Original subtitles

[thrilling music]

We are fairly certain that they do not live in the past

or look to the future.

Then the man told her

"If they don't dwell on the past

"and they can't hope for the future

"they can only live in the present.

"And if their circumstances lead them to suffer..

...then that is the totality of their existence."

[instrumental music]

[music continues]

[music continues]

[music continues]

[music continues]

This is 16 weeks.

This is still the pattern which I follow today.

The Hamburg, an ancient old German breed.

Here's the king of all the egg chickens, the Leghorns.

"The American Standards Of Perfection."

You get a copy of "The Standards"

and you look at the chicken and you look at the picture.

You look at the chicken and you look at the picture

until you imprint it in your head.

The slight arch of the tail

the height, uh, where the neck is over the head.

So when I began to try to bring back standard-bred birds

and as I did my work, I thought I'm going to go back

to the original utility farm birds.

I grew up on a farm here in Kansas..

...and my father showed cattle and stuff

and did it for a living back then.

And as a kid, you know, county fairs to me

was just as exciting as Christmas or holidays

or anything.

And then I started seeing all the chickens.

My dad said that all of a sudden, I would be gone

He always knew where to find me.

I would always be over in the chicken barn.

At the age of five, I got my first show chickens.

This is what we breed here.

The Barred Rock is the oldest American breed that there is.

This is the breed that everybody raised

in this country by the millions

from about 1850 to 1950s.

The White Jersey Giant was a wonderful breed.

Extremely slow-growing and everything

and that's part of the reason why they lost favor.

Other than the 40 or 50 I have here

there's probably not another 20 in the whole world.

Everything I'm doing here is nothing new.

In fact, this is all very, very old.

This is poultry farming 50 years ago.

There was this wonderful system

of farmers who got together

and supported each other to produce the best.

That is completely gone today.

He tells them the story

how in 1923 in the Delmarva Peninsula

a small, almost funny, accident happened

to an Ocean View housewife named Celia Steele.

She had received 500 chicks

instead of the 50 she had ordered.

Rather than get rid of them, she decided to experiment

with keeping the birds indoors through the winter.

Confined and lacking sun and exercise

her birds would never have survived

were it not for the newly discovered feed supplements.

Steele's loop of experimentation continued.

In 1923, she had 10,000 birds

and in 1935, 250,000.

Ten years after Steele's breakthrough

the Delmarva Peninsula had become

the poultry capital of the world.

She had perhaps unknowingly

given birth to the modern poultry industry

and begun the global creep of factory farming.

No one fired a pistol to mark the start

of the race to the bottom.

The Earth just tilted

and everyone slid into the hole.

Pull that first bottle, pull the first bottle out

see what they got for clarity.

You got the sample number? Great.

Great.

This is sample number 3-E.

- Okay.. - Hey, Larry.

There's somebody that's movin'

right on the other side of that shed over there.

Yeah.

There's a creek that runs through this tree line

off in the distance.

Somewhere just over three miles long.

In that one creek, there are 31 CAFOs

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations

that eventually drain into that one specific creek.

So we've actually, uh, started doin' some

some checkin' on this creek, on these -- on these waters

to see what we're comin' up with.

Here in Eastern North Carolina

the area is rural, the people are poor

very little political clout.

And we have one of the heaviest concentration

of swine in the world.

And very soon, we'll likely have the highest concentration

of poultry operations in the world.

This river was just a paradise.

You'd catch more fish in just a few hours

than you knew what to do with.

This was a place that you could really make a living fishing.

And then all of a sudden in the early '90s

my son and I began to see fish with sores on them.

We began to see fish dyin' in larger and larger numbers

and then we began to get the sores that the fish had.

We continued fishing until this river out here

was coated shore to shore with these dead fish.

There were so many dead fish, they were burying them

with a bulldozer on the other beach.

So we shut everything down.

I remember the early days.

I went out to near the mouth of the river

and I could see sediments running in and different things

but I didn't see a source anywhere

which would account for all the carnage

that was going on in the river.

When I got back to New Bern, I told the pilot

let's fly up the Trent River to figure out what was wrong

with this river and get it fixed.

When I got into Jones County, I began to see

all these pink Pepto-Bismol-lookin' lagoons.

Uh, I didn't know what they were.

I had no idea.

I saw the barns

but I really didn't know what I was lookin' at.

Everywhere you look.

You can be at 1000 feet over Duplin County

you look out over the horizon, you can count 100 lagoons

as you look around the airplane. 100.

I remember I called some folks over

some friends I had in Division Water Quality in North Carolina.

I said, "Hey, what are those things?"

And then he said, "Rick, don't you know?

Those are hog lagoons."

You know, you say pink lagoon. Doesn't that sound nice?

You know, you got a girl in a bathing suit layin' out

a little chair and table with some cocktails on it

and everybody's stretched out in front of the lagoon.

Here's what's goin' on in a lagoon.

You got 10,000 pigs

in these confinement buildings

and what they're doing is they're defecating.

They're poopin' right on the floor

and it goes through slats

and then it goes under the floor

out to these huge cesspools

that are nothing but dirt-lined.

No concrete liners, no plastic liners

just basically dirt.

It goes in that lagoon

and as that lagoon begins to fill up

with this fecal marinade of feces and urine

they gotta do something with it.

They shoot up in the air

and it ends up in the ditches and it ends up in our water

and then our river goes out of balance.

And the fish begin to die and people begin to get sick.

The Earth is about 5.3 billion years old.

Mammals have only been around 60 million years.

Anatomically, modern humans have been around

for about 200,000 years.

And then virtually everything that we associate

with human culture and human civilization

has occurred in the last 10,000 years.

And in that 10,000 years

this incredible spike

of population, of consumption

uh, of essentially humanity freein' itself

from the constraints of many natural systems

has all happened in the last 200 years

beginning in the 18th century but really becoming intense

in this post World War II period

that people call the Great Acceleration.

This transformation now is called the Anthropocene.

This is the period that's dominated by humanity.

We are the Goliath

and nature in all of its forms is the David.

There's never been a time in world history

in which there's been so many people

with so much access

to the conditions of a decent life.

There's also never been any point in human history

when there have been so many people who don't have access

to the necessary conditions of a decent life.

Never has humanity been so powerful

since we crawled out of the trees.

But probably never have individual humans

actually felt so disempowered.

The truth is, we don't really know what to do with ourselves.

We don't know what we want

and in part, we don't know what we want

because we don't know who we are.

And so the place to begin is to try to go back

and try to understand who we are.

