It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The Black Death arrived on the shores of England in May 1348 and, in less than two years, spread throughout the country, killing an estimated 2 million people. The death toll from the disease, which was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, got so high that officials in London and other cities opened new cemeteries where hundreds of bodies were interred every day.
According to a new study, those who died around the time of the Black Death may help scientists answer a decidedly modern question: How can malnutrition early in life shape the health of humans far into adulthood?
The answer may be more complicated than scientists once suspected, said Sharon DeWitte, lead author of the study and a professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
In the new research, DeWitte and her colleagues examined chemical clues hidden in the teeth of nearly 275 people buried in English cemeteries before, during and after the Black Death. The team discovered something surprising: People who experienced malnutrition early in their lives may have survived threats to their health, like plague, at greater rates than their peers up until young adulthood, or roughly before the age of 30.
Those survival advantages, however, could have dropped significantly when the same individuals entered their middle and late adult years.
“What this might indicate is that if people experienced a period of starvation early in their childhoods or adolescence but survived, that could have shaped their development in ways that were beneficial in the short term but led to poor outcomes once they got older,” DeWitte said.
The research is part of DeWitte’s ongoing effort to understand the past to help humans living today.
“Mortality varied during a catastrophe 700 years ago in ways that might have been preventable,” she said. “My hope is that we can absorb that lesson and think about how human health can vary across different social categories today, and figure out the points of intervention where we can do something to reduce that burden.”
Childhood health
How experiences early in life shape our health long into the future is far from clear cut.
Some studies of modern humans, for example, have linked low birth weights in infants to health problems later in life. Babies born small, a possible sign of nutritional stress, seem to be more prone to illnesses like cardiovascular disease and diabetes in adulthood than the population at large.
The Black Death, sometimes known as the second pandemic of plague, might be an ideal laboratory for studying these questions, DeWitte noted. In part, that’s because the death toll around Europe varied drastically—in some parts of England, for example, about 30% of the population died, while mortality rates reached 75% in Florence, Italy.
“It raises questions about why mortality was higher in some populations than others,” she said.
To pursue those questions, DeWitte and her colleagues turned to teeth.
Environment matters
She explained that what humans eat as infants and children leaves a mark in the development of our adult teeth—subtly shifting the types, or “isotopes,” of carbon and nitrogen atoms present in the dentine. In particular, when people experience extreme nutritional stress, their bodies will begin to break down their own fat stores and muscle, which have a different signature of isotopes than food that is eaten.
In the current study, DeWitte’s team examined the isotopes present in the teeth of hundreds of people buried in English cemeteries between 1100 to 1540 AD. They included the East Smithfield Black Death Cemetery, which opened in London in 1348 and where the bodies of hundreds of plague victims were stacked in a mass burial trenches.
DeWitte emphasizes that the team’s results are far from definitive—in many cases, the group doesn't have any records about the humans included in the research, so it’s hard to know for sure how they died or how healthy they were in life.
But the findings carry hints that malnutrition early in life may shape the health of adults in ways that aren’t necessarily good or bad—it all depends on context.
When infants or children don’t have enough to eat, DeWitte said, their bodies may develop in ways that prime them for hardship later in life. They may have altered metabolism, for example, so that they use calories, which may be scarce, more efficiently.
Those changes can be beneficial—that is, until the environment changes and food becomes more plentiful. Some evidence, for example, suggests that in the wake of the Black Death, conditions for survivors in England improved as laborers demanded higher wages.
“People who experienced nutritional stress as children may have had a mismatch with their environments later in life,” DeWitte said. “If there’s now a resource abundance, but their bodies were shaped for an environment of scarcity, they may have poor health outcomes, like packing too many fat stores, which can lead to cardiovascular disease.”
For DeWitte, the study is another example of what humans living today can learn from people who died hundreds of years ago:
“For a very long time, I've been interested in this question of why some people experience good health and others living in the exact same society don’t.”
Co-authors of the new research include Julia Beaumont and Jacqueline Towers at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom; Brittany Walter of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency; and Emily Brennan at the University of South Carolina.
Childhood nutritional stress and later-life health outcomes in medieval England: evidence from incremental dentine analysis.
Article Publication Date
30-Jul-2025
Saturday, June 07, 2025
‘Prisons Are Akin To Chattel Slavery’: Inside The Big Business Of US Prison Farms And ‘Agricarceral’ Slave Labor
“If you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement,” says Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, and the legacy of that violence lives on in the big business of “agricarceral” farming today
Private companies and state governments have long exploited the 13th Amendment to create a profitable agribusiness system that runs on prison slave labor. “If you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement,” says Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, and the legacy of that violence lives on in the big business of “agricarceral” farming today. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host and former political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with Sbicca about the prisoners farming our food, the parties profiting from their exploitation, and the ongoing fight to uphold the basic rights and dignity of incarcerated workers.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to Rattling Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.
