By Michaela Haas for Reasons to be Cheerful.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

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.

As she details in the book and as Watts can attest, it is surprisingly difficult for contract farmers to abandon factory farming. More than 70 percent of poultry farmers live below the poverty line and have to pay off crushing loans. When given the option, an increasing number of farmers and their children want to quit factory farming. "Though we didn't advertise the Transfarmation Project, as soon as we rolled out the website, hundreds of farmers immediately contacted us," Garcés says. "We had no idea interest would be that high."

But collectively, the poultry farmers owe $5.2 billion. "As long as they have too much debt, they can't leave because their farm is at risk," says Garcés. "We can't override so much debt as a small nonprofit. There has to be government action, like it did with the tobacco industry."

The farmers need to find an alternative source of income that is healthier and more lucrative in order to keep their land. "It's a solutions-oriented project where we're rolling up our sleeves and testing what works," Garcés says. "Many times, when people are tackling systemic challenges, they write about either the problem or the solution. But a gulf is left in the middle: the complexity of how."

Garcés hired the consulting firm Highland Economics to analyze which crops are likely to succeed, ideally while using the large structures already built. Specialty mushrooms, including shiitake, oyster, reishi and lion's mane, top the list while microgreens came out second, followed by produce like tomatoes and hemp last. Two transformation hubs serve as a blueprint for other farmers to copy.

As a chicken farmer, Watts made $0.05 per pound of flesh. Now, he can get $6 per pound for shiitake mushrooms. The switch to mushrooms is a compelling exit strategy because mushrooms need a similar temperature, humidity and lighting. "But unlike the chickens, mushrooms can't suffer," Garcés points out. "They don't have to be killed and incinerated when things go wrong."

For Garcés, her mission is not just about the "80 billion land animals that die for people's palates in the most horrific conditions" every year worldwide, but also about climate change. "Collectively, farmed animals emit more greenhouse gases than the world's planes, trains and cars together," Garcés reasons. "A third of our precious arable land is used to grow feed for factory-farmed animals rather than food we humans could eat directly." Considering all this plus the considerable amounts of chemicals and logging of ecologically important habitats like rainforests, Garcés concludes, "industrial agriculture is one of the most destructive industries on our planet."

The suffering is not reserved for animals. The ammonia in chicken waste harms farmers and ecosystems. "Agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work in the country," Garcés knows. Suicide and depression rates are 60 times higher for male farmers than for the average male American, and she recounts with sadness the suicide of a Texas farmer she was trying to help, Bo Halley. With failing physical and mental health after decades of poultry farming, he did not live to see the transformation of his family farm into a hemp farm and dog rescue.

Duped by ads of happy cartoon chicken, consumers love their cheap chicken, with an average of 182 million chickens slaughtered every week in the US. "The typical American still believes their meat is raised on a family farm," Garcés says, "though the data clearly shows that 97 percent of chicken come from factories." While 90 percent of farmed animals are chickens, the situation presents similar challenges for hog and dairy farmers. Living near hog farms shortens the lives of farmers and neighbors. "When it comes to the meat, dairy and eggs we eat, the price at the grocery store or restaurant is never a fair reflection of the true cost," Garcés points out. "In factory farming, risks and liability are mostly externalized by the industry, and most often to the most vulnerable among us. This damage, this harm, is borne by many - from the workers to the animals to the farmers."

Ultimately, Garcés's vision is not just "helping a few dozen farmers transition to a healthier and more sustainable model, it is about how we transition away entirely from factory farming." The Transfarmation Project connects farmers with consultants and is producing resources and pilots to model successful transitions.

In the same warehouse where Watts once had to kill chickens and where he and Garcés filmed the whistleblower video, he is now harvesting mushrooms. In front of rows of corn, squash and okra he planted on his land, Watts describes how much happier he feels now.

He has named his mushroom farm "Victors' Village Farms" after the Victors' Village in The Hunger Games. He told Leah Garcés that "leaving contract poultry on my own terms was like winning The Hunger Games." But a victor is "a triumphant decider of his fate."


Michaela Haas wrote this article for Reasons to be Cheerful.