Colonel..

...Harland..

...Sanders. Is that right, sir?

That's right.

[audience applauding]

Colonel, I don't know what you do

but I think you look too beautiful to work.

[audience laughing]

Colonel Harland Sanders was born

in Henryville, Indiana, in 1890.

His father died when he was five

forcing his mother to take on two jobs.

His mother was away for days on end

leaving Harland to forage for things in the fields

like sassafras buds and apples

to cook for his younger brother and sister.

I used to work here on this farm, clearin' new ground.

Then that first month, he fired me.

My mother, she said

"What on Earth are you ever going to amount to?

"Harry, you've got no father.

I got nobody to help me and depend on but you."

And I made a resolve, if I ever got another job

I was sure going to see, prove to her that I was worthy of it.

[instrumental music]

After a long run of failures

Harland Sanders began cooking out of his service station

to make some extra money.

We'd cook meals for the five in the family

and then we wouldn't eat it right away ourselves

hoping to sell one, two, three, or the five meals.

People began to come from miles around.

But pan-frying chicken took too long

and Harland couldn't keep up with the demand

so he modified a then new appliance

known as the pressure cooker.

He was able to reduce the cooking time

down to the minutes

and meet customers' growing demand.

By 1964, Colonel Sanders

was unable to keep up with the business

and he sold the company for two million dollars

under the pretense that there would be quality control

and that no one would tamper with his chicken recipe.

Well, how'd you like to make a million dollars

frying chicken?

Today's guest did just that.

And I just think things have got to be right

and there's nothing in the world more demanding in food

than to have quality there.

Kentucky Fried Chicken!

Bonzai!

You have a reputation of being very fussy

about your original recipe.

that you want things cooked

the way the colonel meant them to be cooked.

- Is that true? - That's right. That's right.

It just had to be right. That's all there was to it.

You know, we kind of got away from that, too, actually

by selling out to two different corporations since I sold

but they've depreciated the value of my product.

Howdy, folks? It's me, Colonel Sanders.

I've been gone for a while and, boy

howdy have things changed.

The guy came out and he did a little presentation.

And I trusted the numbers and trusted him

and then he has, like, this cost projection sheet.

Even if you make the minimum that we can pay you

you're still gonna have positive cash flow.

The farming economy was bad.

I wanted to stay here on the farm.

My kids are the fifth generation in North Carolina

and I looked at that as kind of like my lifeline.

What's the drawback here?

Of course, she told me not to do it.

And I'm like, "No, honey. This is a sure thing.

I got a contract."

Well, the problem is, is every number on that paper

that he gave me was pulled straight out of fantasyland.

My reservation was the debt.

Well, I mean, you know, we were 20.

She was 21, I was 25

and you're talkin' about a quarter million dollars.

That's a lot of money.

I went from two houses to four houses.

My income did not double.

My expenses more than doubled.

It's just a treadmill of debt.

Every contract's take it or leave it.

You're half a million dollars in debt.

You're gonna take it.

It sucks, but you'll take it.

You come across these masterpieces.

Steel, plastic, rotating wheels.

Mechanical arms repeating the same motion.

All brought together in the most ingenious ways

to produce more and more.

Is this efficiency?

You once farmed independently with sweat and labor

love and tedium, and it was satisfying.

Now you go into debt, turn on the machines

take orders from central command..

...but you are efficient.

That's why you do it.

You and your machines are feeding the world.

You are giving people what they want.

You want this world, you want efficiency.

You don't wanna put anyone out of business.

Nobody ever got the idea

wouldn't it be really cool if we raised

millions of animals under really hideous conditions

and gave them short, miserable and painful lives.

By the way, we would also pollute our waterways

uh, and deplete our top soils.

Wouldn't that really be a great way of doing business?

There was never sort of some evil genius

whose idea it was to create a world that was like that.

It's -- it's a place that we got to step by step.

And we're going, "How did we get here?"

The United Nations released a report.

It was over 400 pages.

It's called "Livestock's Long Shadow."

And in this report, they said

whatever environmental issue you're looking at

water pollution, air pollution, climate change

raising animals for food

are one of the top two or three contributors.

It causes somewhere between 14%

and more than half of all climate change.

And so now we're at this point where it's a question

of how do we go somewhere else.

If you look back a generation or two

many, many people were raising pigs this way.

But the basics that I am using today

is passed from one generation to the next.

Father, son, grandfather.

It's a way of life rather than going to, uh, a factory

producing protein units.

- Sophia. - What?

- Are they all up and out? - I think pretty much.

- And they're looking happy? - Yeah.

If you come out here, you'll notice

that they'll be watching you.

They -- they pay attention.

They run away first

and then they're all gonna come back.

They wanna know what's going on.

And I, I think that's really part

of how a pig makes its living, you know?

They're interested in a lot of things.

They're intelligent.

They like being together. They're a group animal.

If they're by themself, they're uncomfortable.

Basically, everything that we're gonna have for breakfast

is from right here.

Uh, it's either from the garden or eggs from our chickens.

And the sausage is from Niman Pork.

When I first started raising pigs in the '70s

I went to meetings and you know, they told me

you gotta get bigger or get out.

And they showed me these buildings

and how you could put one of these up

and how many animals you could raise

and all this kind of thing.

I just had to visit one of those buildings once

to realize that I -- I just --

I just did not wanna raise animals like that.

I'd seen free-range chicken in the market.

Why don't we call these free-range pigs, you know?

So I sent some pork out there, trying to, you know

market to some of the restaurants in San Francisco.

Specialty market.

So the chef said, "I don't know what you do

but this is the best pork I've ever had in my life."

Almost from the beginning

I started looking for other farmers

that were not going for the confinement system.

Initially, we weren't creating new farmers.

We were just finding the ones that were there.

As the demand continued to grow

I started working on the network of Niman Ranch farmers

which today is about 500 farmers.

[cows mooing]

This is what it means when the grass is always greener.

As you go down into these lower areas, the soil gets thicker

and they know that the grasses down here are better for them.

They're more palatable, there's more energy.

It's really strong.

And that means that the fiber is there

and -- and it's -- it's really producing

a lot of milk and -- and flesh.

The meat industry has done a good job

of disconnecting eating meat from killing animals

and it's really made it possible for people

not to fully appreciate that there a -- actually is an animal

that had to be murdered for them to eat this.

[instrumental music]

They're animals that we have a contract with to care for..

...and provide the best possible life.

So we've done all that.

