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Banned From the Barn

By MARK BITTMAN
July 5, 2011, 11:19 pm

Iowa’s ag-gag law failed to pass before summer recess last week: a good thing. The ridiculous proposition, which died along with similar ones in Minnesota, Florida and New York, would have made it illegal to videotape or photograph in the agricultural facilities that house almost all of our chickens and pigs.

Sadly, a lack of idiocy is not the same thing as a presence of wisdom, and the demise of ag-gag won’t give us a clearer view of food production. We need more visibility, not less. But when I visited Iowa in May, I appealed to producers of eggs, chickens, pork and even cooking oil to let me visit their facilities. In general, I was ignored, politely refused or told something like “it’s a bad week.” (I made standing offers to return at any time; no one has taken me up on that.)

When a journalist can’t see how the food we eat is produced, you don’t need ag-gag laws. The system’s already gagged.
The videographers that have made it into closed barns have revealed that eggs are laid and chickens are born and raised in closed barns containing (literally) hundreds of thousands of birds; an outsider wouldn’t even know what those barns were. Pigs are housed cheek-to-jowl, by the many thousands, in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations, where feeding, watering and monitoring are largely mechanized. Pregnant sows are confined in small concrete cells. Iowa is industrial agriculture’s ground zero. But when it comes to producing animals, zero is pretty much what you’re going to see.

One medium-size pig-raising operation did offer me a tour, and we drove to a site where they ran four barns, each of which normally housed around 1,200 pigs. But the one we explored held only 200 pigs and reeked of deodorant. The animals had plenty of room, and they were calm and clean, as were the floors.

Not at all what I expected. Except I’d been expected, and a cleanup must have preceded me by, I’d guess, no more than two hours. (Either that or these were magic, non-defecating pigs.)

“Where are the other thousand pigs?” I asked.

“We’ve shipped a whole bunch recently.”

“How about the other three barns? Are they full?”

“Nope. We don’t have many pigs here right now.”

Some tour. But I’d seen other pig barns during the course of the week because whenever I saw one that appeared unattended (it’s easy enough to tell; there’s no car), I checked it out as best I could. On some roads, there are almost as many pig barns as farmhouses, which may not be a coincidence: If you were an older farmer and your neighbor put 1,200 pigs in a barn, you’d probably move to Florida, too. The smell can be overwhelming.

Most have a small enclosure by the road, usually with a Dumpster. That’s where dead pigs are tossed until the next garbage collection. (Yes, I saw this, several times.) Many of the barns are open on the sides so you can see how crowded the pigs are. (Videos of gestation barns — virtually impossible for an outsider to see — show that the sows can’t even turn around.) The pigs were visibly upset when I approached the outside of the barn.

That was the best I could do, and it wasn’t much. I could’ve been arrested for trespassing; extreme versions of ag-gag would make it illegal for me to write about it, or at least publish pictures.

Which would bring us a step closer to China, whose Health Ministry is trying to clamp down on news media outlets that “mislead” the public about food safety issues. (It’s worth noting, on the other hand, that the Chinese Supreme Court has called for the death penalty in cases of fatal food poisoning.) “Mislead” apparently means reporting about pork tainted with the banned drug clenbuterol, which sent a couple hundred wedding guests to the hospital; watermelons exploding from the overuse of chemicals; pork disguised as beef, or glowing blue; and — my favorite — cooking oil dredged from sewers. (Check my blog [ http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/ ] for the details.)

Our watermelons don’t explode and, for now, I can write about it. Yet when a heroic videographer breaks a horror story about animal cruelty, as happens every month or so, the industry writes off the offense as an isolated incident, and the perpetrators — usually the workers, who are “just following orders” — are fired or given wrist slaps. Business continues as usual, and it will until the public better understands industrial animal-rearing techniques.

“When I grew up here,” said an Iowan I spent some time with, “people were proud of their animals. They’d have signs with their breeds, or their names, and they’d offer to show you around.” That’s no longer the case with most animal operations in Iowa. Next week I’ll write about some of those that give us reason to hope.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/banned-from-the-barn/ [with comments]