By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Tom and Sokchea Lim's farm looks the same as any other factory chicken farm on the outside, four large barns on 28 acres of land, built to house thousands of clucking chickens at a time. Yet, three of the barns are now silent and empty, with no trace of livestock, except for the eye-watering stench of ammonia and red plastic feeders hanging from the rafters - the only signs there were ever chickens here. In the last barn, a large group of people are excitedly huddled on a humid September day to celebrate the Lims' unveiling of their chicken barn-turned-greenhouse. It's hard to believe this new greenhouse, filled with light and myriad of greenery, once looked like the dark, musty barns adjacent to it.

Lim's repurposed farm is a funded project of Transfarmation, a Mercy for Animals initiative that aims to end factory farming - to improve both animal and farmer welfare - by transitioning farmers to growing crops. At the door of the greenhouse, Tom Lim and Leah Garcés, Transfarmation's founder and book author, snip a red ribbon to mark the public opening of the project.

In this airy 15,000-square-foot greenhouse, Lim grows tomatoes, squash, lettuce and peppers amongst other crops. Previously, the farm raised 540,000 chickens a year in all four barns when they were in production. Lim also grows oyster mushrooms in an insulated, food-safe aluminum trailer on the farmland. Collectively, the project will serve not only as Lim's farm, but as an education hub for factory farmers who want to transition out of the industry they're often "trapped" in, says Garcés, who is also CEO and President of Mercy For Animals.

For Lim, the opening marks his transition to sustainable farming and a more hopeful future. An immigrant from Cambodia who came to the U.S. more than two decades ago, Lim was able to set up a chicken farm on this land in 1999, just by taking loans from Farm Credit and signing a contract with Pilgrim's Pride, one of the largest chicken producers in the country. "When I come to the United States, I don't expect that I can buy any land for business. But you know I did it [and] so I'm very happy," Lim tells Sentient.

But over the course of the next 20 years, Pilgrim's Pride, like many other meat processing companies, required Lim to consistently upgrade the chicken barns to meet new standards -on top of paying off his existing loans with agricultural lenders Farm Credit. "The company forced me to do a lot of upgradings and installing new stuff and I cannot afford it. And they say if I cannot do any upgrade, they will cut me off and let me go," Lim says. Although he took out more loans from banks to keep up with the company's demands, he says he was eventually let go in 2018, leaving him and his family with debilitating debt.

This cycle of debt is what keeps farmers trapped and from speaking up, Garcés tells Sentient."If they try to fight against the system, they risk losing their contract and then losing everything."

After he was laid off, Tom and his wife Sokchea worked multiple jobs, seven days a week, to try to keep up with the debt. In 2022, he reached out to Transfarmation for help and so, the idea for converting his chicken barn into a greenhouse and eventually, a demonstration hub for other farmers, was born. Although Lim has not fully paid off the debt he has accrued - more than $150,000 - he is hopeful the greenhouse crops will reap enough financial reward in the long term to make the farm profitable.

Large meat processing companies like Perdue and Pilgrim's Pride pay contract poultry farmers as little as five cents per pound of chicken and pay nothing if their chickens die from disease, for example. This measly pay, coupled with the debt and barn upgrades, means some farmers barely have enough to pay themselves an hourly wage, let alone any kind of profit, says Tyler Whitley, Transfarmation's director.

As Lim leads the gaggle of attendees on a tour through his greenhouse, he explains the various growing systems and their crops, grown from organic seeds and in organic soil. Although he is not yet organic certified, he hopes to pursue the certification so he can access the higher price point markets and help his financial bottom line.

Organic vegetable farms use fewer synthetic pesticides and no synthetic fertilizers at all, among other federal requirements for certification. Lim has already contracted customers for much of his produce; buttercrunch lettuce, mushrooms and red swiss chard to Fresh Point distributors, and beets, lettuce and mushrooms to Sandhill Farm.

Inside the mushroom trailer, oyster mushrooms adorn the metal shelves, bulging outwards from their inoculated blocks made of hardwood sawdust and pulverized soybean hulls - the medium the mushrooms thrive in. The produce from this trailer, which is a little smaller than a caravan, will be enough to pay Lim an hourly wage and profit in full production, Whitley says. In contrast to the low pay for chicken, specialty mushrooms like oyster and shitake, are high crop earners, garnering up to $15 per pound, or more.

