Animal Cruelty Out, Mushrooms In: These farmers are leaving factory farming behind
Transitioning away from industrial animal agriculture in favor growing vegetables and mushrooms isn’t easy, but an organization called Transfarmation, which provides farmers with technical support and small grants of $10,000 to $20,000, can help on the journey to transition away from factory farming.
WHITNEY BAUCK: Some farmers have turned from livestock to crops to avoid the financial pitfalls and thorny ethics of industrial agriculture… Farmer Tom Lim had been raising poultry for 20 years when the company he worked for as a contractor terminated him without warning, leaving him saddled with debt and unsure of where to turn. “My heart just dropped,” he said. “I didn’t know where to make money to pay off our loans”…
Lim is one of a number of farmers transitioning away from industrial animal agriculture in favor growing vegetables and mushrooms. Though Lim’s contract ending forced him to take a job off the farm, it opened him up to other possibilities of what he could do with his land. Lim and his wife, Sokchea, are currently in the process of converting their former chicken barns into greenhouses where they can grow vegetables, and they’ve already converted an old refrigerated truck bed into a specialty mushroom-growing chamber.
“To make a living growing vegetables on my land is my dream,” he said. “This is the healthy way of making food. In the chicken house, you deal with ammonia, the smell, insects, all that. Versus the greenhouse, you go in there it just feels fresh and healthy”… Making such a dramatic shift isn’t easy, but the Lims had help through an organization called Transfarmation, which provides farmers with technical support and small grants of $10,000 to $20,000 on their journey to transition away from factory farming.
Transfarmation is a project of the animal rights advocacy group Mercy for Animals, and arose from the relationship of its president, Leah Garces, with farmer Craig Watts, a whistleblower who made national news after 20 years of contract poultry farming for Perdue. (Watts had become troubled by the discrepancy between the picture that Perdue painted in its advertising and the conditions that Perdue chickens actually lived in. “I felt, as a farmer, that [the consumers] needed to know what was happening,” he said.)
According to Transfarmation’s director, Tyler Whitley, leaders at the organization realized that if they wanted to help end factory farming, they needed to create resources to help farmers do something else. “We’ve been told by the farmers that we work with that the biggest barrier is a knowledge gap. It’s very different raising chickens versus raising fresh fruits and vegetables, very different working for Tyson versus having to find your own customers,” said Whitley.
Transfarmation is partnering directly with farmers like Lim and Watts to transition their farms, as well as paying them a small stipend to collect data about their transition that will be made freely available online for other farmers who want to make a similar pivot. The organization’s farmer resources hub includes reports and YouTube webinars for learning about programs in each US state, sample plans for turning a shipping container into a mushroom-growing chamber, economic analysis of different crops, and guides on how to sell to restaurants and retailers and at farmers’ markets. SOURCE…
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