We oftentimes, when we look at agriculture in society, we see fields and fields of crops, irrigation system, birds flying and chirping. This is the agribusiness as it relates to a fantasy. But when you look at the agribusiness in prison, you see an entirely different story. You see men in the same kind of uniforms providing the labor to produce plants and crops. You see officers, guards on horseback with shotguns, overseeing them, making sure they do not run or escape.
Prisoners are left out in the field, as Malcolm said, one time from, can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night, but they’re left out there at ungodly hours. Recently I spoke with Professor Joshua Sbicca, who is an educator, community builder and associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University, author of Food Justice Now: Deepening the Root of Social Struggle and co-author of A Recipe for Gentrification, Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. Thank you for joining me, professor Joshua Sbicca.
Joshua Sbicca:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.
Mansa Musa:
And introduce yourself to our audience and tell them how you got into the space that we’re now talking about today.
Joshua Sbicca:
Sure. Yeah. I’m the director of the Prison Agriculture Lab out of Colorado State University. And the Prison Agriculture Lab is a space for inquiry and action related to understanding agricultural operations inside the criminal punishment system.
And we do a lot of research to understand what’s happening and provide translations of that research for a public audience, for a media audience, so that people can see behind the curtain of the prison and understand specifically what it’s like to be on a prison farm and to understand the scope of that work.
So I come at this work originally actually through doing food justice work and in particular working with an organization called Planting Justice, who is an organization that works with formerly incarcerated people. It’s also worked inside prisons like San Quentin State Prison in California. And through that work was exposed to the perspectives of a lot of formerly incarcerated people who’ve had to work in prisons, but also who were working in a more positive way with plants and in gardens.
But it stoked this question in me, though, what’s happening more broadly in the US prison system when it comes to agricultural operations. And so that sort of curiosity was really the impetus behind the launch of the prison agriculture lab.
Mansa Musa:
And I did 48 years in prison, and I was in the Maryland system and one of the prisons, they called it the penal farm. And the reason why they called it the penal farm is because that was when it was first built. That’s what the design was. It was designed for producing food for the prison population, as well as the general society in that region, which was western Maryland. Professor, can you give our audience an overview of the history of the agribusiness and practice in prisons in the US?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe I’ll start first with just laying out what are some of the trends right now that we know? So through our research, we found there are around 660 adult state-run prisons that have agricultural operations of some kind.
And we found these fall into four categories, horticulture and landscaping crops, food processing and production, and animal agriculture. And within each of those, kind of broad categories, are a whole bunch of specific practices.
And so you have everything from essentially plantation-style, large cropping kinds of operations, to more diversified gardens. And so it really runs the gamut, but we do see a concentration of agricultural operations in the South. We also know that in the South there’s a greater number of prisons in that region compared to other parts of the US.
And we’ve also asked kind of why are these things taking place? And so currently, according to the prison system, there’s four main reasons why these operations take place. One is idleness reduction. So essentially, kind of because prisons force people to work in the name of, they don’t want “idle hands doing the devil’s work.”
Another is financial reasons, so feeding the prison population or producing profits for the prison system. There’s also more or more, I should say training purposes. So educational and vocational programs are tied to ag operations.
And then lastly, a very small subset are reparative. So we understand this is for community service purposes, donating the food that’s grown, or greening the prison or something like that. But I’ll say that that’s a huge exception, that there are those sorts of reasons for these operations.
As far as the more historical kind of connections, you know, one of the pieces that I think is really clear is that if you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement. And a lot of those violent kinds of logics in agriculture find their way into the prison system, as the US prison system begins to develop in the 1800s.
And the same groups who were bracketed out of this sort of agrarian utopia that was being built for white immigrants to the US, as those people were bracketed out, they were then incarcerated again as the prison system began to develop. And yet agriculture was somehow imagined as a tool to discipline incarcerated people and compel them into being an orderly subject, basically.
And so in many ways, agriculture helped build the prison system. As prisons begin to develop, they needed to find a way to afford what they were creating. And so if you had a captive free labor force, you could force that labor force to grow a bunch of food to feed all the people that were then in that system. And so, farms were really central actually to the building of the US prison system and have continued to play a role over time.
Mansa Musa:
And you listed four things, talk about the relationship between how they work out as far as the agri, and as it relates to the support of the institution and the profit margin that come out in support of the prison industrial complex profiting off of it.
Joshua Sbicca:
So maybe I’ll kind of start with breaking down a little bit, these two differences. So when it comes to agricultural operations in prisons and the financial benefits of those operations, it comes in two forms. One is essentially a subsidy to the prison system in the form of food that goes to feed the prison population. And this acts as a cost savings.
So instead of a prison having to go into the open market and buy that food from a corporation, they have their prison force do that work, anything from $0 to cents on the hour. There’s a large number of prisons that subsidize the cost of feeding people in this kind of way. And food is one of the few pieces within a budget in the prison that is controllable in many ways.
