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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Oil and Water Don't Mix, a nonprofit group opposing Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline, is leading student efforts across the Upper Great Lakes to advocate for its shutdown.

The campaign includes eight Michigan universities, with schools in Wisconsin, Illinois and Canada. Opponents argued the aging pipeline, running through the Straits of Mackinac, poses a catastrophic environmental risk if a spill occurs.

Calvin Floyd, a graduate student at the University of Michigan and volunteer student organizer, joined the Line 5 student campaign after first learning about the issue in high school.

"I remember the Kalamazoo oil spill," Floyd noted. "I became aware of the same company is operating a ticking time bomb underneath the Straits of Mackinac and that it had to be stopped."

Enbridge defends Line 5 by citing its economic importance and safety measures, including a proposed tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac and continuous monitoring.

Last month, Oakland University hosted "Bad River," a documentary about the Bad River Band's fight against the Line 5 pipeline, while the University of Michigan screened "Troubled Water," focusing on environmental and social justice.

Floyd pointed out student support for shutting down Line 5 is strong, with a diverse group leading the effort at the University of Michigan.

"It's both in-state students who have a connection to the Great Lakes and to the region and they know the weight of this issue, and it's also folks who come from all over the world who realize both the importance of this resource and how it's under threat," Floyd outlined.

In November, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved permits for Enbridge's 41-mile reroute of the Line 5 pipeline, bypassing the Bad River Band's reservation. The project faces opposition from the tribe and environmentalists.

By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Alabama News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Over the last couple of years, the US Department of Agriculture has been funding various agricultural initiatives that it calls “climate-smart.” These are farming practices that, in the USDA’s estimation, provide some kind of benefit to the environment. But where is this climate-smart money actually going, and is it really doing anything to stop or slow climate change?

The impetus behind climate-smart farming policies is rather straightforward. Food production is currently responsible for almost one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, with the majority of those emissions coming from animal agriculture. Over three-quarters of all freshwater and ocean eutrophication are the result of agricultural production, as is almost all habitat loss on the planet.

It’s clear that our farming practices need to change, and climate-smart policies are the U.S. government’s attempt to bring about this change. At least, that’s what the government says.

What Are Climate-Smart Policies?

While the concept of agricultural practices that are good for the environment is nothing new, only recently did the U.S. government start using the phrase “climate-smart” to refer to such policies. Unfortunately, the term doesn’t have any official or legal definition, and as we’ll see, that’s resulted in a number of dubiously beneficial practices being dubbed “climate-smart.”

Broadly speaking, though, climate-smart policies are those that provide some sort of environmental benefit, or otherwise help slow climate change and global warming. Usually, this means that they either reduce carbon emissions or increase carbon capture by soil, trees and other sequesterers.

Climate-smart policies are funded by the USDA, which is in turn funded by Congress, and the USDA has many different programs through which it distributes climate-smart funds.

However, tracking the funding, progress and implementation of these climate-smart practices is quite difficult, in large part because the USDA has made it that way.

The USDA’s Climate-Smart Initiatives Aren’t Transparent

In 2022, the USDA announced the formation of Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a billion-dollar pilot program aimed at researching and testing the environmental benefits of various farming and forestry practices. Farmers and other agricultural producers could apply to receive grants from the USDA to spend on potentially climate-smart policies, and over the years, the USDA would measure how beneficial to the environment these practices actually were.

The USDA initially dedicated $1 billion to this program, and has added several billion more since then. But Jason Davidson, Senior Food and Agriculture Campaigner for the nonprofit Friends of the Earth, tells Sentient that the inner workings of this pilot program have been anything but transparent, with almost all of the process taking place behind closed doors.

“The USDA has been very opaque in describing not just the projects themselves, but even what sort of data they plan to collect [to evaluate them],” Davidson says. “All we can really say is that they have planned to give money to these organizations. On what schedule, or whether that’s a lump sum over the years, etc, is unclear.”

The Problematic Investment in Supposedly ‘Climate-Smart Beef’

This lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine why, to take just one example, some of the largest meat companies on the planet, including Tyson, JBS and Perdue, received “climate-smart” funds through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program.

“Tens of millions of dollars were given to projects where either a primary or secondary applicant was a major international meat company,” Davidson explains. “But the actual specifics of all of these programs are hard to decipher. The only sort of information that USDA released was who applied, how much money they were given and a brief description of the project.”

Take the “Climate-Smart Grasslands” grant. The goal of this initiative, according to the USDA, is to “market climate-smart beef with the ultimate goal of launching a cooperative to sell climate-smart beef products.” A partnership of 28 different entities, including JBS USA and Tyson, received $30 million to implement this project.

But what exactly is “climate-smart beef?” Sure, different methods of cattle farming vary in their environmental impacts, but none of those methods are beneficial to the climate. Beef production emits over twice the greenhouse gasses as any other protein on a per-gram basis, according to Our World In Data, and is the leading driver of deforestation worldwide.

Nevertheless, the USDA soon authorized Tyson to market their Brazen Beef subbrand as “climate-friendly,” and to claim on the packaging that it achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Even if Brazen Beef’s production techniques really do produce 10 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than traditional beef production, though, they’re still emitting more than twice the greenhouse gasses than any other protein source.