They've had a good life

and now we have the authority to decide

that we're gonna take their life

and cut them up into pieces and feed people.

So it's, uh, uh, it's -- it's a tough moment.

[indistinct chatter]

The people born into animal agriculture today

think that confinement agriculture

is the way it's supposed to be.

If the consuming public saw what it really looks like

they would stop eating it.

You have to start thinking like the turkey

and realize what they're gonna do next..

...and also sort of learn their language.

I mean, turkeys are always talking.

They have a tremendous language of their own

and many, many different vocalizations

that mean different things.

So that's part of the reason why Ben Franklin

didn't want the eagle.

He thought the wild turkey

was a far more majestic, honorable animal.

People think turkeys as being stupid

and, you know, drowned in the rain

and all this stuff, which isn't true.

That all got based where people went out

and bought baby turkeys and brought them home

and didn't properly house them.

And it rained and they all drowned.

But my response to that is take a human baby

and put it out in the rainstorm

and see how long it -- it survives.

It will put its head up and drown.

Um, you know, that had more to do with just really bad care.

Now the other side of it is

that the modern industrial turkey that everybody buys

at Thanksgiving is a lot stupider.

But that's because of man when they've decided

to take the turkey off the land and house them in buildings

actually began to select for stupidity.

Because if you have an animal that you don't want it

to do anything, you want it to just eat

and stand there and gain weight

you don't want it to have any intelligence.

[laughs]

They like to be where the action is.

I finally learned why drugs are so essential

to factory farming poultry.

Healthy birds don't require drugs.

Sick mutated ones do.

Turkeys have been so genetically altered

that they're no longer even capable of having sex.

They're all artificially inseminated.

I learned that because corporations

want to pay less for feed

and Americans like the taste of fat.

Today's meat birds have been bred with mutant obese genes

to grow faster and fatter than ever imaginable before.

So much faster and fatter

that if a human baby had her growth

similarly accelerated

a two-month-old would weigh more than six hundred pounds.

They're trapped in these bodies

that keep them from doing normal animal behavior.

Well, abnormal is now called normal.

Fifty years ago, these chickens

wouldn't have survived on the farm.

The family farm was the original small business

in this country.

There was this notion that through your own hard work

and your own decisions, you can either succeed or fail.

And that was an idea that embedded itself

in the American way, that embedded itself

in the American economy and culture

and lasted until the 1970s

when we changed what economic sovereignty meant.

You know, the almighty good and the best object

you can achieve is just cheapness.

Make the food as cheap as you possibly can.

And as long as it's cheap

people really didn't care how it was produced.

We still hold this idea in our head

that there's capitalism out there in rural America

that we have independent farmers

that rise or sink based on how well they do.

What we really have now is a system

that looks a lot like a Soviet Politburo system.

It's a system based on central planning

central ownership, centralized control.

I mean, you've literally got a control room in Springdale, Arkansas

with people typin' away on computers, figurin' out

how many chickens are gonna be raised

on farms in the state of Georgia

or North Carolina or Mississippi.

John Tyson and his son, Don

were brilliant businessmen.

You know, he started out by hauling

you know, fruit from Arkansas to Kansas City.

And then when that went under, then he started hauling chickens

and then that's what started his business.

He had a lot of guts.

Don Tyson was brilliant and visionary

and ruthless and completely unsentimental.

He was born in near poverty.

The northwest corner of Arkansas was the poorest corner

of one of the poorest states in the country.

Nobody showed a great measure of pity

to him when he was growing up

and I don't think he felt he owed that

to anybody else.

The chicken business was pretty simple then.

We grew one chicken, it made money.

We grow two chickens, it makes money. We grow more.

And so that, that's the history of our company.

But as it grew, he ran into the problems that I have today.

The demand fluctuated too much.

He had to find a way where he had a product

that didn't change, that was identical

and was in demand 12 months of the year.

Don spent 12 years going to McDonald's saying

"I can make chicken cheaper than anybody can make

a pound of beef or a pound of pork."

And finally after 12 years

they -- they saw what he was seeing.

And that was the Chicken McNugget.

♪ McDonald's new Chicken McNuggets ♪

♪ McDonald's and you ♪

He was always capable

of putting the, the risk, the loss

the chances on other people.

Preferably his farmers.

They always paid the price when things failed.

He'd invented the tournament system.

It is truly a Machiavellian and brilliant system

that all these companies now use.

The tournament is unique in that most farmers

get paid a certain price for the commodity they raise.

You know, corn farmers, soybean farmers

there's a market price for their product.

But chicken farmers get paid

based on the terms of this tournament.

Tyson will take all the farmers in an area

and then it will rank them based on how efficiently

their birds were fattened up

on a given ration of feed that Tyson provided.

Based on your ranking

you were either paid a premium price

or your pay is cut

and that is the bonus

that's given to the farmers at the top.

It makes it so all farmers know

that if they're going to do well

it is gonna be at the expense of their neighbors.

So it systematically divides and conquers rural communities.

It makes sure that farmers don't cooperate

they don't share information.

If I try to compare the results of my tournament to my neighbor's

I can actually be sued by the company.

I have no desire whatsoever

for my kids to do this.

I've got more faith in them

and they're smart enough to not do what their daddy did

and, uh, I just had such a bug to get back to the farm.

I got nobody's butt to kick but mine for getting into it.

Um, but I will keep them out of it.

My 13-year-old son has never set foot in these houses.

Neither will my other son or my daughter.

I don't know one chicken farmer that's happy.

It's that disrespect for the farmers.

For what we are to this business

and to be treated like, uh, uh..

...like a serf.

Somebody called it indentured servitude.

Indentured servant doesn't have $500,000 worth of debt.

I'd trade places with him.

Year after year, the lopsided contracts reduce Craig

to little more than a low-level manager of his own farm

owning nothing more than the houses

the waste and the dead birds.

His chief concern becomes protecting his family

from the danger of their massive debt.

It's not just the unwinding of a way of life.

There is, perhaps, an exhaustion of spirit.

We turned off the interstate in the Central Valley

and headed toward the town of Tulare

to see if we could find any trace of the lake

that was no longer there.

Tulare Lake was once the largest body of fresh water

west of the Mississippi

before it disappeared.

We were told that long before European settlers

came here, the lake's basin was home

to the largest Native American population

in North America.

How they once thrived on the plants and animals

that lived around the lake.

Tulare Lake was a significant stop for millions of birds

migrating along the Pacific Flyway.

With its fertile ground and water resources

settlers began to move in.

