Read an Excerpt
LITTLE RED BARNS: Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable
Excerpt from Chapter Ten: The Poop Tour
In the world of factory farming, Helen Reddout is a legend.
She moved to Yakima Valley when it was still little red barns. Farmers had a couple dozen cows that grazed on green hills. Then the mega farms moved in, and Helen's life changed forever.
The red barns became industrial facilities. They changed the air and water. Her community became unrecognizable. Helen rallied a group of her friends to fight back. They patrolled their little town, documenting farm pollution with disposable plastic cameras.
They called themselves the grannies. Their age and diminutive stature didn't shield them from retaliation. Farm workers and owners would chase them with bats and the occasional shotgun. But step by step, they built a town campaign, filed lawsuits, and fought the confined animal feeding operations—CAFOs—for control of their community.
When I pulled up to Helen's farmhouse, I could immediately see her vision of this land. White wooden siding, potted flowers, a wreath of sunflowers hanging on the bright red door. She met us outside in a denim chore coat and asked us to come in from the rain.
I politely tried to say that I appreciated her effort, but I didn't want to take too much of her time. We were really more interested in filming her, without the slideshow, I said. Maybe we could skip the PowerPoint and start filming some farms? Helen wasn't having it. She said we needed to know the history before we could go on the "Poop Tour" with her.
Helen is a retired school teacher, and Jeff and I knew to sit at attention. She walked us step by step through the saga of council meetings, lawsuits, and industry harassment she had experienced. Helen joked about her age, and occasionally found herself searching for someone's name, or a legal term. But her mind was sharp and meticulous.
On the wall were photos from her investigations. They were already grainy, from her disposable camera, and even more blurred without a proper screen, but I could still see what the CAFOs had done. Polluted water, overflowing manure, and dead calves left on the side of the road.
Throughout the presentation, I took notes and occasionally raised my hand. My questions must have demonstrated understanding of the issues she was facing, and that I was on the same side, because Helen visibly relaxed. We started cracking jokes. At the end of class, she asked if I'd like to see her home.
Journalism is a beautiful and strange profession. You often find yourself in strangers' most intimate environments as you ask them direct, personal questions about experiences that they might not have even spoken about with even their closest friends and family. As a cub reporter, an editor at the Dallas Morning News told me that if someone invites a journalist into their home, you show respect. In that moment, you represent the entire profession. It's a gesture of trust and vulnerability. When someone offers to show you their home, they're offering to show you a part of themselves.
I'll never forget Helen's home tour. It's burned into my mind just as much as the tour of her community that followed. As she walked us through her house, Helen relived it all.
The master bedroom, where she tossed and turned unable to breathe, until one night she hit her breaking point. It was like that scene in Network. Had I seen it? I told her any journalist who hadn't seen Network should have their press pass confiscated. She laughed and said that I'd understand, then. She was mad as hell and couldn't take it anymore.
The bathroom where she had thrown open the window, but there was no fresh air so she had slammed it shut and dug through the cabinet for old perfume. She showed us the bottle, nameless, a gift from her husband years ago. The scent was floral and acrid. Bless his heart, Helen said, he tried. She had emptied half a bottle of the stuff thinking it was so harsh it would mask the CAFOs. But it was no match for the stench.
The broom by the door, which she grabbed mid-tour to sweep up dead flies. She apologized for them. She no longer opens the windows of the house, she said, but they still keep piling up. The meaty black horseflies seem to find a way inside.
I could see the pain in her face and hear it in her repeated apologies for the mess and the smell. She took pride in her home, it was well maintained and neat. I could feel how distressing it was for her to host strangers while sweeping up flies.
We put on our coats and started out the door. As the screen door clapped shut, Helen let out a belly laugh. They couldn't give you a truck? We all turned and stared at the rental car. Another clown mobile. That works if you're going to Seattle to meet the tech people, Helen said, but out here we might not make it down the road.
I explained that this had become a recurring theme in my investigations, the absurdly small cars, despite my reservation requests and kiosk arguments. I told her that I blamed the FBI, or maybe Homeland Security—counterterrorism spies trying to sabotage my investigations through embarrassment and back pain.
"I looked you up, that wouldn't surprise me," she said. "And you're a tall drink of water too!"
As Jeff swapped out camera lenses in the trunk, Helen put her hand on my arm. I'm worried about you getting sick, she said quietly. Have you been out in this before? I told her that I'd been on farms, feedlots, and slaughterhouse floors quite a few times. This is going to be different, she said.
The scientists who come out to meet her all say they have CAFO experience, too, Helen said. But when they leave, they are sick for weeks. She called it "poo flu."
I should plan on taking it easy when I get home, she said. I shouldn't go right back to work. My heart started racing, and I was afraid of another panic attack. I didn't have any sick days left.
She looked over the car, and asked about my rental insurance. When I return the car, they may try to fine me or withhold my deposit, she warned. The last time Charlie was out here, they tried to say that he had been smoking in the car. Helen found this hilarious. Charlie doesn't smoke. They just had never smelled a factory farm.
This is the best time of year for a poop tour, Helen announced as we clicked our seatbelts. The rain of the Pacific Northwest has added to the runoff from the factory farms, she said. The waste lagoons were all full. We'd get some great shots.
I told her that we'd already had some trouble on the country roads with all the mud, and she laughed. Oh that's not mud, sweetheart, she said. That's shit.