However, this blueprint for a better future required a steep investment from Transfarmation. Repurposing the Lim's chicken barn involved demolition, replumbing, rewiring and implementing four distinct growing systems, amongst other costly construction, Transfarmation invested roughly $700,000 in the project. Whitley says the conversion was done with longevity and education potential in mind - the hub is built to residential code, with running hot and cold water, power outlets and wifi. The barn's existing sturdy wooden beam structure remains in place with greenhouse panels made from polycarbonate sheeting, built to last at least 20 years, instead of weaker plastic alternatives.

Not every conversion has to be as large as this one, Whitley says, and the project has served as something of a test case for future Transfarmation farmers. "When other farmers come in, they don't have to learn the expensive lessons that we've learned and they can do [smaller models] at a much lower cost." This particular project has taught the Transfarmation team the ideal seasonal growing models for different crops, for instance.

Constructing a demonstration hub is new for Transfarmation. Typically, the organization helps farmers come up with a transition plan on an individual basis, or in some cases, issues innovation grants to make that plan a reality. An important caveat is that Transfarmation doesn't currently work with farmers who still have large amounts of debt to pay off. "However, the systems and models we're creating have the potential to service substantially higher levels of debt," Whitley says.

To bridge that gap, Garcés says debt relief or transition money needs to be granted at the federal level - a cause her team has been actively advocating for the past two years. Earlier this year, they applied for a USDA grant and regularly look for more opportunities for federal funding of their work.

The seeds of Transfarmation were sowed in 2014 when Garcés met Craig Watts, whose chicken farm was also in North Carolina. "I probably saw that person as my enemy as an animal activist but he invited me to come on his farm through a mutual friend. And sitting with him, I realized for the first time that chicken factory farmers are almost as trapped as the chickens [and] this was a system that oppressed them as well," Garcés says.

The two began working together to share his story and leave factory farming behind for mushroom growing. This relationship spurred Garcés to found Transfarmation in 2019. "Within the first few months we had hundreds of farmers writing to us and we realized we had really hit on something important, a missing link in breaking factory farming down," Garcés tells Sentient.

Lim and Watts represented just two cogs of the machine that is North Carolina's biggest, booming agricultural business which employs over 100,000 farmers: poultry. A recent Environmental Working Group study using artificial intelligence and aerial surveillance from the state's department of agriculture, found poultry farms house 357 million birds annually. That's up 43 percent since 2007 in response to growing demand.

But the pollutant-heavy Big Poultry industry has left its mark on the state. A Charlotte Observer investigation found North Carolina's chickens produce more waste than nearly 72 percent of the state's population. This waste flows into rivers and streams as a result of the state's lack of industry regulation. The investigation also found the state "shields the locations of poultry farms," which 230,000 residents currently live half a mile from and have no right to object to. People who live near these farms are at risk of respiratory problems from inhaling polluted air and drinking contaminated water.

While Transfarmation did not comment specifically on how many farmers want to get out of the poultry industry in North Carolina, they said they receive hundreds of requests for help from all over the country. For now, the Transfarmation team hopes the hub - and others they intend to build - will serve as a learning experience for those seeking to escape the grasp of factory farming. And for Tom and Sokchea Lim, the experience has been transformative: "I'm very excited to see the conversion of my whole barn to an educational greenhouse. I didn't really think [it was possible], but it happened, so I'm very happy," Tom Lim says, smiling.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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Utah's leaders are taking steps to protect the state's shrinking agricultural land by issuing conservation easements. The move will limit non-agricultural uses on protected lands and ensure they remain dedicated to farming and ranching.

Jeremy Christensen, land conservation program manager for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, said the easements are necessary so that Utahns in the future can consume locally grown food. Because of the expected population growth in the Beehive State, farm land is being targeted by developers for housing and industrial projects.

Since the 1960s, Christensen said, the state has already lost a quarter of its farm land. He said that figure could likely rise if more isn't done.

"We are really struggling to produce enough food to feed the number of people that are coming into and are growing in our state," he said, "so a lot of the food that we eat comes from elsewhere."

Christensen said he is confident the answer may lie within conservation easements. The latest round of awards from the LeRay McAllister Working Farm and Ranch Fund is set to protect more than 5,500 acres throughout the state and award six privately-owned farms and ranches a total of about $1.7 million.

Christensen said landowners will receive funds for the developmental rights they're willing to giving up.