And in the 1850s

the governor of California ordered the execution

and annihilation of the Yokut Indian Nation.

As settlements grew

the farmers redirected the rivers

that fed the lake to provide water

for their crops and farm animals.

The early pioneers of big agro business

took the cows off pastures

and placed them into high-density feed lots.

We drove through the now dry lakebed

and passed the massive dairy complexes

that now populate the area.

Okay, let's see. He's right behind us again.

Who knows what he's doing?

So stay off of our property.

We have our right. We're on a state road.

So I'm not doing anything wrong.

I appreciate it, okay?

Thanks. Okay.

It is good. Let's pass on now.

Wow.

Might want to get a picture of this too.

Good eye.

[indistinct chatter]

Back, back, back, back.

Here he comes. Paul, here he comes.

Paul, he's coming.

Nine billion farm animals.

Their lives are categorized by unmitigated misery

from the moment they're born

to the moment that they're slaughtered.

98% of people eat animal products

and 98% of people

are complicit in cruelty to animals

that if they actually witnessed it

they would find it morally loathsome.

These are the worst jobs in the country

working in slaughterhouses.

And yet anytime anybody is eating meat

you are entering into this mercenary relationship

wherein you are paying someone else

to slice animals' throats open for you

to castrate pigs without pain relief

even on the so-called humane farms

to slice the beaks off of chickens

even on the cage-free egg farms.

The level of abuse from the farm to transportation to slaughter

is something that will shock the conscience

of most kind people.

It's only a matter of time before you move from

you know, where we are now to a world in which

more and more people are saying

you know, well, maybe we shouldn't be consuming them

in the first place.

Do you have eight?

Today is the day in which we load all the turkeys

for the Thanksgiving market.

It's always the day I hate.

It's -- it's not like it's a great enjoyment to know

that I'm going to send these turkeys off to their death.

I just don't know how else to finance what I'm doing.

This is the way I know of saving these endangered animals.

There ought to be 12 in there.

If you want to help preserve them or save them

we have to put them back into your meal.

Are you gonna drive dad's truck or is he gonna drive?

He is.

Where do you want me to move it to?

They'll start loading right here.

When he was a young kid, he told me he was gonna do this.

I mean, he was eight years old

he bought twelve turkeys

and, uh, he raised them all

and when they got about, oh, half-growing

the, the coyotes got in 'em

and killed them all but one.

And that one turkey was kind of like

one of the family for years.

Lars, my wife, she went to leave one day

to g -- go get the kids from school

and backed over that turkey..

[laughs] ...with the car.

And, of course, she jumped out and wrung its neck

and right away and let it bleed out, so we..

It wasn't a waste. We ate it.

He is really old.

Sort of support him up or he isn't gonna breath right.

But after that, well, he always had turkeys.

[indistinct chatter]

This has to work.

I've thought about that a lot at night

that it is my responsibility

to show people

because part of sustainability is the economics.

And, you know, these birds have to pay for their way.

Part of being a farmer is making a living at it.

So who says standard-bred turkeys

have to be skinny little narrow-breasted things.

Look at that, some of these hens.

Beautiful round-breasted hens.

These birds you've worked with for six, seven months

and you've started with an egg

and hatched and everything else

are gonna be sent off to be killed.

And if, if you're not aware of that

you know, but I love my turkeys

so I know what's gonna happen.

Today farmers working outside of the factory farm system

are required to fit themselves into a model

built to serve big ag.

Access to affordable slaughterhouses

what the industry calls processing plants

is the single biggest problem that farmers like Frank face.

Most slaughterhouses in America today

simply refuse to work with smaller clients.

Independent farmers

once a crowned jewel of American democracy

are now peasants serving the will of corporations.

We sent our turkeys to the processing plant

in Nebraska to be processed

not knowing that the plant is very close

to being foreclosed on by the bank.

The employees really didn't give a damn

and they were cutting the colons

and spilling fecal material all over the meat

and the inspectors were condemning them all

and nobody really cared.

The turkeys are just part of the widget

that's gotta get shut down the assembly line.

Basically, they destroyed 40% of our flock.

We more or less lost

about the entire amount of turkeys

which was about 2600 turkeys

was -- was the number of turkeys I put on the truck.

You know, again, these big companies

these big corporations, you know, they don't get it.

So we're entering MARC, uh, right now.

The most striking thing about it

is that there are these large concrete bunkers

they used to manufacture ammunitions during World War II

and they stored them in the bunkers.

And they were able to get it transferred

from US Military Department of Defense to the, uh, USDA

and created the MARC.

It's probably the largest

livestock research center in the world.

More than a billion dollars has been spent over there

in the past 50 years, which is allocated by Congress

to support maximizing meat production

and dairies and things like that.

As a clinical veterinarian

I've been at MARC for half of its lifetime.

So I knew where the dead bodies were buried.

About a mile down, there is probably some sheep.

That's it. Left side of the road.

- All those buildings. - What did you say, Connie?

I'm saying that's the research center.

I was banned from here eight or nine months ago.

- Here comes another car. - Yeah, we got company.

They're probably calling MARC security.

Well, they can't do anything to us.

We haven't done anything wrong.

What I came to realize over the years

was some of the actual experiments that they did there

I could no longer buy into.

One was a case where a technician did surgery

on about 60 pigs.

She used a very fine suture and the wrong suture pattern

and so a couple days after the surgery

all the guts fell out of the pigs.

So when a lamb is born..

Another case that comes to mind is the project

called the Easy Care sheep

and MARC was trying to fight nature.

They were trying to convert domesticated sheep

into a wild sheep

and the idea was just to minimize the labor.

I had a veterinary student and his job

he would just pick up lambs by the dozens or hundreds

depending on the day, that had died each day.

So he'd go out there and pick up all the deads.

Another example I can think about

was on a Saturday I was on call.

The technician told me there was a heifer that was down.

So I went up there and it turned out

it was from an experiment.

Typically, the way to measure sex drive in a bull

is you put one bull into a pen

with a single female who's in heat

and you see how many times the bull mounts

the female in 15 minutes.

In this case, this heifer was with five or six bulls

restrained in a headlock.

I'm -- I'm not sure why, what the rationale for that was

but this heifer was mounted

until she ruptured both of her Achilles tendons

and broke both of her rear legs.

Basically, a cow was raped to death.

After that, I started documenting things I saw

or things I heard about, cases of animal abuse.

I had a log.

I guess at some point, uh

I realized I just..

Yeah, I just, it was time to pull the trigger.