And so prisons have sought to make that expenditure less and less and less over time, and it’s at a great cost to the health of people within prisons. And I’ll note that, even in cases where food is going into the prison system, it usually isn’t enough to completely feed everybody. And so food has to be bought anyway.
And then there’s the food that’s being sold on the open market. So if we were to think about it, I think about it like an agricultural/industrial complex, where have prisoners that are selling or that are working to produce crops that then get sold. And also raise animals and livestock.
So in Texas for example, there’s a huge livestock operation. A bunch of this livestock is going into livestock auctions throughout the state of Texas. And then that beef is making its way into food supply chains that go into the consumer market, where you know may be having a hamburger at McDonald’s where some portion of that was produced in a prison in say, Texas.
And so, in terms of how much money is being made, like an exact dollar figure, this is something that actually the prison agriculture lab is trying to get information on. And so we’re in the middle of a project where we’re compiling a bunch of these numbers and we’re compiling the companies that are buying from the prison system. But just to name a few know there’s big companies like Smithfield or Cargill, these large multinational corporations that are purchasing some part of their food supply from prisons. And so tracing that is much more complicated, but it’s nevertheless happening.
Mansa Musa:
Are you familiar with the farm line litigation involving the Louisiana State Penitentiary? And can you talk about your research as it relates to that and any other views you might have on that?
Joshua Sbicca:
Sure. I guess the first thing that I’ll actually say here is, I was retained by the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the farm line litigation. So I can speak about some things and not other things.
But I guess what I’ll say first is a little bit about the research that the prison agriculture lab has done. So as it pertains to Louisiana know, our research has found that there’s a lot of different agricultural operations in prisons in Louisiana, at Angola specifically. So Louisiana State Penitentiary, we know that there are large cropping operations, and that’s sort of the majority of the kind of agricultural work that takes place there.
And there’s work that’s run by the prison industry itself in LSP. And then there are fields that are run by LSP itself. And so those operations run parallel to each other but serve different kinds of purposes.
And part of what the farm line litigation is about, and this has been all kind of publicly recorded and reported on, I should say, is focusing on the heat conditions that men incarcerated at LSP are subject to, particularly in the summertime. And then the harms that are associated with working in a plantation-style agricultural system that’s reminiscent of chattel slavery. And so the pending class action lawsuit is seeking to address those two concerns.
Mansa Musa:
And to your knowledge and your research, how much money do they make versus how much profit comes out of that space? I know you say y’all was trying to pin down how much profit, but if you can give a general view of the profit margin relative to how much the wage margin.
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, I mean it really varies a lot by prison and state across the US, but if we’re talking about a state like Louisiana and a prison like Angola, prisoners are paid anywhere from zero to 4 cents an hour, so basically nothing. And in terms of the farm line itself, what’s come out in kind of public declarations, is that food actually goes back into feeding the prison population. So it’s different than some of the other agricultural operations that are producing food for the open market.
In terms of the exact dollar figures, I don’t have those exact figures, but if you were to look like in the aggregate, the Associated Press released a report about a year or so ago, and they essentially found that there’s likely hundreds of millions of dollars that are being made by this agricultural system within prisons. And so you could do some ballpark math to realize essentially that you have incarcerated people paid basically nothing while companies and/or the state are profiting off of this labor.
Mansa Musa:
And it is known that when you’re dealing with any type of large agricultural situation that you have to have some type of pesticide, or some type of way to preserve the plants that you’re growing, or create an environment for the plants to grow. In your research, have y’all found any relationship between the pesticides being used and the health, or health related issues, from men or women that’s working in these environments?
Joshua Sbicca:
Our research hasn’t looked specifically at that relationship between, kind of the environmental exposures and then the health of incarcerated people working in these systems. But one thing that I can say, is that based on various cases that I’m aware of around the country, that the use of pesticides and herbicides is part of some of these agricultural operations. So I’m particularly familiar with the case of Florida where I’ve done extensive research and I know that pesticides and herbicides are used in various farming operations. Now whether or not they’re being safely applied and whether or not people are getting sick as a result of those exposures, I think is another question.
There have been reports, again, this is in sort of publicly available documents that at places like Angola, that crop dusters are used. Again, the question is how safely is that practice happening and are people around when those practices are happening? The prison system is notoriously opaque and it can be incredibly hard to verify what’s happening in any systematic way, but there appear to be reports and information to suggest that these chemicals are being used. And then it’s whether or not it’s harmful to people is the bigger question.
Mansa Musa:
The real news recently reached out to Louisiana State Penitentiary for comment on how frequently they use crop dusters, and has not yet been provided with any official response. I come out of prison myself. When I look at the farm line and I look at the whole agribusiness as it relates to the prison industrial complex.
Unless a person is coming out of the system and buying acres of land and planting and feeding them on their own self, even with a marketable skill is virtually impossible. If you are in an environment where agriculture is the primary industry that exists in the Maryland system, in the federal system, they have industry and it is exploitative in and of itself, but they provide you with a marketable skill where a person might come out with upholstery, a person might come out with plumbing, a person might come out with cabin making, even though they’ve been exploited all them years.