We got closer to the farms, and I saw that she wasn't exaggerating. Their fences butted up to the edge of the road. The brown mess we were driving on wasn't dirt mixed with Seattle rain. I could see it flowing from the perimeters of the farms. I could see it flowing right out of the cows.
As I drove, it flung itself up on the car and covered the windshield. The wiper blades strained. I kept shooting wiper fluid onto the glass, and it turned into a smeared mess. At times I would hop out of the car to take photographs, but much of the poop tour was spent driving like this. Helen narrated as we saw observed her community through yellow and brown streaks.
Jeff announced that he wanted to film with the windows down, in order to collect b-roll footage as we drove. I really wouldn't do that, Helen said. Feces from the road accumulated on his lens and splattered the back seat.
We rolled up the windows and closed the air vents. Jeff film through the mess. When I stopped the car periodically, I'd try to roll down the windows. It would squeegee against the rubber lining of the windowsill and collect in chunks.
I was a bit worried the clown car would get stuck in the slough. Several times we spun out on the country roads. I had the flash image of me and Jeff pushing this thing as Helen steered, sputtering feces in our face as we slipped and fell. I decided then and there that if this car got stuck, I would leave it. The rental car company could hunt me down.
I want to emphasize that I'm not being sensational with the potty talk. I am struggling to describe the scene appropriately. The word "waste" feels inaccurate, because that could include everything from vegetation to farm debris. "Feces" sounds too clinical, sanitary by comparison. "Sewage" also doesn't seem right, because this is a particularly foul form of sewage, full of chemicals, hormones, and antibiotic waste. There's only word for all this. Yakima Valley is a town drowning in shit.
To understand why, we need to step back and look at how factory farms operate.
In the pastoral red barns of our imagination, farms are an endless cycle of birth and death. Animals walk the land eating and pooping. Their poop goes into the soil where it decomposes. The plants use those nutrients in the soil to grow. Animals eat those plants. The cycle continues. The system is ingenious and perfectly designed. Even on foul topics like feces, there is an effortless beauty to the natural world.
With factory farms, animals don't walk the fields. There are thousands or tens of thousands of them, all confined. The dairy cows in Yakima, for instance, spend much of their time on concrete and steel. The waste can't get back to the soil. It doesn't feed the plants. It has nowhere to go and it piles up.
The result is something award-winning science journalist Madeline Drexler says is straight out of the Middle Ages. Factory farms are "akin to a walled medieval city, where waste is tossed out the window, sewage runs down the street, and feed and drinking water are routinely contaminated by fecal material," she says.
I think the analogy is pretty good, but it doesn't go far enough. Medieval cities were not nearly as densely populated as factory farms. A better exercise would be to picture a modern major city, like Houston or Detroit; now imagine removing all the toilets and sewers, and everyone relieving themselves in pots and dumping it outside.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, one factory farm can produce as much waste as an entire city. The hogs on factory farms in just one county of North Carolina, for instance, produce as much sewage as all the humans in the Boston Metropolitan area.
The problem is getting worse. Factory farms in the United States have grown by 14 percent from 2012-2020. That's 82 billion additional tons of waste produced every year, according to one study: roughly equivalent to the waste of three new New York Cities.
Sometimes it feels like we are in the manure business and we just happen to make a little milk every once in a while, dairy farmers like to say. This is a line I've heard from every type of farmer. They change it up and say "we just happen to make bacon every once in a while," or chicken, or beef, but the aphorism remains true. A big part of modern animal agriculture today is managing massive amounts of fecal sludge.
All of the waste is different. I've been on enough factory farms at this point that I've become a bit of a connoisseur. When I visit farms, I don't collect samples for scientific testing, but I collect notes and photographs. I also evaluate the waste using the imperfect measurement of how difficult it is to breathe through my inflamed asthmatic lungs.
Cattle feedlots are bigger and open air. They're a bit easier on the lungs. The smell overpowers, but generally not in the choking way that I feel around the birds. Feedlots smell similar to a petting zoo or small farm, but concentrated. They still smell like cow, but sharp. Sometimes they burn.
Egg farms have warehouse-style structures called "sheds." But these aren't sheds, they're catacombs. They're packed floor to ceiling with battery cages. Some sheds contain up to 120,000 birds. The birds defecate on the ones below. It accumulates in pits; if you look closely you'll find the corpses of birds that escaped their cages only to drown in their collective waste.
Even with a respirator, I can barely breathe in these sheds. They have no windows, and minimal air circulation. There is concentrated ammonia, human pathogens, endotoxins, and volatile organic compounds that irritate the lungs and are linked to lung disease and nervous system damage. The particulates alone are too much for healthy lungs. The air is thick and rough with feed dust, feather dust, excrement dust, corpse dust.
The particles hang in the air, and in the dim light of headlamps and cameras the sheds have a dreamlike state, something out of a science-fiction movie. In the absence of sunlight and fresh air, bits of feces and feathers cling to the metal cages in dendrites and tendrils. Wisps of it attach themselves to the struggling fans. I've seen sheds full of so much of this dusty, tacky biomass that it fills the gaps in the wire mesh. The cages start to look like H.R. Giger artwork, a biomechanical blend of bird and metal.
Any time you have many thousands of animals confined in a small area—the literal definition of a CAFO—the amount of waste produced will be a problem. But industrial hog farms and dairy farms, like those in Helen's community, are the worst I've ever seen.