I thought I could just be hidden

and just supply Michael Moss

of "The New York Times" with the documents.

Another veterinarian showed up unexpectedly

and, uh, saw me with him there

and -- and that's how I got found out.

Is this the same guy in the red?

Yes. Probably a security guy.

Do I have to stop? Is he looking at me?

You're staying on the road. You can do whatever you want.

Oh, we're just driving, looking around.

Okay, um, I notice you got a camera in the back there.

- Yes, we do. - Okay, what is it for?

It's, uh, we're filming.

You're on federal property, sir.

- Are you -- - May I see your ID?

Uh, are you a -- a state police?

- No. - Okay, then I'm sorry.

I'm not going to. I know my rights.

She's writing down your plate.

Now what?

- You can go. - Okay, okay.

Hours after they were stopped for filming

Jim and Connie received a knock on the door

from an FBI agent specializing in eco-terrorism.

Despite the fact that he has no criminal record

the agent placed a file folder on the table

an inch and a quarter thick

and opened it to the first page

revealing a color photograph of Jim.

Not long after he was visited by the FBI

Jim bought "The Whistleblower's Handbook"

and in it, he read that about 80% of the time

the whistleblower gets hammered.

It just builds over 20-something years.

I mean, you just get to a point where..

I mean, everybody's got that point

and I just hit mine watching that, uh, Perdue commercial.

My dad always, uh, taught us one line.

Uh, do the right thing and we're doing the right thing

and we're transparent.

He wants the public to believe that that's a normal farm.

I might not be a lot of things, but I'm not a liar.

My granddaddy drilled that into me very good.

Um, he always said, you know, tell the truth

no matter how bad it hurts.

I've seen birds with four legs, no eyes.

Bacteria-laden intestines.

You'll smell that walking in the door.

That can be horrendous.

And you'll see heart attacks.

They call them flip-overs.

We call it water belly.

This will get purple and it's just full of fluids.

It's a absolute breakdown of the heart

lungs and whatnot.

I'm not a vet, but that's not normal.

Rubber.

The leg's folded completely in half.

I -- I really don't know what happens.

It's just so soft that it doesn't snap.

You run into a lot of these that can't get up.

You can hear respiratory in this one really bad.

Can you hear it?

This is your premium primetime, no antibiotic ever, cage-free

humanely raised, blah-blah, whatever else is on that label.

You know, I -- I -- I mean, I took pictures.

I cut the birds open, told them what it was

sent it, nobody came.

If you want the egg to hatch

you had to leave it in there with..

If Craig, he had come to me first and said

"I wanna be a whistleblower. I wanna tell the truth

about what's happening on these farms.."

I would not have said, get a camera and start videotaping

because the risk would have been too high.

We've been around for 37 years

and, uh, represented very high-profile whistleblowers

and we know what happens.

You're probably just gonna get your ass handed to you

by the corporation.

It's not just like you can come up to these giants

and throw stones and say bad things about them

and expect not to have some sort of retaliation.

There's a brand that's at stake

and they definitely wanna fight for that.

We were going through the government route

and -- and what we found out was

if you step in that congressman's office

time you leave, the chicken counselor knows

that you were just there.

That's just the way it is.

And I found out, okay, the hot button is video.

I'm Craig Watts.

I'm a contract poultry producer with Perdue Farms.

Leah released a video

and "The New York Times" picked it up

and then they got it on the "Reddit" board

and, and it's just like, pfft, damn.

"Forbes" and "Washington Post" and front page of "Reddit"

and "New York Times," "Wired."

It really upset people.

The next thing you knew, there's a half million views

in 24 hours, and I was like, "Oh, shoot."

I mean, I didn't expect that.

They dispatched a team of welfare experts to my farm.

Company people.

Six visits in ten days, if I remember right.

They were telling me my welfare standards on my farm

weren't up to their standards.

How can I be so bad to finish first in the tournament system?

The whole thing was to get me to the breaking point.

What you guys doin' over here?

- Just filming. - Just a little videotaping.

Well, you can't be filming my farm.

- Why not? - Because I don't want you to.

- Well, okay, well. - Yeah.

You guys might as well get in your trucks

and go on about your business.

Now you're here trying to hurt me.

- I'm not trying to hurt you. - Yes, you are.

You're trying to put me out of business.

- You've tried for years. - I haven't, what..

When have I ever done anything to you?

- You want to hurt me. - What?

That's what these cameras are about.

Cut your camera off, please, sir.

We could see where they're putting the waste

we could see the lagoon, we could see if it's overflowing

we could see if it's running in the rivers and streams

and where they're spraying, right?

We could see all of that.

The one thing we can't see

is what's inside those buildings.

That's the deep, dark secret of this industry.

What is it that the industry is trying to hide inside?

Is it suffering?

When asked, the majority of people

say that they object to animal cruelty

and environmental degradation.

You'd be hard-pressed to find any other issue

on which so many people see eye to eye.

And yet suffering and disregard for the environment

has been built into the equation of cost

and efficiency.

They've calculated how close to death

we can keep an animal without killing it.

How close to destruction we can keep the environment

without losing it altogether.

It's an essential element for a system

that delivers the cheap meat we've come to demand.

Are we trying to hide it from ourselves?

The public has a right to know

the truth about the meat they eat

about what this industry is doing to them.

Okay, and then hit it again to turn it off.

We process 19,000 hogs a day.

Uh, so it's been five months

since I started working at the plant.

Whistleblowers in our society play a very important role.

Corporations can't tolerate that

so they pass these laws called Ag-Gag to shut us down.

And in some states, if you take a photograph on a factory farm

you could have committed a felony.

Not a misdemeanor but a felony.

I mean, it's ridiculous.

My job primarily is I recruit.

I look for people who are, for one, willing to go

into these environments and work in them

but also to do it successfully.

Honestly, finding people who even want to do this job

is challenging enough, let alone then breaking it down

to people who are, who are gonna be good at it.

To actually participate and be a part of this world

maintaining your cover, and it's -- it's huge

and you can't do that

if you're just gonna stand there and watch.

You have to do the job you're hired to do.

There are many days where I would come back to my hotel.

I'd wanna curl up in a ball

and just not do anything, not write my field notes.

I don't wanna relive the horrible day

that I just had.

I don't want anybody to know

about what's going on inside those facilities.

You can't do that.

You can't shut down the individual's right

to inform other people about what they know.

I don't think that's constitutional.

I have a right under the First amendment

and Fourteenth amendment.

Ag-Gag is the stupidest thing

ag ever did.