Christensen said farmers have welcomed the conservation easements, and added that there is a "huge demand," especially among multi-generational farming operations that are concerned with their longevity and vitality. But Christensen added that they're aiming to dispel misconceptions, "whether or not the land owner remains the owner of the property at the end of the day, which they do, or whether there is some mechanism by which they could lose control of the property through doing this easement, which they really can't."

Christensen contended the benefits of protecting these private properties extend "far beyond the boundaries of the properties themselves." He added that it is a benefit to not only landowners, but for all in the state who'll be able to consume local food and learn to value open lands.


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By Nina Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Nancy Utesch first moved to Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, a family in her community was poisoned after drinking water contaminated with E. coli, which has been tied to manure spread on nearby farms. The entire family went to the hospital, Utesch tells Sentient, and the eight-month old daughter spent time in intensive care.

"We were really stunned by the outpouring of support for the farmer and not the family," she says. "Upon arriving here, we began to learn the inner workings of this very dysfunctional dynamic that [concentrated animal feeding operations] bring to a community, which really pits neighbors against neighbors."

It was quite the first impression of her county, where she and her husband Lynn have now lived for the last 20 years. Utesch's advocacy group, Kewaunee CARES, is one of 13 groups who sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over their lack of enforcement of CAFOs under the Clean Water Act. On Oct. 2 the court denied the petition in full.

Fewer Than 30 Percent of CAFOs Have Clean Water Act Permits

Utesch estimates that there were approximately two concentrated feeding operations, or CAFOs, in Kewaunee County when she moved there. Now, according to new data compiled by Food & Water Watch, Kewaunee County has 36 factory farms which produced over 2 billion pounds of waste in 2022. The manure from CAFOs is often kept in open-air lagoons, where it is stored until it is sprayed to fertilize agricultural fields. Any excess manure not soaked up by crops or grasses ends up in aquifers and waterways, contaminating wells with nitrate and causing health issues ranging from acute poisoning to cancer. In some states, like Iowa, animals in CAFOs produce 25 times as much waste as its human population.

The 13 groups were represented by Food & Water Watch staff attorney Emily Miller, who in September argued in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. EPA itself has admitted that fewer than 30 percent of CAFOs have Clean Water Act permits. In the petition denial EPA sent Food & Water Watch six years after the initial petition was filed in 2017, they wrote, "EPA shares your concern that CAFOs can be a significant source of pollutants into waters of the United States. The Agency recognizes that there may be opportunities to do more to address these pollutants." EPA's solution was to form a committee to determine next steps - a decision which the petitioners felt was too little, too late.

"EPA needs to really step up in their actions so that they can actually protect people and not just be saying, 'Oh, we're going to have more stakeholder meetings,'" Utesch says. "During all these years, all that's happened is further expansion."

In their denial, the judges wrote that though the agency acknowledged "the serious problem of CAFO-based waste discharges into U.S. waterways," its promise to "further study" its own manure pollution guidelines and "commission a stakeholders' subcommittee" was not an unreasonable response.

"The EPA has never demonstrated an urgency to the outright widespread devastation and impoverishment CAFOs leave in their wake," Utesch wrote in a text. "The well of 'hope' people echo we must keep is contaminated, and will continue to grow in its contamination, as long as EPA is beholden to corporate interests above the people their agency was designed to protect."

The "Special Sector That Gets a Pass"

The Clean Water Act was officially born in 1972, or in an era when cattle and pig CAFOs were coming to be the norm. Within the Clean Water Act, CAFOs are classified as "point sources" of pollution, requiring them to have National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits. But according to petitioners in Food & Water Watch et al. v. EPA, "Half a century later, the United States Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of CAFOs has become one of the Clean Water Act's greatest unmet promises."

Food & Water Watch first submitted a petition on behalf of 32 environmental organizations in 2017, "urging the agency to fix its failed factory farm program under the Clean Water Act," Miller tells Sentient.

The case outlines two main issues with the current EPA regulatory structure for CAFOs - one being that most factory farms discharge pollution but lack the required federal permits to control these discharges, and the second being that the permits themselves are insufficient to protect waterways and communities from pollution.

"The reason why these things are happening is because of agricultural exceptionalism," says Silvia Secchi, a professor of geographical and sustainability sciences at the University of Iowa. "EPA is treating agriculture as this kind of special sector that gets a pass, and then gets a second pass and a third pass."

