Photo: Siarhei Nester/Pexels
When Leah Garcés, CEO and president of nonprofit Mercy for Animals, met Craig Watts in 2014 at his poultry farm in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties, it changed both their lives. Watts had borrowed $200,000 to build four giant chicken houses where he raised 720,000 chickens in 22 years for Perdue, the fourth-largest US chicken company. Two years later, he began cultivating specialty mushrooms, earning $6 per pound vs. $0.05 per pound of chicken flesh, working with the Transfarmation Project. Most poultry farmers are poor and collectively owe $5.2 billion. Almost all of the average 182 million chickens slaughtered every week in the US are raised in factories. “In factory farming, risks and liability are mostly externalized by the industry, and most often to the most vulnerable among us.”
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