Future Perfect, Vox’s section dedicated to solving the world’s most important yet neglected problems, obsessively covers how the way we eat affects our lives and our planet. For the last year, we’ve been working hard on a special series of ambitious, deeply reported feature stories and investigations on the history of the meat and dairy industries, their political and cultural influence, and their sweeping impacts on American life, particularly in the Midwest, where factory farms are disproportionately concentrated.
The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative. To read more work supported by this grant, check out Vox’s series How Factory Farming Ends.
Big Oil and Big Ag are teaming up to turn cow poop into energy — and profits. The math doesn’t add up.
The hundreds of billions of pounds of waste produced by America’s dairy cows every year has long been a headache for farmers.
Manure is expensive to manage and, to state the obvious, it smells terrible, which can lead to complaints, protests, and lawsuits from neighbors — even the occasional fine or misdemeanor charge. And when dairies store their manure in giant open-air lagoons, the most common and cheapest method, it becomes a climate problem: As the manure decomposes, it produces methane, a climate “super pollutant” that accelerates climate change at a much faster rate than carbon dioxide.
How public universities hooked America on meat
Americans are eating more meat than ever, but livestock giants still see plenty of room to grow. As pressure mounts for meat producers to improve their treatment of animals and environmental footprints, they’re turning to a tried-and-true strategy — used in the past by the tobacco and oil industries — to expand their markets and shore up the public’s trust in their products: funding favorable research from university scientists.
Last year, the National Pork Board, a pork marketing group sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), funded a nearly $8.5 million program in partnership with researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Georgia, the University of Minnesota, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to research popular perceptions of the pork industry and improve its reputation, according to federal records obtained by Crystal Heath, a veterinarian and founder of animal advocacy nonprofit Our Honor.
