S5. E14: Leah Garcés and Michael Pellman Rowland: Transfarmation
“There's $5 billion of debt collectively from contract chicken farmers. It's enormous. You're just treading water. You're just paying the bills and it starts off great, in the sense that you think you're going to make enough money. But you end up just paying bills and never getting ahead. And that's very typical.”
– Leah Garcés
Over the past few decades, people have become increasingly aware that factory farming is destroying the planet and causing horrific animal suffering. But most people still don’t realize that it’s not just the animals and the planet that are being exploited - it’s people, too. For example, the majority of chicken farmers in the U.S. raise birds on a contract for major meat companies. They take on huge debts, that are next-to-impossible to pay off, forcing them to live far below the poverty line.
The Transfarmation Project aims to change that by freeing farmers from the confines of factory farming and the cycle of debt by helping them transition to plant-based farming.
“The project is about creating constructive solutions, where we come in and work with communities, with farmers, finding alternatives. Especially alternative economies or alternative ways of farming that move farmers away from factory farming to something that's regenerative and sustainable and is creating a compassionate food system.” – Leah Garcés
Leah Garcés, the President of Mercy for Animals and Michael Pellman Rowland, a financial advisor and a Mercy for Animals Board Member spoke with me about Transfarmation at a live event in December. Please listen and share - this project is going to change the world for millions of animals and for farmers across the planet.
Learn More About The Transfarmation Project
Learn More About Mercy for Animals
Read “Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry”
Watch Leah’s TEDx Talk About Turning Adversaries into Allies
Learn More About Mercy for Animals
Connect with Michael on LinkedIn
Listen to More From Leah and Michael on Species Unite:
Leah Garcés: To Prevent the Next Pandemic Our Food System Has to Change
Michael Pellman Rowland: Betting On Plant Based Meat or Michael Pellman Rowland: Beyond Beyond Meat: The Next Big Plant-Based IPO
Transcript:
Leah: [00:00:00] There's $5 billion of debt collectively from contract chicken farmers. It's enormous. You're just treading water, you're just paying the bills and it starts off great in the sense that you think you're going to make enough money, but you end up just paying bills and never getting ahead and that's very typical.
Elizabeth: [00:00:27] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Michael Pellman Roland and Leah Garcés. Michael is a financial adviser and he's on the board of Mercy for Animals. Leah is the president of Mercy for Animals. This was a live event that we did for that transformation project. They are working to end factory farming from the inside out by working directly with farmers to free them from a cycle of debt and convert them to plant based farming. Michael and Leah were here to talk about it, and there's a short Q&A at the end. Michael, will you tell us a little bit about what you do, Mercy for animals and transformation, which is what we're here to talk about today?
Michael: [00:01:45] Sure. In my day job, I'm a financial adviser working with families on investing an impact, particularly around sustainable food. Since that's such an important topic for me personally, that's extended into my non-profit work. So I joined the Board of Mercy for Animals a little less than two years ago. One of the exciting things about Mercy for Animals is not only the great work the organization has done historically, but in sort of the outside the box thinking about how to approach difficult challenges and come up with solutions. We recently connected, Beth, on this topic of transformation. I thought it would be a great one to bring into the broader ecosystem and help people appreciate the reality not just for animals, but for farmers and communities around the existing farm system and ways in which we could try to reinvent it.
Elizabeth: [00:02:35] Tell us exactly what it is and the idea behind it, because I think so many people understand now that factory farming is just hell for animals and it's hell for the environment. But I don't think a lot of people are familiar with how bad it is for the actual farmers.