When that hit the editorial page of "The New York Times"

it made ag just look like they had something to hide.

Dumbest thing they could ever do.

When you get bashed, you should be opening the door

not shutting it.

I have a saying.

Heat softens steel.

Undercover videos of really bad things

that made the steel soft

and then all of a sudden, industry started coming out

with some good guidelines on animal handling.

And they realized, yeah, we need to change things.

Big is fragile, but has advantages.

Economy of scale, cheap price.

But it's fragile.

We are approaching what was

the notorious Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse

where they kill spent dairy cows

and they're no longer considered to be profitable milking cows.

We're just looking at what you're doing here.

I guess is this a slaughterhouse?

It's against federal law to have cameras?

You'd give us a tour if we asked?

- You would give us a tour -- - I sure won't know.

But do you do tours of the place regularly?

Is that something..

Really?

Right, so these, right, right.

- Okay. - Alright, we'll do that.

In the 2000s, the Humane Society sent an investigator

here to work at this place

and documented horrible conditions

with cows being pushed with forklifts

with animals being horribly mistreated

and this plant was sending

these downed cows into the food supply.

Ground beef from these diseased animals

was going into the school lunch program.

That was what was happening routinely here

and that resulted in the largest beef recall

in US history.

You were established by Abraham Lincoln

who called you The People's Department.

But now your job is to protect industry

from increasing public fears about everything

from tainted meat to farm animal abuse.

When your own dietary guideline committee

cites health concerns and recommends Americans

eat fewer animal products

you ignore them

and buy unwanted meat and cheese to feed our children

through the federal school lunch program.

While independent farmers struggle

you spend millions on photos of celebrities

with milk mustaches to prop up big ag.

While thousands of Americans are hospitalized

or dying from food poisoning

you allow millions of pathogen-infected chickens

to be sold with your approval every week.

While people demand meat raised without antibiotics

you ignore sound science and side with meat companies

to continue putting drugs in animal feed.

You silence the whistleblowers

who do the job you were created to do.

Your job is to guard the fox, not the henhouse.

You are now known as the USDA.

It doesn't look like

the democracy that was around

when I signed up for the Marine Corps 40 years ago.

I swore to support and defend

the Constitution of the United States

against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

I always wondered about the domestic part of that oath.

What kind of a domestic enemy would I have to support

the constitution against, you know?

And then I got into this business

and I see what these corporations are doing

and the way this meat is being raised

and, and then how they put money in the pockets of legislators.

The USDA's been charged by the president to do a better job..

Every secretary of agriculture

whether they're Republican, Democrat

they learn on the first day

that if the subsidies don't continue to flow

if meat doesn't continue to be favored in diet guidelines

you're gonna hear about it in the next election.

[indistinct chatter]

They pay the US Government enormous amounts of money

to make sure that their products

are front and center in what the government tells people to eat.

There are plenty of things in his childhood

and now his child's childhood that informed him

that diary was a necessary part of a well-balance diet.

But he had seen too much and for him

it was no longer an issue of personal health.

He's no longer blind to what goes into a glass of milk.

What are you, what are you feeling for in there?

The dairy cows are artificially inseminated.

It's a bit jumpy, I think I would be

if someone did that to me.

He learned that immediately at their birth

babies are separated from their mothers.

The females will be sent into the dairy production cycle

while the males are sent into crates for veal production

or sold as beef.

The cows' tails are sometimes docked

for the benefit of the milker.

The hybrid cow has been bred to maximize milk production

yielding ten times the amount of standard cows.

This can lead to mastitis of the udder

or other painful infections.

White blood cells, also known as pus

accumulate and end up in our milk.

They quibble back and forth over the suffering

that goes into the glass of milk

they serve their children.

After that expose

they tried to fire me

but in the end, it was my tenure

that kept me from getting fired.

But on the other hand, I have to move to Lincoln.

I mean, my family's gonna stay here.

But what I didn't really plan for or expect

were all the other negative things.

The past five years have been really, really difficult.

Really difficult.

It's not the way I ever dreamed

this time in my life would be, you know?

And granted, it's for a good cause..

...but..

...I wish it were somehow done differently

with -- with us on the radar.

Sorry.

He had this drive to do this

and again, some good stuff has come out of it..

...but also some not-so-good stuff.

I mean..

...all through the years, I've, um..

...with kind of an absentee dad..

...I played the role of both parents.

It would be easier for me to fix the work side

than the family side.

You know, families, there's too much.

All the emotional stuff that's involved in that

and, um, being relocated to Lincoln

and, you know, I don't want to go to Lincoln.

Well, so here we sit.

At Niman Ranch, we sell about 3000 pigs a week..

...and the hog kill nationally is 400,000 a day.

So 3000 a week, 400,000 a day.

So we're still, in the big picture, small

but the demand is there.

One of the worst fears that people have

if they live in the country is that somebody will build

a confined animal feeding operation, uh, next door to you.

The laws here allow those to be built

within 1800 feet of your house.

The neighbor down the road

a piece of land was sold off by the farmer.

It depends on which way the wind blows.

There's a lot of odor that comes out of the buildings

but each building holds about 2500 hogs

in confined animal feeding operations.

They're not really owned by the farmer.

They're owned by a company.

Then another neighbor

he doesn't care whether he makes any money on the pigs.

It's, he considers it a fertilizer plant.

After a lifetime of raising pigs

Paul decides to make some changes.

He says raising hogs is a young man's game

so last winter a farmer came

and picked up the last of his pigs

the same line he's had since the 1970s.

Paul has become an increasingly rare breed.

It is uncertain whether his now unique knowledge

of raising hogs traditionally

will find its way to a new generation of farmers.

I have done everything to bring those birds into existence.

I had their parents, their grandparents.

I've gathered the eggs, I set the eggs

I washed the eggs.

I spent hours and days taking care of them as babies

and months being with them in the pasture.

Some of the lines I have here

this truly is the last of them on Earth.

I find my faith in doing what I do

and the connection with the earth and with these animals

a very religious experience.

Holiness doesn't mean you do great things.

It means you do small things with great love.

When I was a kid, there was a true love of the aesthetics.

I would go and I would visit the farmers that I knew

and you would look out over the field

and you would see a flock of Barred Rocks

or you would see a flock of Bourbon Red turkeys.

They would truly love the beauty of what they saw

of what they were doing.

That is gone today in farming.

There's no way you could love an animal

that has been genetically engineered

to die in 6 weeks.

I've come to learn why annually

billions of birds are fed antibiotics.