But it’s not even clear that this 10 percent reduction is actually happening, as Tyson and the USDA have offered vanishingly few details as to how they’re achieving this supposed reduction. (Tyson is also being sued for these claims.) The USDA doesn’t directly monitor their implementation of these practices, and EWG says that when it asked the USDA for substantiation of this claim, the documents it received were heavily redacted in order to protect Tyson’s “trade secrets.”

This kind of opacity is indicative of the USDA’s general approach when pressed for details on its climate-smart policies, Davidson tells Sentient. Other environmental organizations, such as the Center for Biological Diversity, have also expressed frustration at the USDA’s lack of transparency regarding climate-smart policies, as have some members of Congress.

“Friends of the Earth and other organizations have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to USDA over the last two years to try and get more information about these projects, and we have been largely unsuccessful, receiving heavily redacted documents in return,” Davidson says. “It is extremely unclear how the USDA evaluates these programs.”

The Inflation Reduction Act Funded Climate-Smart Projects — Or Did It?

 When the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was announced, information on it included $19.5 billion in funding for climate-smart policies. While it’s true that it contains $19.5 billion in funding for the USDA, the phrase “climate-smart” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the law’s text.

In truth, the the IRA allocated this money to a selection of USDA conservation programs, and mandated that these programs use the money only on practices that “directly improve soil carbon, reduce nitrogen losses, or reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emissions, associated with agricultural production.”

Since then, the USDA has curated and maintained a list of programs that it considers to be “climate-smart,” which it updates annually. This list determines which specific practices are eligible to receive climate-smart funds provided by the IRA. In October 2023, the USDA added 14 new practices to its list of “climate-smart” policies.

A February investigation by the Environmental Working Group, however, found that one of the USDA’s newly designated “climate-smart” programs — waste storage facilities for animal farms — actually increases greenhouse emissions, according to the USDA’s own analysis from 2024. Note: though the 2024 data is no longer available on the USDA website, this author did review data provided by EWG.

The Farm Bill Could Scale Back Climate-Smart Funding

Every five years, Congress has to renew the Farm Bill, an enormous package of legislation that undergirds American farming and agriculture. The last version of the bill has expired, and as usual, Republican and Democratic lawmakers are bickering over what the next bill should include. One of these arguments concerns the IRA’s funding for climate-smart policies.

In May, Republicans released a Farm Bill proposal that retained the $19.5 billion in funding that the IRA approved, but removed the requirement that this money go to initiatives that “directly improve soil carbon, reduce nitrogen losses, or reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emissions, associated with agricultural production.”

If this version of the Farm Bill passes, which looks increasingly probable given Republicans will control both the House and Senate, the $19.5 billion in “climate-smart” funding provided by the IRA would become $19.5 billion in general funding for the USDA’s conservation projects, regardless of their impact on the climate.

A 2022 analysis by EWG found that the overwhelming majority of funds from the USDA’s conservation programs don’t go to climate-smart projects, and the group estimates that if these “guardrails” from the IRA are removed, only one-fifth of the USDA’s conservation budget will go to programs that reduce greenhouse emissions.

It’s not a sure thing that this provision will be included in the final Farm Bill, which isn’t expected to pass until next year. Nevertheless, the fact that these guardrails are on the chopping block shows just how precarious funding for climate-smart projects is, regardless of their efficacy.

The Bottom Line

From a bird’s-eye perspective, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that the federal government has, at least in theory, recognized the importance of making America’s farming practices more sustainable.

But the extent to which these efforts have actually benefited the environment is entirely unclear. Some of the ostensibly “climate-smart” initiatives are anything but, and the USDA’s lack of transparency makes it difficult to measure the effectiveness of those that are.

Bringing about a more environmentally friendly farming system is a laudable goal, but the American government’s efforts to do so have been disappointing and lackluster at best.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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A Pennsylvania group warned progress on environmental protections could be at risk under a second term for President-elect Donald Trump.

The state's Climate Action Plan aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

Tom Schuster, director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, said it is important for Pennsylvania to continue to curb fossil fuel pollution to prevent severe climate effects. He highlighted the state's growing shift to cheaper renewable energy, noting Trump might not stop it but it could slow down.

"Donald Trump, as president, has pledged to encourage more drilling for and burning of fossil fuels and some rollback policies that are aimed at transitioning to clean energy faster," Schuster pointed out. "That is definitely bad news for the effort to protect our communities."

Schuster added the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure law has provided major funding for climate initiatives. He argued Pennsylvania has effectively utilized these resources for both emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts.

Schuster emphasized the urgency of utilizing the current available funding, as the longevity of some programs is uncertain with the new Congress and administration. He stressed the need for Pennsylvania to implement state-level policies such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is currently before the state's Supreme Court.

"If the court rules in favor the Department of Environmental Protection and the environmental groups such as the Sierra Club that are supporting it, we need to quickly implement that program to help reduce climate disrupting pollution from the electricity sector and create an investment fund for new clean energy investment," Schuster outlined.

Schuster pointed out Gov. Josh Shapiro's proposals aim to boost renewable energy requirements for utilities, spurring solar and wind development. The state's RISE PA plan, tied to the Inflation Reduction Act, focuses on cutting industrial climate pollution -- the largest source in Pennsylvania -- while preserving jobs and industry.