I find the connection between when a person doing long-term in the Angola, or long-term on any prison where it’s agri is concerned, that they don’t have the necessary job skills to be competitive back in society. Do you have a view on that?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, I do. And I think that’s a really important point that you’re making. And one of the claims of many state prison systems is that there is some sort of educational or vocational benefit to the agricultural work that people are performing.
Unfortunately, there’s very little evidence to suggest that that’s actually happening. And I think that there are several reasons for that. I think one is part of it’s like a tracking problem. It’s very difficult to track people once they leave prison. But I think more fundamentally is the point that you made, which is that you can’t buy land coming out of prison. It’s very, very unlikely that you’re going to be able to do that. And moreover, the skills that you actually developed are probably for a more frontline position.
Mansa Musa:
Exactly.
Joshua Sbicca:
So working as a field hand or milking a cow or something of that sort, and if you look at the pay that’s associated with that work, it’s very low pay, and agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work that exists in the economy. And so the thing that I’ve thought a bit about is what is it actually signaling to incarcerated people when you say, this is the kind of work you’re going to do? It signals that they don’t deserve better work.
Mansa Musa:
Right. Exactly.
Joshua Sbicca:
It signals that they deserve some of the most backbreaking, brutal work that we know exists. And to suggest that people are going to come out with a skill then, in that same sector that continues to abuse people, is ultimately this sort of disciplinary and brutal logic that has no intention of actually taking care of people.
Mansa Musa:
And under the law, you have crime, you have punishment, and the punishment is the sentence that you receive. I commit a crime, I get punished for it. The punishment is the sentence I receive. The punishment is not where I go at, and then in turn be brutally punished or physically punished.
And according to the concept of penology is that once I get into the system, then I’m supposed to be provided with the opportunity to change my behavior, to develop a work ethic, to develop social skills, because ultimately I’m going to be returned. Within in the agri system, and much like in the industrial system as well, but in the agri system in and of itself, you’re going to find very few people that come out of the system that is equipped to re-socialize themselves back into society, primarily because everything is done in a plantation style. If I don’t work, if I refuse to work, I’m going in solitary confinement. Or the threat of solitary confinement exists that if I don’t get on the farm line that exists, and more importantly, I’m doing long-term, the average person is doing 15 to 20 years in that environment and come out that environment, have very little skills to adjust back in society.
So it’s inevitable that they’re going to revert back to some kind of criminal behavior which opens that cycle, repeat that cycle. And this has been my experience that I’ve seen over and over again when people leave out, we’re not prepared, we’re not equipped and we’re confronted with a society that we have to live in. We don’t have the ability to get housing, our medical benefits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But in closing, professor, tell our audience where you see this farm line litigation going. If you can give an overview on that or based on your research and your knowledge of these types of litigation, where do you think this might end up at?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, it is a great question. And when we look at how some agricultural operations are run in this plantation style, like you were talking about, where the point of the system is to heap punishment on top of a sentence, as you put it.
When we see that these kinds of systems exist, it breathes life into the argument that we need to get rid of, for example, exception clauses from state constitutions that say, you can be subject to slavery or involuntary servitude if you’ve been convicted of a crime.
So these kinds of systems, they breathe life into this analysis that prisons are akin to chattel slavery, and they traumatize people in ways that are akin to chattel slavery. And so, even though plantation style agricultural operations are the exception in the American prison system, they’re demonstrative of the larger logics in the prison system that abuse people that use incarceration and capturing the time of people in order to prop up, essentially a giant public works program.
And then on top of that, the entanglements of that system with private industry, which profits off of the captured time of people. And so when thinking about something like the farm line litigation or kind of more broadly what it represents, I think that’s why it’s significant, and that’s why we should be paying close attention, and thinking about how that logic is maybe happening in many other places as well. And so there’s an opportunity to crack that open and engage in efforts that actually uplift the human rights of people who are incarcerated, and that sees the human dignity of people who are behind bars no matter what they’ve done.
Mansa Musa:
Based on your research and your study and your knowledge of the history, what would be a good solution for the type of problem that we just outlined?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, I mean, I guess the one thing that I would point to is that it’s always important to take direction from people who are on the front lines, and that’s incarcerated people, and look at the analysis and demands of people who are subject to abusive systems.
So if you look at efforts like the Free Alabama movement or efforts in the State of Florida, for example, to engage in various prisoner rights organizing, I think it’s really important to find those organizations and those individuals that are already doing the work and to find a way to plug into it wherever you’re located.
There are prisons in every single one of these states that we live in here in the United States, and there are many people that are locked up in that system. So making connections with people on the inside I think is really important.
I think on a more outside level, knowing those companies that are profiting off of the labor of incarcerated people and refusing to spend your money to support those companies is also something that we can all take ownership of ourselves and be aware of how we’re entangled with the prison industrial complex. And so I think that’s another set of actions that consumers can be taking.