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The sale of Ohio's Gavin coal-fired power plant is sparking uncertainty among residents and energy experts alike. The plant, which has been one of the state's largest electricity providers for the past 50 years, is now being sold. The Gavin Power Plant, notorious for its high emissions, is the fifth-largest carbon dioxide emitter in the U.S., releasing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide in the past seven years.

Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst for the with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the sale raises questions about Gavin's future operations and impact on the environment.

"The Gavin coal-fired power plant is being sold from one private equity company to another private equity company. And that brings great uncertainty into whether that plant will continue to operate into the future," he said.

As part of the sale, Gavin will be separated from three gas-fired plants also included in the deal. Some argue that this separation could indicate the new owner, Energy Capital Partners, may not see Gavin as a long-term asset, raising speculation about a potential shutdown or conversion.

While environmental concerns are central to the conversation, the sale also has economic implications for the surrounding communities. Wamsted said the potential for a sudden shutdown could affect local jobs and tax revenues, affecting families that depend on the plant's operations.

"Transitions are going to be hard, but they're a lot easier if you plan for them than let them happen to you. And the reality is Gavin is going to close, so you plan for it or you let it happen to you," he continued.

The new private equity owner has positioned itself as a leader in energy transition. But the ongoing debate about the future of the Gavin plant will likely draw attention from both environmental advocates and those concerned with the plant's role in Ohio's economy.

By Isabelle Atkins for Grady Newsource.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Georgia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Picture a mountain of discarded material, towering as big as the University of Georgia’s 200,000-square-foot Miller Learning Center, destined for the landfill.

That is the size of the 10 million pounds of materials UGA sends to the landfill each year. But through the doors of that same building is a place where unwanted items can be traded instead of discarded.

In 2021, two UGA students, Jenna Franke and Avery Lumsden, started Swap Shop to lessen overconsumption and waste on campus.

The clothing industry has become one of the most polluting. According to the World Wildlife Fund, making one cotton shirt takes 2,700 liters of water. Then when those clothes are thrown away, they can take over 200 years to decompose in landfills. During decomposition, textiles generate greenhouse methane gas and leach toxic chemicals and dyes into the soil and groundwater.

But Franke and Lunsden remembered the old saying: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

With the help of a grant from the University of Georgia’s Office of Sustainability and a partnership with UGA libraries, they set up a small room on the second floor of the Miller Learning Center. The room holds clothes, shoes, textbooks and other household items that once belonged to members of the Athens community and are ready to be traded. 

Saumya Malik, director of marketing and communications for Swap Shop, says that as fast fashion is on the rise, sustainable practices are needed more than ever.

“There has been a rise of fast fashion, which has really accelerated these trend cycles in a way that people are buying new clothes every season and because they are buying new clothes, they are not using the ones that they were using earlier, and they are not mending things as much,” Malik says. 

At Swap Shop’s repair workshops, they provide materials and teach people how to fix their items, such as mending a hole or replacing a missing button. 

Not only is overconsumption costly to the environment, but people are suffering too. Sara Idacavage, a fashion historian and sustainable fashion educator, says that the bombardment of advertising we access through technology makes us more susceptible to overconsumption.

“Our phones really kind of tell us to buy more and more, so I think it is perfectly natural to overconsume in today’s day and age,” Idacavage says. “The problem is that we are so disconnected from the people who are making the clothing that not everyone even stops to question ‘how could a shirt possibly be $3.99…’”

According to Idacavage, it is not possible to produce clothing for that cheap unless someone else is being exploited, such as through wage slavery or pollution. Even the people living in the surrounding areas of these factories are negatively impacted due to pollutants entering their food and water supply as dyes find their way into local waterways. Yet buying reliable pieces or second-hand provides an inexpensive solution. 

In the fall of 2023, Swap Shop says they diverted 872 pounds of trash from the landfill, and since its founding, the effort has saved 2,709 pounds from the landfill. 

One of Swap Shop’s most familiar faces is Abigail Ventimiglia. Since her sophomore year, she has stopped by the shop about once a week to drop off her used items and see if she can swap anything. She notes that a common misconception is that you must give something away to receive an item. However, if you have nothing to give away, you can still receive items and contribute to extending its life cycle.