The biggest "pass" in question in this lawsuit is the agricultural stormwater discharge exemption. Under the current EPA rule, Miller says, as long as factory farms are applying waste in accordance with a nutrient management plan, any discharges that are precipitation-related from its land application areas are exempt from regulation.

"What has happened is that this has essentially allowed thousands of operations to completely evade permitting requirements altogether for their nonexempt discharges, because it provides them an easy out to explain away any evidence of discharges coming from their facilities," she says. "It requires almost no oversight from EPA or any other state agency to confirm that the operation is actually meeting the exemption."

This limited oversight is causing destruction to communities who live closest to the polluters. There are downstream effects, too, as pollution from agricultural states is the largest contributor to the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico.

The issue of CAFO pollution is a problem of scale, Chris Jones, water quality expert and president of Driftless Water Defenders recently said at an event on animal agriculture held in Des Moines. The solution does not exist in technological fixes or manure-treatment initiatives.

Instead, Jones says, "We need laws. We need laws that are going to help us get our arms around this and give us the environmental condition in this state that we deserve as citizens."

Secchi agrees.

"We need to see litigation as the way civil society responds to a captured agency," she tells Sentient. "Ideally we would have a more responsive Congress that does things to address new challenges...But because Congress cannot tie their shoelaces, what we have are these laws that have some good bones."

Ninth Circuit Sides With EPA Despite Persistent Pollution

In 2023, the EPA acknowledged that there was a significant problem with CAFO permitting and that their current regulations are failing to address it. But instead of addressing it head-on, Miller says, they decided to study it further.

"EPA is on record in a 2022 report stating that not only have its regulations failed to address the problem, but they are actually impeding effective enforcement of the Clean Water Act," she says. "In other words, the problem is persisting, not just in spite of EPA regulations, but because of them. What else does the EPA need to know?"

In court in September, Judge Salvador Mendoza asked EPA counsel in the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, "Why isn't now the time?" He added, "You don't need additional studies to understand the fact that you need to enforce the permitting process."

On Oct. 2, 2024, the judges released their final decision: "Because we find that EPA did not act arbitrarily, capriciously, or contrary to law, we deny the petition."

The decision comes as CAFO waste reaches untenable levels nationwide. According to Food & Water Watch, approximately 1.7 billion animals live in confinement on factory farms, producing 941 billion pounds of manure each year. And when it comes to pollution, Des Moines Water Works, which has the world's largest nitrate removal facility, must run their sometimes $10,000 per-day facility to keep drinking water safe for its residents when nitrate levels are high.

"We need judges who understand the reality of current agricultural production systems, the immediacy of the problems we face and the extensive evidence we already have," Secchi wrote in a text upon hearing the decision. "This panel [of judges] gave EPA leeway to keep kicking the can down the road. That's not a tenable situation."

Upon hearing the decision, Miller wrote in an email to Sentient: "We are of course disappointed by the decision. It's shocking that the court gave such short shrift to a critical issue. We'll keep working to hold EPA accountable for its decades of failure."

For Utesch, the entire process of petitioning and suing the EPA has instilled in her a belief that the agency is not serious about enforcing CAFO pollution, especially as it relates to human health.

"The CAFO issue is directly tied to human rights: the right one has to protecting personal health, home, air and water quality and quality of life, all which are severely compromised by industrial agribusiness," Utesch wrote. "EPA must remember and fulfill its mission, which is to protect."


Nina Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Kari Lydersen for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Energy News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When farmer Trent Gerlach found out a solar farm would be built on the land he had long worked in northwestern Illinois, he was disappointed.

"As a farmer, seeing that land taken out of production is difficult, when you farmed it for many years, you've been stewards to that land, fertilized that land, taken care of it as if it was your own," he said.

Gerlach's family had been raising corn, soybeans and livestock since 1968, and like many farmers, they leased farmland in addition to working their own land. And when the owner of one of those leased parcels decided to work with Acciona Energia to help site its High Point wind and solar farm, Gerlach initially was not enthusiastic.

"The thought of taking productive farm ground out of production with solar panels was not, in my personal opinion, ideal," he said.

But Gerlach was determined to make the best of the situation.

Ultimately, that meant a win-win arrangement, where Acciona pays him to manage vegetation around the 100 MW array of solar panels that went online in early 2024. Gerlach does that with a herd of 500 sheep.

