Fpoorer Tom Lim had been farming poultry for 20 years when the company he worked for as a contractor terminated him without warning, leaving him 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 was born in rural Cambodia, where his parents tended rice fields with water buffalo, raised a few chickens and grew vegetables around their house. That lifestyle shaped his love of farming, but was a far cry from what he did as an adult: raising 540,000 chickens a year in North Carolina for Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the largest meat producers in the U.S. that supplies chicken to Walmart. Costco and KFC.
The longer he stayed in industrial-scale poultry farming, the more he became aware that it “damages the environment” and that “many poultry farmers get sick from breathing in the (chicken) house,” he said, referring to the ways on which poultry farming ammonia chicken waste from factory farms harms both ecosystems and human health.
But he didn’t feel like he had any other options; each season seemed to require a new loan from the bank to pay for an upgrade that Pilgrim’s Pride demanded but would not help pay for. “They told us that if we can’t upgrade what they want, we would lose the contract,” Lim said. The result was an endless cycle of debt that made it seem impossible to leave the company.
Lim’s predicament is becoming increasingly common among farmers in the US about a quarter of all agricultural businesses are struggling with debt, and this also applies to family businesses bought up by large agricultural companies. Many of the small farms that remain are similar to Lim’s, where growers receive their orders from multinational agricultural companies, which often prioritize the bottom line over the health and well-being of growers, their animals and the water and land on which they depend are.
Lim is one of a number of farmers who are switching from industrial livestock farming to vegetable and mushroom cultivation.
Although the end of Lim’s contract 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 a chicken barn greenhouses where they can grow vegetablesand they have already converted an old refrigerated truck bed into a special room for growing mushrooms.
“My dream is to make a living growing vegetables on my land,” he said. “This is the healthy way of making food. In the chicken coop you have to deal with ammonia, the smell, insects, things like that. Compared to the greenhouse, when you go in there, it just feels fresh and healthy.”
MBringing about such a dramatic change isn’t easy, but the Lims got help through an organization called Transfarmation, which offers farmers technical support and small grants of $10,000 to $20,000 on their journey to transition from factory farming.
Transfarmation is a project of the animal rights organization Mercy for Animals and grew out of the relationship between its president, Leah Garces, and farmer Craig Watts, a whistleblower who has led national news after 20 years of contract poultry farming for Perdue. (Watts had been concerned about the discrepancy between the image Perdue presented in its advertisements and the conditions in which Perdue chickens actually lived. “I felt, as a farmer, that (consumers) should know what was going on,” he said. .)
According to Transfarmation CEO Tyler Whitley, the organization’s leaders realized that if they wanted to end factory farming, they had to create resources to help farmers do something different.
“The farmers we work with have told us that the biggest barrier is a knowledge gap. It’s very different to raise chickens than it is to grow fresh fruit and vegetables, it’s very different to work for Tyson than it is to have to find your own customers,” said Whitley.
Transfarmation works directly with farmers like Lim and Watts to transition their farms, and also pays them a small fee to collect data on their transition, which is made available online for free to other farmers looking to make a similar pivot. That of the organization hub for farmer resources includes reports and YouTube webinars to learn about programs in every U.S. state, sample plans for turning a shipping container into a mushroom growing room, economic analyzes of various crops, and guides on how to sell to restaurants and retailers and at farmers’ markets .
Tanner Faaborg grew up on a farm in rural Iowa, where his parents contracted with a commercial pig farm, filling two barns with 1,100 pigs each.
But like the Lims, the Faaborgs soon found themselves stuck in what Tanner described as a financial “treadmill,” where the operation always required them to invest money to upgrade or repair something, but never delivered sufficient returns.
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Moreover, “doing that kind of work under these conditions takes its toll on your body. It is very hard work and involves a lot of injuries, and the air quality is not optimal,” says Faaborg, describing the chores that start every morning with dragging a 250 kilo pig from the stable that has died during the night .
When he went to college and became interested in sustainability, Faaborg couldn’t imagine working on the farm anymore unless something changed.
“I just couldn’t escape the environmental impact that these two Cafos (concentrated animal feeding operations) and the open lagoon and everything associated with it had,” he said. (Research has shown that living near industrialized pig farms can shortens lifespan not only from farmers, but also from their neighbors, because of the air and water pollution they cause.)
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Iowa has one of the highest cancer rates in the country, and we have been continuously polluting resources,” he said.
“And so I started talking to my parents about it,” he said, first convincing them to install solar panels on their land, and more recently, to get out of the pig business altogether and start growing mushrooms. The farm recently started selling fresh mushroom specialties and mushroom products such as tinctures and mushroom salts.
aAt first glance, former livestock farmers – many of whom are not opposed to eating meat – and an animal rights organization that promotes veganism may seem like an odd combination. But whether the players involved were initially motivated by concerns about the exploitation of animals, land or people, ultimately they have enough in common to work together. “What we find is that the more you talk to a farmer about why he wants to quit and what he doesn’t like about the system, we agree on 90% of things,” Whitley says.
It is still too early to declare these farming transitions a resounding success, and only time will tell whether the Faaborgs, Watts and the Lims will be able to find the market to financially support their new efforts. But they all seem encouraged about what is possible, and appreciate the solidarity that comes from knowing they are not alone.
Faaborg remembers the feeling he had when they first installed solar panels on his parents’ farm: their neighbors were skeptical and some even joked about what seemed like a silly idea. But over time, the solar panels paid off, and Faaborg noticed that some of those same skeptics began installing solar energy equipment on their own land. He hopes his family can once again make an impact on their little corner of the agricultural landscape by closing their Cafos in favor of something kinder to themselves and to the land they farm.
“The hope is to rise to this challenge, find success and then show that change is possible,” he said.