Michael: [00:02:53] Yeah, exactly right. Farmers have it really rough. I mean, it's always been a very challenging industry. But as the food companies have grown larger and larger, particularly in the U.S., but also globally, it's really put farmers in an increasingly tough spot, sort of often described as almost indentured servitude for most farmers. So if we look at the poultry farmers or chicken farmers as an example in the U.S. in particular, the average farmer holds around seven hundred thousand dollars in debt, and their income on their farm is on average, anywhere between thirteen and eighteen thousand a year. So what that means is that they basically have a negative net income. They have massive debt loads. They work 16 hour days and they're in these contracts that are very difficult to get out of. In addition, they have these things called tournament systems where every farmer is effectively competing against one another to produce the highest quantity of meat with the least amount of feed. Not only does this put them in a very variable income position year over year, but it also starts pitting them against their neighbor. So when you start to look at the realities of how the farming system is set up for most farmers in the U.S., particularly small farmers, they're overly indebted, have very low income and are stuck in these contracts and they don't really know how to get out of them. Which is why, sadly, the suicide rate for farmers in the U.S. is three and a half times the national average. Many families are having a difficult time getting the next generation to want to enter those businesses. So the goal of this initiative was how can we start seeing farmers as allies and as partners in this goal to reinvent the food system that not only touches, as you said, the animals and the environment, but also touches the farmers on those farms and as a result, the communities that those farms are operating in.
Elizabeth: [00:04:47] So take me through it. So say I'm a farmer, a chicken farmer, and I'm a million dollars in debt and I don't make a tenth of that a year. There's no way out like you're just stuck in the chickens keep coming and you have to keep buying more equipment and taking on more debt. Then so you guys come in and how does that work? How do I get out of debt? Can you go through the details a little bit?
Michael: [00:05:09] We start off with the contract and look at whatever contract they're in and see what avenues exist to get them out of that contract. Secondarily, then it's about helping them transition away from their current business model into a new one to increase their income and thus be in a position to start paying down their debt. One of the issues is that for these farmers, you know, they'll make massive investments in their farm. They'll start paying down their debt, get them into a decent position with a lower debt load. Then the companies, let's say, a Tyson or Perdue or say, Hey, we need you to retrofit your farm now with all this new equipment or all these new instruments. So now they'll have to tact their debt all the way back up. So part of it is about not just getting them out of their situation to get them into a higher income, but also to get them out of this need to consistently be upgrading their facilities with high cost equipment that basically keeps them in perpetual debt. Then it's also about helping them understand the best practices so they can maximize the yield of whatever inputs they're trying to grow. Then also to connect them with the buyers of those inputs so that they hopefully have a consistent and growing stream of purchasers who will be happy to offload whatever it is they're growing.
Elizabeth: [00:06:24] So far, what's been the response from the farming community when they learn about transformation?
Michael: [00:06:30] I'd say it's a combination of excitement and skepticism. So at the same time, there's a lot of desperation and solution seeking on the part of farmers that really don't see a sustainable path out of the jams that they're in. So really the key is to find folks that are in the farming community or that are trusted by the farming community to be the ones to approach those farmers to say, Hey, we know what you're dealing with and there's some solutions out there, would you be open to having a conversation kind of thing? You know, transformation is a new initiative. We just launched it this past year, and as you can imagine, with COVID, it wasn't the ideal environment to be going around trying to meet farmers and doing a lot of engagement. So what's surprising and very encouraging is that all the farmers that we've signed up to the program thus far have been inbound. They found us. They found us through the website or through other means and said, Hey, we're kind of stuck. We're in a tough situation. We want to hear what you have to say. So that's given us a lot of confidence that, you know, we're onto something here and it's also been backed by some very generous grants that we have through some of our donors and partner organizations to begin to take this out of what it was basically a test phase this year and really start rolling it out to a more substantial program in twenty one and beyond, both in the U.S. but also in other important markets like Brazil, India and China.
Elizabeth: [00:07:56] Are the situations in Brazil, India and China similar in the sense that the farmers are almost like indentured servants?
Michael: [00:08:01] Yeah, this is a model, right? So it's not like the U.S. is unique in that regard. So, you know, by and large, most smallholder farmers around the world are in very similar situations where they make very little money. They're in very tough sort of circumstances and are looking for ways to not only increase their incomes but improve their community in the lives of their families alongside of it. So this is our initiative to leverage the contacts we have within the food system, to take advantage of the growing demand for plant based inputs for things like mushrooms, hydroponics, hemp and other things that are very well suited to chicken coops because they're sort of dark and closed damp environments that those inputs are particularly appropriate for and connect those farmers with CPG companies and others that are are looking to buy these kind of inputs. So we're trying to sort of create an ecosystem where farmers, consumers and companies can all sort of benefit from creating a platform to help these farmers get out of the jams that they're in and get into a thriving business that not only can help them make more money, but certainly improve their mental and physical well-being and improve the health outcomes of the communities as well. A lot of farms are really toxic for the communities that they are in, whether it's the air quality, the water table and others, and those tend to be predominantly in communities of color.