And I think the last piece is, in those cases where there is a litigation or other kinds of efforts to hold prisons accountable, that people find ways to support those efforts. So those are the things that I would offer here today.
Mansa Musa:
And will say, tell our audience how they can follow you or keep track of some of the works that you’re doing in terms of your advocacy.
Joshua Sbicca:
Sure, you can find the work of the Prison Agriculture Lab at prisonagriculture.com. And personally, I’m on Blue Sky and you can find me on Blue Sky if you want to follow me on social media.
Mansa Musa:
Professor Joshua Sbicca, you rattled the bars today, and we want to always be mindful of this to say that we’re talking about human beings. We had the United Farm Workers that was working in the fields for pennies a day and inhumane conditions that was able to unionize and ultimately get treated like a human being, get a livable wage.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
The Forgotten 10 Billion Lives: A Tale of Suffering, Survival, and the Fight to See Farmed Animals
I imagine the grim days that followed. Now her relentless craving for escape amplified by an urgent need for food and water, the air growing louder—deafening—with the sound of 50,000 hens shrieking from thirst and starvation. Now a cagemate is dead. Now more hens immobile in the cages, their sounds muted. Now the air is thickening with the stench of rotting flesh. Second by minute by hour, two weeks passed. Finally, state officials began gassing birds by the thousands. After three more days, animal sanctuaries negotiated to take custody of the surviving 4,460 hens.
A year later, I photographed the empty facility. The filthy warehouses I found there did nothing to alleviate my nightmarish imaginings. The ammonia stink of chicken urine still lingered.
Chickens recognize beauty, protect their young, and exhibit empathy. A rooster signals danger from predators with various calls, depending on the threat. Anyone who has seen baby goats together cannot doubt they are jumping with joy. Stressed fish seek out caresses even from robot fish. The cow bellows and is beaten back as her bleating calf is dragged away. Sentience—the capacity to experience feelings—connects humans with birds, with fishes, with mammals.
The photographs I made that February day in Turlock became the inspiration for Censored Landscapes, a photographic exploration that tells a story in which the central characters are innocent of any crime and yet are condemned to imprisonment, torture, and death. It’s a true story of ecological destruction, of worker exploitation—mostly people of color—and of secretive corporations protected by laws and enriched by government subsidies and lobbies. It is also a story that offers insight and healing.
A photograph is a love song to the ecological implications of the landscape contained inside its frame. Carleton Watkins hauled thousands of pounds of photographic equipment through Yosemite. His photographs influenced Abraham Lincoln to sign a bill that protected Yosemite Valley. William Henry Jackson’s photographs persuaded Ulysses S. Grant to designate Yellowstone as a national park. Ansel Adams’ work inspired Congress to establish Kings Canyon National Park. American landscape photography evolved in conjunction with the conservationist and environmental movement.
The tale told in photographic history books illustrates that American landscape photography, like US history writ large, has been dominated by white men. Their mythologizing of a pristine landscape colluded in the ethnocide of millions of people who lived in this country before colonization. In 1975, the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition was considered radical in that it depicted a stark view of human impacts on the land. But only one of the ten artists was a woman, and none were people of color.
The tale of American landscape photography is also one of human exceptionalism. Though humans are now integral to landscape photography, farmed animals have almost entirely been excluded, despite their prodigious numbers. Terrestrial farmed animals account for 59 percent of vertebrates on earth, humans 36 percent, all other terrestrial animals only 5 percent. Approximately ten billion land animals in the U.S. are slaughtered every year. The absence of farmed animals from landscape photography reflects their exclusion from environmental activism even though animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and mass species extinction.
In the agricultural industry, nonhuman animals do not exist as individuals but as capital to be exploited for profit. The word capital comes from the Latin capitalis, meaning head, in the sense of a head of cattle. In medieval Europe, the number of cattle owned by a family stood for wealth and prestige. Cattle were used as currency for large transactions. In the U.S., mercenary corporations are granted personhood, meaning they are entitled to at least some of the legal status, rights, and protections of humans. They can own land and money. Nonhuman animals, however, are deemed property, with none of those rights or protections.
How, then to portray the individuals hidden away in remote places and windowless warehouses? A number displayed with each landscape in this project represents the number of animals bred, confined, or slaughtered in the facility depicted in the photograph.
Accessing the numbers wasn’t easy. People who breed, confine, and slaughter animals conceal their enterprise aggressively. In more than half of the U.S. state legislatures, the industry has attempted to pass “ag-gag” laws that criminalize photographing sites of animal agriculture. These laws are contrary to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but they are currently in effect in eleven states. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is a federal law that criminalizes economic damage to an animal enterprise, including loss of profits. Photographers who expose the practices of these corporations can be lumped into the same category as Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.