It's not that they're initially sick.

It's so they can stand the filthy

overcrowded conditions they're raised in.

It's because their bodies have been modified

to grow 4 times more quickly than they would naturally

leading to diseases that make drugs essential.

Nearly 80% of all antibiotics

produced by the pharmaceutical industry

are used for factory-farm animals.

This constant flow of antibiotics

is a vital artery of industrial farming

as essential as air or water to the factory-farm system

and it has led to the birth of so-called superbugs.

These bugs are already mutating

to bypass the antibiotics designed to kill them.

Tens of thousands of Americans now die annually

from ailments once easily treated.

The CAFO system, it's like a petri dish

for resistant bacteria

and flu viruses as well.

It's a system that is just ripe for creating disease.

Birds and waterfowl, in particular

are a melting pot for all these viruses.

They come together, they mix and match.

You can get H5N1, H1N7.

What's changing things now

is that the industrialized poultry industry

is spreading across the world.

So now we routinely raise birds

in flocks of several million

on a single site in close proximity

and it's very easy to get a buildup of pathogens

that will go through the entire house in a matter of hours.

The risk then comes that these viruses jump into humans.

And that's when you get a human pandemic

and that's when we get worried

about the likes of Spanish flu back in 1918.

The 1918 pandemic was unlike most influenzas

that attacked the weak.

This one preyed on the young and healthy.

The virus spread around the world

traveling on boats that moved across the oceans.

Estimates suggest that one-third of the world

fell ill.

25 million died in a 25-week period.

By now, the deadly strain of influenza

had not disappeared from the planet

even though it had largely disappeared from our minds.

Where is the virus now?

Is it en route on the wings of a bird?

Imagine 2500 cesspools like that

cooking in the hot summer sun in Eastern North Carolina

and -- and if you don't expect something bad to come out of that

well, I got a bridge to sell you.

This is now some of the filthiest floodwater

ever seen in this country.

In the mix, millions of gallons of concentrated hog manure.

Worried about disease

state officials are shipping in portable incinerators.

Sooner or later, it might be swine flu.

It might be Avian flu.

Something bad's gonna happen in America.

Now I'm not a scientist, but it takes a idiot

not to realize that that's gonna happen.

That may be a rendering truck.

We are creating the perfect storm.

I mean, it's -- it's

not if, it's when there's going to be

another really dangerous flu virus.

Frank's birds are outside, they're free-range

they're exposed to the environment, to pathogens

to wild fowl, et cetera, et cetera, from day 1.

They've build up resistance.

But we can't feed the world's population

on chickens running around in a field.

If we're gonna produce enough chickens to feed the world

then we're gonna have to double from 50 billion

to 100 billion a year

unless we all turn vegetarians tomorrow.

[speaking in Chinese]

The combined population of India and China

is approaching 3 billion people

and every year, their diets look more and more like ours.

The decisions they make will shape the world we all live in.

When I think about the forces that shaped my life the most

this place is a -- a very significant one to me.

Got a couple in here.

Hey, pups.

I was taken by how similar

animals in the barn and animals in our home were

and had trouble making distinction

between the two of them, in terms of which ones

you would -- you treat as a pet

which one you would -- you would take to slaughter.

And I think that had a big impression on me

in terms of what I'm doing today.

The notion that you can't perfectly replicate

animal protein with plant protein, I think, is wrong.

The core parts of meat are everywhere.

They're abundant in the plant kingdom

and so why not take them directly from the plant kingdom

run them through our process

which is heating, cooling and pressure

and create that piece of meat for the center of the plate?

For most people to eat plant-based food

you're gonna have to replicate meat

and it's possible

but it's up to companies like myself

and to others to invest

so that we really deliver on the promise.

[indistinct chatter]

We looked at over 3200 plants now.

We've identified 11 and then we can use these plants

to do a whole bunch of different things.

We can use it as an ingredient to everything

from binding a cookie to aerating

to gelling in a pan like a scrambled egg.

There's something amazing about plants

and we can tap into 'em and we can use it.

And I think there's a way to do it that preserves resources

that, that promotes things we can all agree on.

People are eating meat because it's delicious

because the price points are good

and because it's convenient.

So people are not eating meat

you know, because of how it's produced.

They're eating meat despite how it's produced.

Yes, people eat a lot of meat now.

But once people are given 2 choices

and one of them is healthier and environmentally sustainable

and doesn't harm animals, and the other one is

you know, what factory farming and slaughterhouses look like

I think we're gonna see massive shift over

to the plant-based technologies.

In, uh, 1889

there was a story in "The New York Times" that said

"Edison's gas light substitute is catching on."

Electricity, you know, over 100 years ago

was called a gas light substitute.

When it becomes the easy thing, the affordable thing

it's not a substitute any longer.

It's just called electricity.

One year after he lost half his flock at the slaughterhouse

Frank is unsure if his poultry ranch will be able to survive.

A friend and neighbor come to help

try to balance Frank's ledger.

Be careful. She just..

Yeah, I was gonna say don't do that!

We're running these numbers.

It'd be tough to do worse than we did last year

with the slaughter problem, but looking at these numbers

the changes you've made are clearly working.

This is the 1st year you've made money

on all of your hard work.

It's kind of like now we have a foundation

that we can actually take off from.

I can't compete against the factory farm.

I can't compete. It's not even my job.

- It's not even my focus. - Right.

My focus is in what I do.

Ben brought some ladies here

a while, a few weeks ago to visit

and one of the questions she asked me, she says

"Of all these birds and turkeys

"which ones are the most important?

Which ones do you wanna keep?"

And I said, "That's like asking, you know.."

Um..

[inhales deeply]

[instrumental music]

For 17 months, I was in work limbo.

Eventually, the choice was either move to Lincoln

or not have a job, so I guess it wasn't really a choice.

[blender whirring]

Connie and I..

It's not finalized yet, but we're getting divorced.

Um..

Yeah, that was the biggest price..

...out of all this.

I hope that at some point

Connie and I can become..

...um, friends again.

In the last 3 months, I've slowly become an activist.

Working with the Humane Society.

I guess it's the next logical step.

Going from thinking and then whistleblowing

and the next step, you have to take action.

There's inherent cruelty in that system.

I look back on it now and I say

"How could I not see that?"

Maybe it's like if you don't wear glasses

and you can't see well, you put your glasses on

and then, wow, there's a whole new world out there.

Maybe it was sort of like that.

I like my non-work activism much more than my job.

I'm already much more comfortable in my own skin.

