Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: July 2, 2024
Report on the Transfarmation Movement of Entrepreneurs Escaping Factory Farming!
A grassroots movement of farmer-entrepreneurs are switching their businesses from factory farming to plants and mushrooms, and they’re just starting to grow!
You can help by asking U.S. newspapers to cover this “Transfarmation” movement.
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Reasons For Hope
Industrialized factory farming of animals for meat has a massive carbon footprint, and often pollutes local water supplies. But beyond that, it’s often a terrible life for American farmers and their neighbors as well. Health problems are common due to exposure to airborne feces and other pollutants, while financial difficulties are endemic as predatory meat companies pressure their suppliers to take out more and more loans.
Now, there’s an emerging bottom-up movement to build a better food system, with former factory farmers sharing tips and expertise on how to transition their buildings to growing plants, fungi, and other specialty crops instead of crammed-together animals. The scrappy young Transfarmation Project is providing small grants and technical assistance to help more people make the jump to a plant-based, cruelty-free farming business. They’re gathering data on each early project to build a scalable model of how this can be done, with blueprints for transitioning from poultry and hog farming to mushroom growing available on their website.
You might think this sounds newsworthy - and it is getting some coverage, just not in America.
The Guardian wrote an in-depth article on former factory farmers across America switching to mushroom cultivation to escape both the animal cruelty and big agricultural companies' exploitative "debt trap" business style.
In North Carolina, Tom and Sokchea Lim provided chickens to major meat producer Pilgrim’s Pride until the company terminated them without morning, leaving them saddled with debt. They’ve now converted a truck bed into a commercial mushroom growing chamber, supported by the Transfarmation Project.
In Iowa, Tanner Faaborg led his family to get out of the industrialized pig farm business, known for its negative environmental and health impacts, and switch to growing specialty mushrooms as well, also with support from the Transfarmation Project. The BBC covered a similar story of another Transfarmation Project partner in Texas.
But there’s been essentially silence from major American media outlets. So far, at least!
This amazing story needs to be a little higher on their priority list: Americans deserve to hear about this newborn movement of farmer-entrepreneurs working towards a better world!
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