The numbers that form an essential element in this project are revealing, but they’re a pitiful substitute for even one of the animals whose identity, sentience, emotions, and existence are obliterated. Censored Landscapes also includes portraits and stories of individual animals exploited by the industry. The animals I portrayed in this project serve as ambassadors of their species. Their stories are meant to individualize the vast numbers of farmed animals bred, confined, and slaughtered.
Extensive and meticulously documented facts included in Censored Landscapes regarding the treatment of farmed animals substantiate the barbarism and injustice of the industry. For example, virtually all farmed birds, including chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons, are kept indoors in extremely crowded conditions for their whole lives. In 2022, 9.54 billion chickens, 208.2 million turkeys, and 26.7 million ducks were slaughtered for food in the U.S. Each of the phases involved in arrival at the slaughter facilities causes more suffering for the birds. About twenty million chickens die on the way to slaughter every year.
At the slaughterhouse, the birds are hung by their legs in metal shackles, which causes them more stress, pain, and injury. They are carried upside down to an electrified bath meant to stun them, their necks are sliced, and they are dunked in scalding water. The speed at which the USDA allows facilities to slaughter birds continues to increase. In 2023, the rate was 140 birds per minute, though some facilities have received waivers that allow them to slaughter 175 birds per minute. The stunning technique can be ineffective, so many of the birds are conscious as the blade cuts their throats. Or the saw misses, and they are boiled alive. Almost one million chickens and turkeys are boiled alive every year in slaughtering facilities. Birds raised for food are excluded from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act. The standard treatment of other species exploited by the industry is similarly abhorrent.
Well-documented impacts of animal agriculture on almost all facets of our world, including human health, the economy, wildlife, and the environment, illustrate the industry’s far-reaching effects. For example, workers in the U.S. meat industry suffer an estimated three times as many serious injuries as the average American worker, including repetitive stress injuries, fractures, burns, head trauma, and amputations. Respiratory disorders are rampant. The rate of injuries and illness is likely higher than estimated; many workers refrain from reporting for fear of retribution. Employers may also underreport to avoid higher costs. Workers do not receive proper safety training and disproportionately lack health insurance.
In 2020, 37.5 percent of workers in animal slaughtering and processing were foreign-born. An unknown but substantial number of workers in this industry are undocumented. In one of the most dangerous industries, they cannot advocate for their own safety, health, fair compensation, or benefits for fear of losing their job or deportation.
Censored Landscapes does not focus on the kind of graphic depictions of cruelty found all over the Internet, of men beating turkeys with iron rods and throwing them aside or slamming piglets onto a concrete floor by the hind legs. Atrocities against animals are rife in the industry, but I don’t have the heart to investigate. Most heartbreaking is the innocence of the animals. They can’t possibly understand why this is happening to them—why the contempt, why the cyclonic rage. Beyond unbearable pain, they must feel utterly forsaken by all things good. The men must also feel bereft of goodness, to be so possessed by monstrous resentment or whatever drives them to viciously harm those creatures. My intention is not to expose any specific worker, company, or owner. The dingy, wretched structures revealed in this project insinuate everyone and everything—farmed animals, wildlife, humans, rivers, oceans, forests, soil, air—into their abyss. Censored Landscapes scrutinizes animal agricultural industry standards, business as usual.
Homo sapiens have existed at least 300,000 years and have only been farming animals less than 12,000 years, a bizarre blip on this end of the human timeline. North and Central Americans did not farm animals until the invasion of the European colonists about 400 years ago. Veggies, legumes, grains, nuts, and fruit are the basis for superb cuisines of all flavors. Plant-based restaurants of every variety are proliferating like wildflowers in spring. Meat, dairy, fish, and egg alternatives are available in all chain grocery stores and even at fast food restaurants.
Numerous studies evidence the human health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet. A plant-based diet protects against cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and other illness. A 2022 study shows that “rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for thirty years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century.”
But no matter, Americans continue to consume more animals than ever. Animal agriculture is a ruthless and avaricious business that results in ecological devastation, grievous health effects, and colossal suffering. This I know to be true: environmentalism and social justice must include the other animals who share our planet.
Imagine flipping the script—subverting the colonizing, profiteering paradigm. Sentient nonhuman animals instead of corporations would be granted personhood; forests, rivers, and oceans valued much more than money; prisons and animal farms morphed into homes and sanctuaries. Every transformation, no matter how preposterous or sensible or liberating or urgent, is kindled with sparks of inspiration. Let this be a spark.
Isabella La Rocca González is an artist, author, and activist based in the United States. As the daughter of immigrants, she strives to reconcile values from her Indigenous Mexican roots with her European heritage. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including a solo show at the Center for Photography in Woodstock. Awards for her work include the Ferguson Grant from the Friends of Photography. Her creative nonfiction works have been published in various outlets. Her screenplay, “Fugue 9,” was chosen as a finalist for the 2008 Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Her short story “Chingonas” will be published in an upcoming anthology of Latina authors. She received her BA in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in photography from Indiana University.