[applause]

I think if I had the choice to do it again

I'd do it again.

We thought we could simply go to the legislators

of North Carolina and the governor and say

"Look, here's the problem. We know what it is.

The scientists are showin' it. It's documented. Let's fix it."

Go to the forests and streams..

We were able to figure out

where the pollution sources were comin' from.

We were able to educate the public.

We were able to educate the government.

What we weren't able to do

is to make somebody do somethin' about it.

Alright, this one here at 3 o'clock.

Here it is now, 20 years later

and every one of those lagoons

is still out there where they were.

It's a problem not just for those of us out here

who think this is a problem.

It's a problem for our society, in general.

It's the way we eat meat, the way we raise meat.

It's the way we treat the animals.

It's the way we impact the environment.

It's health issues.

It's how we're treating our communities.

How we're treating the people that live in these areas

who have no choice but to be here.

It's just, uh, it's -- it's a sad situation

all the way around.

It's sad, but it's also infuriating

and downright maddening at times

that you have an industry that has that much

of a stranglehold on this society.

Come on, let's go! Come on!

What time do you get off ballet tonight?

- Around 6:00. - 6:00?

Sometimes I -- I get fatigued.

Are you still practicin' for "Nutcracker?"

I'm up there now and my time is limited on this Earth.

And sometimes I think that maybe the best thing to do

is to just enjoy what's left.

And then I think about my grandchildren.

Uh, they got a whole lifetime ahead of 'em.

There's enough left for me. There is.

But is there enough left for my daughter

and my grandchildren and my two great grandchildren?

Is there enough left?

Connecting. Okay, it is connecting now.

There's gotta be a stop to this. There's gotta be a limit.

That was slow.

Duplin County traffic, skyline on the roll, runway 2-3.

Duplin County, departing to the southeast.

There's always gonna be people who are willing to stand up

and tell the public about what's going on.

I wanna hit Hookerton on the way back down to..

That's near Grifton, the Grifton Tower.

People need to understand there are 2 sets of law

that govern what we do on this planet.

There's the laws of men and the laws of nature.

The final word is gonna come from Mother Nature herself.

The unfortunate part about that is

it's gonna affect you and me

just like it does all the bad actors.

That -- That area around Goldsboro

that's really flooded right now.

If they pass a law that says

it's a criminal offense for me to take a picture

from a public highway or from an airplane

then they're gonna have to lock me up.

Somebody's gonna try to strip those rights away from me.

It's gonna be, they're gonna have a fight on their hands.

After the video release that Leah and I did

I raised chickens for another year.

I mean, there was nothin' more.

I had nothing left with the business.

So in January of 2016, I decided to, to cancel

the contract and, uh, start life over at 50.

Well, I just woke up one morning.

I had my, my head, my hands like this

and it's about, like, 3 o'clock in the morning

and I'm just waiting for my wife to wake up

and I look at her and I say, "Can I stop raisin' birds?"

Um, and she said, "I told you that 2 years ago."

It's scary. I have young kids

and, and I'm not where I expected to be at 50 years old

so there ain't a storybook ending.

We're just gonna h -- hope we can find an ending

where we land very softly.

That shit runs downhill and I was at the bottom of the hill.

[chuckles]

It's good that I'm not beholden to Perdue Farms anymore.

Having to raise their chickens while they're lookin' at me

the whole time as an expendable resource

and not a person and not an asset.

When I was doing chickens under contract, I mean

bottom line is, I was a homogenizing widgets.

Is this farming?

I say no.

I don't want my kids involved in this method of raising food.

There might be a heck of a past, but there's no future in it.

Um, I don't see it gettin' any better.

I see, um..

I -- If the world's appetite in meat grows

and the -- and these, these companies keep expandin'

like they are, um

at some time, uh, some point in time

it's gonna force our hand to change.

They're talkin' about this Feed The World mantra.

This is insane.

We're not feeding the world now.

We're not even feedin' everybody on this road.

It's a defense

for the system that's in place now.

You're growing soy and wheat and corn

and such a high percentage of that

is just going back to feed animals.

Uh, tillable acres.

At some point in time, it's finite

but it's not gonna be sustainable.

At some point in time, you're gonna have to go

for less meat consumption.

You vote at least 3 times a day with your fork.

I believe with, in all my heart,

the future lies in diversifying farms.

I believe you're gonna see more

traditional-type livestock production.

The -- The hogs on the pasture

and the cows on the grass-fed

and the, even the chickens on the pasture.

That is like the new, that's -- that's like, um..

It's like back to the future

is kind of where -- where

where I think we're goin'.

Without the diversification in the monoculture

you're so dependent on those commodity prices

that it's feast or famine.

When you put all your eggs in one basket

all your eggs are in one basket.

You don't have anything to fall back on.

I was fascinated by the question

about what was here before we were raising

13 billion bushels of corn, you know?

[chuckles]

Iowa, it's actually the most altered landscape on Earth.

99.9% of the -- of the prairie is gone.

And so the fascination with it kind of hooked me.

So I planted this and never regretted it one second.

It's 140 acres of restored and reconstructed

tallgrass prairie.

It's an oasis for wildlife, really.

All kinds of mammals, badgers, foxes, skunks.

And every time you go out there

you'll see something different.

The seed bank was there.

I've never put a fish in any of the ponds

yet there were 2 varieties of fish in the ponds.

Well, this is the stuff that's been here

for the last 10,000 years

since the Wisconsin glacier came through.

It just enriches a person's life in my estimation.

Much more than another field of corn.

There needs to be a place for farmers to come

and relearn this again

as we did years ago.

I'm not sure that's easier to read though.

- No, that's harder to read. - Yeah.

- Really? - Yeah.

I like it on the wall.

This type of farming, this type of breeding

is not taught anywhere anymore

because all the land grant universities

are controlled by the factory farms.

'Cause that's where the money is.

It may take us a long time, but little bits at a time

and this is what we're hoping.

It's gonna be back a ways.

I want a big enough space for busses to turn or whatever.

If we're going to change something

then we need to change the entire system.

We cannot legislate

nor pass laws

nor fine the factory farm into compliance.

It isn't gonna happen.

The only way to replace this system

is to replace it with something new

and make it available to more and more people

one farm at a time, one state at a time.

This is my mission.

And I'm sure I won't live to see what happens.

When I told my mentor when he was dying

that I would try not only to save the birds

but to save the memory of those people.

It is a love for the birds, but it's also a love

for that whole personal system of people

fighting to keep something alive

to keep something going.

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