Most of the meat we eat in the United States isn’t raised on small farms or fenced fields, as it was decades ago. Today it comes from large concentrated animal feeding operations, also known as CAFOs. These industrial facilities house thousands of animals in close quarters—generating tremendous amounts of manure, climate-polluting methane and a host of issues for neighbors.
Managing editor Jamie Smith Hopkins sits down with four ICN journalists who have reported on CAFOs: Georgina Gustin, who covers agriculture and the many ways that farming, food systems and the environment intersect; Lisa Sorg, who covers North Carolina, one of the nation’s top hog producers; Phil McKenna, who reports on climate superpollutants like methane; and Anika Jane Beamer, who covers Iowa, where manure from CAFOs contributes to a long-running and far-reaching water contamination problem.
Watch as they explain what we know—and don’t know—about CAFOs, the scale of the pollution they cause, what it’s like to live near one of these facilities, and whether elected officials and policymakers are doing anything about them.
About This Video
Perhaps you noticed: This video, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