The Extreme Cruelty of Confining Mother Pigs to “Gestation Crates”
Pigs, intelligent and social creatures, possess a strong maternal instinct. In the wild, a pregnant pig will walk several miles to carefully select the perfect spot to build a nest for her newborns. A sow, or mother pig, is pregnant for almost four months before the arrival of her babies. Pregnancy can be an exciting and momentous time for humans as families prepare and anticipate the joy of welcoming a new life into the world. After she welcomes her babies into the world, she will spend the first few months of their lives caring for them, nursing and grooming them. They will play and forage for food together as a family unit. Mother pigs have an instinct to love, protect, and nurture their newborn babies, just like humans do.
In factory farms, however, this natural maternal bond is broken. The meat industry doesn’t see sows as mothers with the capacity to love. Instead, they treat them like inanimate breeding machines, repeatedly impregnating sows just to raise and kill their babies. These sows will spend the majority of their pregnancies trapped in a “gestation crate” (gestation is another term for the period when an animal is pregnant before giving birth). This metal cage is about seven feet by two feet, an area barely larger than the sow’s body, so small that she can’t even turn around. At the core of gestation crate use is a desire to maximize space and exercise tight control over breeding cycles. In these confined spaces, sows are reduced to production units, and their ability to exhibit natural behaviors is entirely curtailed. Trapped in this horrific contraption, a sow will never be able to feel sunshine on her skin or grass beneath her hooves. For the entirety of her pregnancy, she only knows the cold, iron confines of this crate.
After birth, mother pigs do not get a chance to care for their babies as they naturally want to. Instead, pork producers take each litter of piglets from their mother when they’re only around three weeks old, raising and killing them for food. This separation is not only traumatic for the mother and her babies, but it’s also unnatural. In nature, mother pigs nurse their babies for up to 17 weeks.
Then, this exploitative cycle starts again. The industry repeatedly impregnates sows, forcing them to give birth to new litters of piglets until their bodies are completely exhausted. When a sow is “spent” (i.e., no longer able to give birth), she is sent to slaughter at only around one and a half to two years old. In the wild, pigs can live up to 20 years. But after just two years of life, a sow will be killed for her meat, just like her offspring.
The Pork Industry: Purveyors of Intense Cruelty
Tragically, this abuse is standard practice in the pork industry, where companies view these intelligent, emotional, feeling animals merely as machines for maximizing profit. All of this is done in the secrecy of factory farms, which the vast majority of consumers will never encounter firsthand. Imagine a mother pig kept in a cage barely bigger than her body for most of her pregnancy, unable to walk or move more than a few steps, unable even to turn around, and able to interact only with the two mothers on either side of her, who are also caged. Imagine her water spouting from dirty pipes at the front of this cage, with a food trough below. Imagine floors slatted to allow excrement to flow downwards before collecting in vast outdoor lagoons. Factory farms imprison mother pigs in these conditions for the entirety of their four-month pregnancies.
While the cruelty of this system is evident, its implications extend far beyond the sows’ suffering. This practice encapsulates a range of ethical, environmental, technological, and economic dilemmas that lie at the heart of modern factory farming. Due to the cruel, horrific conditions they are forced to endure in captivity, sows are among the most abused animals on the planet. In 2022, Mercy For Animals released evidence from a heartbreaking investigation that shines a light on the cruelty that mother pigs endure trapped in factory farms.
The pork industry forces millions of sows across the U.S. and worldwide to suffer through these horrific conditions every day. Many consumers are unaware of the cruel conditions under which their pork products are produced.
Alternative Systems: Group Housing and Free-Range Models
In contrast to the intense suffering caused by gestation crates, alternative systems such as group housing enable sows to interact socially and move more freely. In group housing, pigs can engage in instinctive behaviors like rooting, foraging, and socializing, which are essential for their psychological and physical well-being.
Although these systems require careful oversight to manage issues like aggression and resource competition, they offer the possibility of a higher quality of life by restoring a degree of natural behavior.
Taking this approach a step further, free-range or pasture-based systemsallow pigs to roam in outdoor environments where they can forage, build nests, and form natural social bonds. This shift from a sterile, confined environment to one that more closely mimics nature addresses animal welfare concerns while also challenging the long-held industrial model that has defined modern agriculture. The philosophical reorientation toward respecting an animal’s intrinsic value is a central element in the debate over how best to produce food humanely.
Beyond animal welfare, the environmental consequences of intensive farming practices are profound. Traditional systems that rely on gestation crates centralize waste production in confined spaces. The concentrated waste from these systems not only disrupts the natural cycle of decomposition and nutrient distribution but also contributes to water contamination and greenhouse gas emissions. The localized accumulation of pollutants can lead to broader ecological degradation, affecting soil health, water quality, and atmospheric conditions.
In contrast, alternative systems that provide pigs with more space encourage a more natural dispersion of waste. In pasture-based systems, waste becomes part of a cyclical process where it can enhance soil fertility through natural carbon sequestration rather than acting as an environmental burden. This approach aligns with the principles of sustainable agriculture, suggesting that a system designed to work with nature rather than against it can mitigate many of the environmental impacts associated with factory farming.