“I go like every week and all of the staff, or volunteers, know me, and it’s just this very fun community, where I show up, we chit-chat for like 15 minutes and then I leave. It’s a very small, but important highlight of my week,” Ventimiglia says. 

Although Swap Shop does not take any items with major quality issues, sometimes clothes need alterations or small repairs. For Ventimiglia, this is actually a positive.

“I actually think it’s a very fun opportunity like I started doing embroidery during the pandemic, but I ran into this issue where I love my clothes. I’ve spent so much money and time finding them, I don’t want to just ruin it on my amateur embroidery, but with the Swap Shop, if something has a stain or a little cut, and I need to fix it I can just make that my next embroidery project,” Ventimiglia says while showing three flowers neatly embroidered into her green t-shirt.


Isabelle Atkins wrote this article for Grady Newsource.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Prairie News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Our food systems are in serious need of an overhaul. Over the last 60 years, per-capita meat consumption has roughly doubled, and is now at unsustainable levels. During that same period of time, the number of billionaires in the world has increased dramatically as well. This confluence of trends raises an important question: what, if anything, are the world's billionaires doing to fix our food systems, and help us transition into a more climate-friendly way of eating?

Meat production fuels a number of long term environmental impacts, which is one reason why the precipitous rise in meat consumption over the last few decades is such a big problem. The livestock industry is responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, with 80 percent of all agricultural land going to livestock production. Beef production is the top driver of deforestation worldwide, and deforestation is an enormously destructive process that destroys ecosystems, reduces biodiversity, erodes soil and emits massive amounts of greenhouse gasses.

At the same time, the world's population is predicted to swell to 9.7 billion people by the year 2050, which means many more people potentially eating more meat. Researchers warn that the global appetite for meat will eventually exceed our capacity to produce it on this planet.

"I was at a workshop surrounded by pork producers, chicken farmers and dairy farmers, and eight out of 10 of them agreed that they will not be able to meet growing meat [demand] on their own without the other options," says Sheila Voss, vice president of communications at the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that advocates for alternatives to meat. "We only have finite land and water."

Despite what some opponents of food systems reform claim, the goal of getting people to eat less meat is not a conspiracy of billionaires trying to replace traditional meat entirely, or aiming to force people to become vegetarians. Efforts to reform the way we produce and consume meat include investments not only in alternative proteins, but also into technologies that aim to make traditional meat production more environmentally friendly, such as feeds that reduce the methane output from cattle. (Though when these turn out to be more marketing gimmick than verifiable solution, the public should be wary.)

While there's no silver bullet for accomplishing all of these changes, the richest people in the world are certainly in a position to help fund initiatives that move us in the right direction. But have they?

To answer this question, we analyzed the investment profiles of several well-known U.S. billionaires: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Which of them are actually giving away money to improve food systems - and which ones don't appear to invest in solving this major climate issue at all?

A Breakdown of Billionaire Investments in Food

1. Jeff Bezos

One of the more prolific donors in the field is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos - a little surprising, no doubt, since "Amazon" is hardly synonymous with "sustainable." As a company that sells and ships physical products around the world, Amazon has an enormous carbon footprint, and while it's announced several measures intended to reduce its environmental impact, the efficacy of these measures is still unclear.

Bezos himself, however, has spent quite a bit of money to fund climate initiatives, including measures aimed at researching and promoting alternatives to traditional meat. He's done this primarily through the Bezos Earth Fund, a grant program for funding climate scientists and green initiatives around the world.

"Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet," Bezos wrote in an Instagram post announcing the fund. "I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share. This global initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs - any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."

Bezos, one of the richest men on Earth, seeded the fund with $10 billion of his own money at the outset. That money is meant to be distributed gradually by 2030; as of this writing, $2 billion has been doled out to various climate initiatives, according to the fund's website.

The fund has committed to spending $1 billion of its overall endowment on food-related projects, with the goal of "transform[ing] food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet." A lot of that money has gone to grants aimed at reducing methane output from cattle, while the Bezos' fund is also funding research into cultivated and plant-based meat.

In 2024, the fund announced that it would be spending $60 million of its endowment on research centers aimed at improving the technology behind alternative proteins. This allocation was soon increased to $100 million, and in May, the first Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein went live at North Carolina State University. The fund intends to build more of these centers in order to "establish a network of open-access research and development centers focused on sustainable protein alternatives, expanding consumer choices."

