Think of farms, and if you can picture them at all they’re likely to include the little red barns of yore, scattered innumerably over the countryside. Not so, writes investigative journalist Potter: “A landscape of small farms has morphed into a monoculture of big business.” The numbers are telling: As Potter notes, four companies control three-quarters of the world’s beef-packing plants and slaughterhouses, while another four companies “control 99 percent of the global chicken breeding market,” just one-ninth the number of firms that did that work four decades ago. The conditions animals endure in factory farms are shockingly hellish. As Potter chronicles, baby cows have metal spikes inserted in their nostrils “so that it is too painful for mothers to nurse them,” while chickens lay their eggs in tiny cages surrounded by chicken corpses and “covered in the feces of birds stacked above them.” That this is not everyday news has a devious reason: Big Ag, working through a lobbying group called ALEC, has pushed through laws across the country to declare whistleblowing a species of terrorism, with “ag-gag laws” threatening journalists with lawsuits and even imprisonment for detailing the truth about how animal agriculture is conducted. Moreover, writes Potter, “like Big Oil, the factory farming industry has wielded their deep pockets and government ties to skirt emissions reductions, undermine and rewrite environmental legislation, and absolve themselves of responsibility for climate change.” Under the current administration, things are certain to get worse, which prompts Potter to conclude that telling the truth about Big Ag is a form of resistance not just against corporations but also against “the rise of fascism.”