The Legal Landscape: A Global Shift Away from Gestation Crates
Legislation around the world increasingly reflects a growing ethical and environmental consciousness. Numerous regions have moved to restrict or ban gestation crates, signaling a broader reevaluation of the values underpinning intensive animal production. Several countries have banned the use of cruel gestation crates, including the United Kingdom and Sweden. These legal reforms are not solely about improving animal welfare: they also acknowledge the interconnectedness of ethical treatment, environmental sustainability, and economic viability. Although alternative systems may initially entail higher production costs, proponents argue that the long-term benefits, such as improved animal health and reduced environmental impact, justify the investment.
Policies that restrict gestation crates serve as catalysts for social change, challenging both producers and consumers to reconsider the ethics of modern food production. By enforcing higher standards of animal treatment, legislators are not only protecting animal welfare but also prompting the industry to explore models of production that respect the environment and align with contemporary ethical values.
Tech for Compassion: Innovations Supporting Humane Farming
Technological innovation is a promising avenue for transforming animal agriculture. Advances in electronic feeding systems and smart monitoringtools are making it increasingly feasible to manage group housing systemswithout sacrificing efficiency. Electronic feeding systems, for instance, can deliver tailored diets to individual sows in a group setting, thereby reducing competition and minimizing conflict. Smart monitoring technologies—often utilizing artificial intelligence—track animal health and behavior in real time. By detecting early signs of stress or illness, these systems allow for prompt interventions that can enhance overall welfare.
These technological innovations demonstrate that it is possible to balance the demands of efficient production with the imperatives of humane treatment. By integrating advanced management tools into alternative housing systems, producers can maintain high productivity levels while also offering environments that respect pigs’ natural behaviors. This blend of technology and animal welfare not only supports a more ethical production model but also contributes to long-term economic sustainability.
The economic rationale for gestation crates has traditionally hinged on lower upfront costs and maximized production. However, this short-term economic calculus often overlooks the hidden costs associated with animal health issues, environmental cleanup, and shifts in consumer behavior. Alternative systems, despite requiring more significant initial investments, can offer long-term economic benefits.
Improved animal health leads to lower veterinary costs and a reduction in the negative externalities that can plague intensive farming. Moreover, as consumers become more aware of the origins of their food, there is a growing market for products that are produced through humane and sustainable methods.
This evolving consumer preference is reshaping the pork industry’s economic landscape. Modern buyers increasingly favor ethical production methods, and their willingness to support such practices is driving market forces that favor alternative systems. In this light, investing in more humane production methods is not only a moral imperative—it is also a sound economic strategy that can lead to a more resilient and future-proof industry.
Forgotten Voices: Farm Workers in Factory Farming Systems
Transitioning to alternative systems, such as group housing or free-range management, could also improve working conditions. More open and dynamic production environments offer the potential for safer, more engaging work experiences. When animals are treated with respect and allowed to exhibit natural behaviors, the overall atmosphere on the farm can shift toward one that values care, safety, and dignity for both animals and the people who work with them.
A Vision for the Future: Compassionate, Ethical, and Sustainable Farming
Reimagining the pork industry through the lens of compassion and sustainability requires a comprehensive reexamination of established practices. It challenges the entrenched economic models that have long prioritized short-term gains over long-term environmental health and ethical treatment. By embracing innovative technologies and alternative management systems, the future of animal agriculture could be defined by an integration of efficiency with humane practices.
In this vision, ethical considerations become a central component of production rather than an afterthought. Producers, policymakers, and consumers are invited to participate in a transformative movement—one that redefines modern agriculture to respect the natural world and its inhabitants. This transformation is about more than eliminating practices like gestation crates; it is about forging a new relationship with nature, one that acknowledges the intrinsic value of all living beings and the importance of sustainability.
The pork industry’s reliance on gestation crates reveals a fundamental tension between the imperatives of industrial efficiency and the ethical demands of humane, sustainable production. As society becomes increasingly aware of the broader costs of intensive animal farming—both environmental and human—the call for change grows ever stronger. By shifting toward alternative systems, such as group housing and free-range management, the pork industry can move from a model of confinement and exploitation to one characterized by innovation, compassion, and resilience.
This reimagined approach respects pigs’ natural behaviors and dignity and promotes a healthier environment and improved working conditions for farm laborers. While the best way to avoid animal cruelty is to keep animals off our plates, as long as there is a demand for meat, more humane solutions need to be implemented. In the end, transforming the industry is a shared responsibility—one that involves ethical reflection, technological advancement, and a commitment to sustainability. Such a change represents not only a more humane way to produce food but also a promising model for the future of agriculture, where profit and compassion are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Michael Windsor is the senior director of corporate engagement at The Humane League, a global nonprofit working to end the abuse of animals raised for food.