"We don't own the land, we don't get a say - that's landowners' rights, and I'm very pro that," Gerlach recounted. "In U.S. agriculture, the biggest thing that gets farmers in trouble is saying, 'that's how we've always done it so that's what we're going to do.' Renewable energy is probably not going anywhere, whether you're for or against it, it's coming, it's what's happening. As an agriculture producer, we're going to adapt with it."

A promising arrangement

Researchers around the country are exploring agrivoltaics, or co-locating solar generation with agriculture in a mutually beneficial way. Projects range from growing tomatoes in California to wild blueberries in Maine, with varying levels of success.

Acciona regional manager Kyle Charpie said that sheep grazing appears an especially promising form of agrivoltaics, and one that the company is likely to continue exploring globally. Solar operators need to keep vegetation controlled, and sheep are a more effective and ecological way to do it than mechanized mowing. Acciona has long had a sheep agrivoltaic operation in Portugal, Charpie noted, and two projects in Texas are underway.

"It's incredibly cost-effective - sheep don't break down like a tractor; if a tractor blows a belt, you've lost a whole day of cutting," he said. "These grasses grow wickedly fast, it's that constant presence of the sheep that's been super super effective. It aligns with our sustainability goals."

"It's tough to say we're the greatest renewable company in the world [if] we have a bunch of tractors running up and down our fields belching out CO2," he continued.

Another advantage, Charpie said, is that at the end of the solar array's lifespan, the land beneath it will be restored and refreshed.

"We have all these sheep now who will spend 30-plus years breathing, living, using their hooves to churn up ground, even dying; it's the circle of life," he said. "When these farms get turned back to the families, that soil condition will be wonderful."

'He saw an opportunity here'

Gerlach's family had about 50 ewes when the idea for grazing around the solar panels struck. He "hounded" Acciona, in Charpie's words, to bring an agrivoltaic deal to fruition.

"He saw an opportunity here, and he has been his own best advocate, banging down the door, checking how close are we, when will we get our sheep here," Charpie said.

Gerlach ultimately bought about 500 sheep of two types: Dorper and Katahdin, small breeds that can fit easily under solar panels.

"The panels create lots of shade - during the heat of the day, they'll all be underneath the panels for shade," Gerlach said. "In early mornings, late evenings they're out grazing aggressively. They don't bother the panels one bit."

Gerlach said his family "used to raise livestock like everybody did back in the day," and his farm has won awards for its cattle, but raising livestock has become less profitable in recent years. Agrivoltaics offer an opportunity to delve back into raising sheep, something Gerlach loves. A commercial sheep operation would only be possible with the payments for vegetation management, he said.

"Raising sheep in the United States is challenging because the market for sheep is not very high," he said. There's not much of a domestic wool market, and "the meat side of sheep and lamb never really caught on in the U.S. - we're a beef, pork, poultry-consuming country."

Gerlach sells the bulk of his lambs around the Easter season, and largely for kosher and halal consumption. Since that market is so limited, the ewes largely earn their keep being paid to graze.

"We love providing stewardship to the animals. That's what U.S. agriculture was built on hundreds of years ago," Gerlach said. "It marries really well with our crop production" on nearby land. "In agriculture you need diversification. By bringing sheep and livestock production in, we can afford to hire more full-time employees."

Sheep are the livestock best suited to agrivoltaics, stakeholders agree.

"You can't use cattle because they're too large, they would rub on the panels and break them," Gerlach said. "You can't use goats because goats would climb on the panels, and they're natural chewers, they would chew on the wires."

The High Point solar array is divided up into separate plots with fences, "like perfect little pens for the sheep," added Charpie.

In a bigger uninterrupted plot, a farmer would likely need to move water sources for sheep strategically around the area to make sure the animals cover the entire plot. Gerlach's flock only grazes about a fifth of the Acciona solar array. He's hoping to expand, though feeding and sheltering sheep during the winter when they can't graze is costly.

"I've got three young kids. Hopefully we raise them in agriculture. It's such a good practice for our young people to learn responsibility and stewardship," Gerlach said.

"[The animals] come first, they get fed and watered and taken care of before us. Sometimes agriculture gets portrayed in a poor light, especially larger production agriculture. I try to really push that that's not everybody. Talk to a local farmer, a local person - you generally see that we're stewards of the land, we want healthy ground and livestock. That can marry in fine with clean energy."


Kari Lydersen wrote this article for Energy News Network.


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