Recent public health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. In Animal Factory, bestselling investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms, and tracks the far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, water, and food.
In this thoroughly researched book, Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. These farms (known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs), confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of fecal and biological waste as well as other toxins. Weaving science, politics, law, big business, and everyday life, Kirby accompanies these families in their struggles against animal factories. A North Carolina fisherman takes on pig farms upstream to preserve his river, his family’s life, and his home. A mother in a small Illinois town pushes back against an outsized dairy farm and its devastating impact. And a Washington State grandmother becomes an unlikely activist when her home is invaded by foul odors and her water supply is compromised by runoff from leaking lagoons of cattle waste.
Animal Factory is an important book about our American food system gone terribly wrongand the people who are fighting to restore sustainable farming practices and save our limited natural resources.
Kirby combines the narrative urgency of Sinclair's novel with the investigative reporting of Schlosser's bookAnimal Factory is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. There's no political pleading or ideological agitprop in this book; it's remarkably fair-minded, both sober and sobering. Like Sinclair's and Schlosser's work, it has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues.”NPR, Books We Like”
Nature did not intend for animals to live and die in a factory assembly line. In David Kirby’s startling investigation Animal Factory, he gives a human face to the terrible cost our health and environment pays for this so-called cheap food’. This is a story that is seldom told and rarely with such force and eloquence.”Alice Waters
Animal Factory, by David Kirby, documents the scandal of today’s industrial food animal production system in the same compelling way Upton Sinclair alerted Americans to the abuses of the meat packing industry in his 1906 The Jungle. The well being of animals produced for human consumption, the fate of rural communities, the health of farm workers, and the protection of the environment are daily compromised for the sake of profit.”Robert S. Lawrence, M.D., Director, of the Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Sometimes it seems that the only people who truly support CAFOs, or animal factory farms, are those who stand to profit from them. This is made brilliantly clear in Animal Factory, David Kirby’s exposé into the business. Animal Factory follows the stories of three people trying to fight against big dairy and pork operations. These stories are deeply disturbing and might actually make readers sick. The writing is brilliant, the people profiled are inspirational in their activism, and the topic is one that so many people remain blissfully ignorant of. Everyone would benefit from reading this book and becoming aware of where their food comes from.”The San Francisco Book Review
Animal Factory is not a book about animal welfare, or nutrition, or fair labor practices. Instead, it is something that concerns us all, no matter what our political persuasionthe long-term health of people and communities directly affected by factory farms. The scandal of industrial food-animal production is a direct link to the health care debate, making 'Animal Factory' all the more urgent. Mr. Kirby has produced a powerful, important book to all those who care about their family's health.”The Washington Times
Animal Factory tells how big agribusiness' industrial meat production is leaving our communities foul with unhealthy air, awash in untreated sewage, and increasingly buffeted by bacteria made resistant to the antibiotics. Anyone in search of why America's health care system is going bankrupt will find part of the answer in these pages.”David Wallinga, M.D., Food and Health Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
David Kirby’s book, Animal Factory, is a beautifully written account of the danger industrial meat and dairy production represents to our health, environment and democratic process. In a unique and captivating way, Kirby reveals the consequences of animal factories through the eyes of the citizen advocates who have fought the long and hard battle to civilize the barbaric and often criminal behavior of the meat barons. Rick Dove, Karen Hudson, Helen Reddout, Chris Peterson, Don Webb and others featured in the book are real American heroes. Their stories are compelling, true and engaging. The time has come to end the greedy and destructive practices of animal factories. As the readers of Kirby’s book will learn, nature’s clock is ticking and much is at stake for the planet and all of its inhabitants. Each page of this book is filled with powerful information. It has all the makings of a number one best seller.”Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
This book puts a human face on a well hidden national scandal: the effects of large-scale raising of animals on the health and well being of farm workers and their families, local communities, the animals themselves, and the environment which we all share. By examining how CAFOs affect the lives of real people, Kirby makes clear why we must find healthier and more sustainable ways to produce meat in America.”Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production
Animal Factory is a compelling narrative in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle led to changes in the meat-packing industry. It isn't a novel, but it moves along with the urgency of a pot-boiler. What Kirby has done in this journalistic account of animal factory operations across the country is draw back the curtains that have carefully screened from the public the untidy secrets about how meat is produced on a large scale in this country. You'll read about the cramped feeding operations where animals are fattened for market, the pharmaceuticals that go into feed, the alarming practices used to dispose of feces and urine and how animal byproducts sometimes wind up in feed.”The Charolette Observer
An environment in which there are lakes of putrid slush, foul odors wafting in the breeze and entire rivers turning orange may sound like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, but it’s a reality for many people who live near industrial farmsthe result of keeping thousands of animals in one place in order to keep prices low. In his latest book, Animal Factory, David Kirby follows three unlikely grassroots activists who have opposed big agriculture, from small community protests to the national sustainable movement.”Leonad Lopate, WNYC-FM, NPR Affiliate, New York City
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