Elizabeth: [00:09:26] And so why mushrooms and hemp? Why is that the ideal place to transition?
Michael: [00:09:31] Well, for a couple of reasons. One is they're growing markets. So the demand for both of those inputs are growing quite rapidly year over year. Secondarily, they tend to grow very well in the conditions that chicken coops create, which are sort of dark, damp environments. So those two factors make them ideal as a starting point. But I'll stress that there are many options, including hydroponics that can be explored as well. But those are just two of the sort of low hanging fruit, if you will.
Elizabeth: [00:10:04] Look, it's our special guest. Hi, Leah.
Leah: [00:10:07] Hi, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:10:10] Thank you for being here. For those of who don't know, this is Leah Garcés, who is the president of Mercy for Animals and the Woman of the Hour, in terms of who knows about chicken farmers and chicken farming. Thank you, Leah, for being here. If you haven't seen Leah's TEDx talk, it's now on the TED main page and has well over a million views. Congratulations.
Leah: [00:10:33] Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:10:36] I just want to hear from you why this matters, why transformation matters.
Leah: [00:10:39] That's a great question and I think one of the main blocks to us making progress to end factory farming is getting rural communities on board with that, because rural communities really rely on their economy in terms of just cash in their pocket on factory farming. But it's at great cost to the communities, to the environment and of course, to the animals. So the project is about creating constructive solutions where we come in and work with communities, with farmers finding alternatives, especially alternative economies or alternative ways of farming that move farmers away from factory farming to something that's regenerative and sustainable and is creating a compassionate food system.
Elizabeth: [00:11:28] Will you talk a little bit about how you got into all this to begin with?
Leah: [00:11:32] Yeah. My story starts around 2014, where I had my first encounter with a real live factory farm or a chicken factory farmer named Craig Watts. Through my partnership with him, I was able to really understand that it wasn't just the chickens suffering immensely under this system, it's a system that oppresses farmers too. Craig, like many farmers, is trapped in debt, and he took out a big loan to build these warehouses and he built the warehouse. Then the only way to pay the debt off is to continue to raise chickens like a mortgage. Year after year, month after month, flock after flock. So if he wants out, there's really not an alternative option. After a while, Craig and many other farmers realize I hate this job. This job is essentially a chicken babysitter, but a babysitter of really sick, tortured animals and a lot of farmers we talked to want to get out. So after a while of working with Craig, I started to reach out to other farmers and I met someone named Mike Weaver. He lives in West Virginia. He worked for Pilgrim's Pride, and the conditions were horrible and he wanted out, so he converted his houses to hemp. From there, I came to mercy for animals, and in November two thousand last year, whatever year we're in, I can't even I don't even know. Pre-pandemic, we launched the project called Transformation, which is this vision that we're going to partner with contract chicken farmers and other farmers, but initially contract chicken farmers to build an alternative with them. When I imagine the kind of arc of change, I imagine there is a tipping point in which we go from an animal based economy to a plant based economy, and transformation is about building and constructing the other side of that tipping point. I'm really excited about our first year. We had our pilot year this year and it's been beyond successful. We have a line of farmers wanting to work with us now.
Elizabeth: [00:13:42] How many did you do for your pilot?