In addition to the Bezos Earth Fund, Amazon itself established the Right Now Climate Fund, a $100 million initiative aimed at reforestation and conservation. As cattle farming is the biggest driver of deforestation worldwide, this fund targets efforts, like agroforestry, that are component of food system change.

"We are not turning everybody into vegetarians," said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, in June. "But we are trying to improve the choice and the health and the vitality of the agricultural system."

2. Bill Gates

Next on our list is Bill Gates, one of two founders of Microsoft. A vocal proponent of alternative proteins, Gates has called plant-based meat "the future," and said that wealthy countries "should move to 100 percent synthetic beef" in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with cattle.

More importantly, he's put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. Gates has invested in plant-based meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, as well as the cultivated meat company Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats. Upside Foods is one of just two cultivated meat companies that have been given FDA approval to sell its products commercially in the U.S.

Gates has also given money to Neutral Foods, a food company that aims to be carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for the emissions its products cause. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also provided grants to a number of organizations working on alternative proteins, including the Good Food Institute.

3. Elon Musk

Musk's record on the environment is mixed. There was a time when he had a reputation as an environmentalist, as the success of his electric car company Tesla was seen as a positive step in reducing transportation-related greenhouse emissions.

Over the last few years, however, Musk's politics have drifted steadily to the right, and that includes his stance on global warming and sustainability. In a recent conversation with Donald Trump, Musk downplayed climate change's urgency, claiming that "it's not like the house is on fire immediately" and that "people can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it's okay." Musk's statements are often contradictory, however. He went on to characterize climate action as "something we need to move towards," albeit "without causing hardship in the short term." Musk has also praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made headlines recently for banning the sale of cultivated meat in his state.

And yet despite all of this, Musk's company SpaceX has collaborated with Aleph Farms, an Israeli company that makes alternative meat, to investigate the viability of growing cultivated meat in space. In 2022, a four-man team flew to the International Space Station on a SpaceX capsule with cultivated beef cells in tow, and studied the viability of growing those cells into edible meat in zero gravity conditions.

It seems contradictory: Musk's company participates in an experiment that promotes meat alternatives (in space, at least), yet he's also vocally downplayed beef's role in driving climate pollution (back on Earth). While only Musk knows what's going on in his head, the fact remains that his company has at least played a small role in research to advance cultivated meat technology.

Outside of that, Musk's company Tesla stopped using animal products in its cars in 2019, replacing the traditional leather seats with vinyl.

4. Mark Zuckerberg

Finally, we took a look at investments made by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg has made clear that he has no problem with traditional meat, and he doesn't appear to have invested in the alternative meat or meat reduction strategies in any significant way (a Zuckerberg-backed fund did apparently invest in biotech company Modern Meadow, maker of leather alternatives, in 2019). He has made headlines, however, with two of his meat-related projects.

In 2011, Zuckerberg announced that for the next year he would only be eating meat from animals that he personally killed. He later explained that this meant he'd "basically become a vegetarian," since he was killing relatively few animals. He ended the experiment after a year.

More recently, Zuckerberg revealed that he's been raising cattle on his ranch in Hawaii, with the goal of creating "some of the highest quality beef in the world." He said that the cows are wagyu and angus breeds, and that he's feeding them macadamia meal and beer that they produce on the ranch. Zuckerberg was widely criticized for this, in part because it's unclear whether macadamia meal and beer is a suitable diet for cows.

The Bottom Line

The billionaires we've looked at here are all over the map in terms of their stances on meat. Both Bezos and Gates support efforts to address how much meat the world consumes, while Zuckerberg mostly has other ideas. As for Musk, only he can know what's going on in his head.

"[Bezos and Gates] are leaning into food systems transformation, and that's fairly new," Voss says. "Our food system needs massive help, given the realities and challenges, as well as growing meat demand, and in both of these cases, the Bezos Earth fund and Gates both are supporting multiple interventions. They're not just putting their eggs in one basket."

But money talks, and what matters much more than what these people say about meat is how they've spent their money. Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy have the resources to significantly improve food systems around the world. A few have made the financial commitment, and hopefully, more of their peers will soon follow suit.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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