<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/farmers-quitting-factory-farming-transfarmation/>
"By any definition, Leah Garcés considered Craig Watts her enemy. As CEO and
president of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has devoted her life to
protecting animals. When she met Watts in the spring of 2014 at his poultry
farm in North Carolina, he was one those factory farmers she deeply despised.
In fact, she was so worried that his invitation to meet was an ambush that she
gave her husband the address with the reminder, “If I don’t come back, look for
me rotting away in the chicken litter.”
Watts had raised over 720,000 chickens in 22 years for Perdue, the
fourth-largest chicken company in the US. He had been searching for ways to
stay on the family land in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties, and when
Perdue offered him a contract to raise chickens, it sounded like a lucrative
opportunity. He took out a $200,000 bank loan to build four giant chicken
houses. But soon the chickens, crammed 25,000 wall-to-wall in the ammonia-laden
air, started to become sick or died, and squeezed by Perdue’s profit margins,
Watts struggled to pay the bills.
To her surprise, Garcés realized that Watts was not her enemy, but an ally:
Chicken farmers like him wanted to end chicken farming as much as she did. He
described the enormous toll this kind of farming took on his physical and
mental health. Yet because of his hefty loans, Watts saw no way out. “I
realized he was trapped in a system I am advocating against,” says Garcés.
Their meeting in 2014 changed the trajectory of both their lives.
Together, they released footage from the horrors of chicken farming in the
New
York Times. In the first 24 hours, a million viewers saw the panting birds at
Watts’s farm living in their own excrements. Two years later, the whistleblower
quit the chicken business for good and took a paid job for the Socially
Responsible Agriculture Project, warning other farmers not to trust the
promises of the chicken industry while still paying off his debt from the
chicken houses.
A farmer at heart, Watts has now become one of the poster farmers for the
Transfarmation Project, which Garcés founded as an offshoot of the nonprofit
Mercy for Animals in 2019. “I remember standing in his barn and thinking, could
we make it into a strawberry farm? Repurpose the land?” Garcés shares. Watts
started small by installing a 300-square-foot shipping container in his large
poultry house with a small grant from the Transfarmation Project and
cultivating specialty mushrooms like shiitake. He told Garcés he wanted his new
operation “as removed from the industrial model as it can be,” while not
abandoning farming: “It’s part of me, in the blood. It’s a calling. I like to
watch things grow.”
Garcés describes the story of how she helped Watts leave factory farming in her
new book,
Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us From Factory Farming."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