Leah: [00:13:44] So this year we've been working with five. That was our objective, and I'll just tell one story that I feel really exemplifies the power of this project, which is the Haylee family. They live in northeast rural Texas, and they had 12 chicken houses. So each of those chicken houses were raising tens of thousands of animals, and their father was a vet and a pillar in the community and raised chickens. But it was really hard on him, and he died quite early, of a heart attack. He had two sons and a daughter and the two sons are twins and they were only 14 when he died and they had to take over. The mom was an accountant outside the home, and this changed the kind of trajectory of these boys' lives, and it created a lot of hardship and problems for them. They had a lot of mental health problems and physical health problems. They had drug addiction. It's a horrible life. In the end, it tore the family apart for years until one day the daughter saw our Mike Weaver video, wrote to us and said, We need help. Can we do this? And we started working and planning and plotting, literally plotting. We plotted hemp seeds in the ground with them, and just in August, I went with our team and we pulled up and harvested hemp like five foot high plants. We took it out of the ground. The beautiful thing about it was the twins who are, you know, now in their early forties came back. The daughter was there, her daughter, who's 21, was there, she had come back from being a bartender in San Diego and then the daughter's partner, who has a son who's 15, was there. So there were like six of us coming back, you know, six of them coming back together as a family. So it's not just about rebuilding the land and getting away from something that is cruel, but it's also about creating thriving families and communities that have been torn apart by factory farming. It's so beautiful in every kind of aspect, and I'm so proud to be working on it. These farmers are even talking about creating a cooperative because right now they're sending the hemp away to be processed in Colorado, actually they're working with a company called Tin Dekalim there. Eventually, they're hoping to get enough farmers in this community that you can create a processing plant for the hemp and then they can be bottling and selling and distributing right from there. So you can see how they can reclaim their community and they can create their own economy and their own system for helping their community thrive and be sustainable into the future.
Elizabeth: [00:16:33] This is the future.
Leah: [00:16:35] I hope so.
Elizabeth: [00:16:36] In terms of income, when the transition happens from, you know, chickens to something like hemp or mushrooms, how does that scale?
Leah: [00:16:45] I mean, the math works out really well on hemp. Mushrooms we’re still working out, we haven't had a totally successful transition yet. We're still in the early days for that. But hemp is amazing. Mike Weaver says that he had two warehouses and he only made about $7000 profit from those each year. And some farmers make no profit. Some farmers are in debt and upside down and losing money.
Elizabeth: [00:17:16] Twenty thousand chickens.
Leah: [00:17:18] Forty thousand he had two houses. So yeah, because you're just you're just treading water. You're just paying the bills. It starts off great in the sense that you think you're going to make enough money, but you end up just paying bills and never getting ahead and that's very typical. There's $5 billion of debt collectively from contract chicken farmers. It's enormous. It will require a government intervention for us to overcome this, which is part of the transformation’s objective. It’s to look at debt relief for farmers. Actually, Cory Booker in January this year introduced the Farm Systems Reform Act. A major piece of that is debt relief for these farmers to transition out, and that's what we're going to need. We're really going to need legislative intervention, debt relief and subsidies to switch from supporting things like factory farming and to regenerative, compassionate ways of farming.
Elizabeth: [00:18:12] What's the big, bigger goal? So you start with five this year and where does it go?
Leah: [00:18:17] Yeah the big idea. Our big goal is fifteen hundred farmers, not just in the U.S., but in India and Brazil. So India and Brazil have very similar contract farming systems and indentured servants, essentially, they're indentured servants to these loans that they have to take out. Our goal is not just to transition the farmers ourselves, but to create a spark, to ignite a change and organize farmers who are fighting against factory farming themselves and create a hub and a network and an umbrella of organized farmers and people supporting those farmers to get a worldwide movement to end factory farming from inside. You know, from the bottom up, from the people closest to the farms, literally on the farms.
Elizabeth: [00:19:07] Do you have any plans for Europe?
Leah: [00:19:09] No, we don't at the moment.
Elizabeth: [00:19:11] Why is that?
Leah: [00:19:12] Well we did have some really inspirational folks in Poland writing to us and saying, Hey, can we start like a branch? Can we work together? We keep getting that, we keep getting people. This is really like an idea whose time has come. So we really are thinking of creating an umbrella that everyone can work together with. So we're the central kind of organizer and coordinator for everyone to come together and learn from each other and share information, resources. So look out for that in the new year.
Elizabeth: [00:19:44] We have a question from Barbara King. Hi, Barbara. Thank you for this wonderful project. Can you describe the process of gradually reducing those huge numbers of chickens over time? How does this happen?
