, a group
of farmers threatened by the contract system, workers facing poor
conditions in plants, and neighbors facing agricultural pollution
formed the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance. Jim Lewis, an Epis-
copal priest who worked with the group, put it this way, “[W]e have
brought together all of the people in the area who have anything
to do with a piece of chicken.” Working together as a community,
the Alliance brought a successful lawsuit against Perdue, Tyson,
and three other poultry companies for unpaid overtime wages
and helped bring the problems of contract farming to the national
stage.
The communities surrounding industrialized meat, egg, and
dairy production operations bear the visible damage of factory
farming, but the true costs are borne by all of us. We all have a role
to play, not just as farmers and neighbors, but as consumers. To
quote Wendell Berry, every time each of us makes a decision about
food, we are “farming by proxy.”
At what point will we all stand together and demand account-
ability and an end to the devastation caused by factory farming?