Leah: [00:19:57] So I'm assuming on the farm or as a system, as a whole, I guess. Part of our goal is to literally reduce the number of factory farms and reduce the number of animals as a result that are farmed. We're working with the farmer right now where we're actually working on that. One of the ways that we do it with him, he has four warehouses and we do one warehouse at a time until his economic model works out because he still has this massive loan to pay off. So he had to kind of show viability to the bank and begin to slowly transition and show success. So a lot of the farmers we work with, they kind of first do it in a warehouse like in their backyard. Then once they figure out how to grow hemp, then they're taking one of those four warehouses out. So that's 20,000 birds out and then when that's successful they move to the second one, the third and the fourth until they can completely transition over. In some cases they're talking about growing hemp outside, if the weather is good enough, in between the houses and really thinking about how to regenerate the soil. So the idea is that we just keep doing that and warehouse by warehouse, reducing the number of chickens that are farmed by twenty thousand at a time or thirty thousand at a time, depending on how many there are, how many houses and how many chickens.
Elizabeth: [00:21:22] Right. Will you talk a little bit about soil? Because that's such a big part of this and such a big part of what's wrong?
Leah: [00:21:27] Yeah, I mean, chicken farming, a lot of people think of environmental impact and they just think of greenhouse gas emissions. So then they leave chickens out of that equation. But environmental impact and our food sovereignty and ability to feed ourselves goes way beyond that. Arable land and water and air pollution are a big component of that and for the most part, chicken farming is not regulated. For example, in North Carolina, you do not have to get any kind of environmental permit, and you don't even have to tell the government where you're locating your poultry farms. So they're set up with no environmental assessment and no environmental impact assessment after they're set up. So the repercussions on our water and our air and our land are vague. We don't know, but we know from people like the water keepers that it's one of the highest inputs of phosphorus in the water and is really destructive. So we're really excited about the switch in the kind of measurements we can do around improving arable land quality, for example. I didn't know this before, but I'm learning a ton about him. It has a regenerative quality, so when you plant it in the ground, it can clean the soils. So one of the farmers we're working with is planning on putting the male Goliath plant inside the warehouse to clean the soil of all the junk that was there from when the chickens were living there. Clean it and then tear it down and be able to have this clean, regenerated soil.
Elizabeth: [00:22:58] What a better life for these guys, just to wake up and be doing that instead of picking up dead chickens out of the piles.
Leah: [00:23:06] Yeah and I think that's why we saw in this one family the young people coming back because young people don't want to do this. They've seen their parents suffer, their grandparents suffer and they don't want to do it. But then you say hemp, this twenty one year old woman came back and was like, I'm going to do tinctures and I'm going to do this and that and she's excited and she's innovating with her mom and her uncles. That's so beautiful. That's such a beautiful story.
Elizabeth: [00:23:33] One of the other questions: do you find other types of farmers like dairy or pigs are as open to the change as you found with the chicken farmers?
Leah: [00:23:41] We are in fact working with a pig farmer. We just started working with a pig farmer and we have had quite a few dairy farmers. So dairy farming is in a really bad place, and you might be aware that it has one of the highest suicide rates, sadly for the farmers, because there seems to be no future economic model for this. While that's great for the cows, it's terrible for farming communities. So one way to accelerate that change without causing suffering to the communities is to really think, how can they switch to oats? There are stories and there are farms that have switched to oats, for example. But we also think hemp could be something that could work. There are some farmers who are playing with hemp and dairy and again, the idea is you kind of transition one as one becomes more economically viable, they leave the dairy behind.
Elizabeth: [00:24:35] Well, and I would imagine with each farmer that goes through this and then the transition and and then their life transforms, a lot more farmers just keep wanting to get on board. It's got to be contagious.
Leah: [00:24:48] Yeah, one video we did with Mike Weaver is what's bringing us the most farmers. Seeing another farmer do this and talk about the benefits has been the single biggest impetus for us getting new farmers.
Elizabeth: [00:25:01] I love this. I love transformation. I'm so excited about it and I can't wait. This is just going to grow exponentially year after year, so.
Leah: [00:25:09] I hope so. I hope that in this year, a difficult year, that this is a little sliver of hope for everybody to think about, you know, change can happen, fast change is around the corner and to remain hopeful.
Elizabeth: [00:25:24] Awesome. Thank you Leah. Thank you, Michael. It's great to see you both. To learn more about the transformation project, go to our website. We will have links to everything, it’s SpeciesUnite.com. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, it’s Patreon.com/SpeciesUnite. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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