Unconfined

In this episode of Unconfined , the Center for a Livable Future's food system correspondent Leo Horrigan walks us through the world of biological farming, the soil food web, the unpaid labor done by billions of microbes on the daily (they need a better agent!), and how we could all save a lot of money and agita if we just let nature do its thing. It's not enough to simply stop the loss of soil—we...

Debbie Berkowitz has been at the center of the vexed effort to ensure a safe workplace for poultry workers since her time as a union workplace-safety advocate in the early 1980s. In the Obama era, she served as a top official in the Occupational Safety and Health Adm inistration, and ha s since eme rged as a leading advocate and researcher on the topic. In this episode of Unconfined, she lays in s...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks agriculture as the third most dangerous industry to work in, after construction and transportation. In this episode of Unconfined , North Carolina-based journalist Christina Cooke paints a picture of how workers get injured , maimed, or die while working in facilities with large animals . Despite being trampled and gor ed , dying of asphyxiation in grain bins ,...

Every year, the average U.S. consumer polishes off about 100 pounds of chicken—the highest rate of any large country, and twice the level we consumed as recently as 1985. As our love affair with wings and nuggets continues to take flight, the workers behind this bounty remain stuck in a cycle of rock-bottom wages and staggering injury rates. In this episode of Unconfined, Tom talks to Magaly Licol...

Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle exposed inhumane working conditions in the meatpacking industry, as well as disgusting details about the meat itself. Decades later, conditions and wages improved for meatpackers. Meatpacking became a proper middle -class job, alongside jobs in the automotive industry. But during the 1980s—the Reagan Era—union-busting reversed the trend. Workers in the meat i...

Unconfined Podcast with Guest Chris Heaney Back in the 1990s, a University of North Carolina epidemiologist named Steve Wing pursued what was then a novel idea: to find out the healt h effects of living, drinking water, and breathing near CAFOs, he didn't just set up sensors and draw blood from nearby residents . Instead, he consulted them about what questions to ask, often listing them as co-auth...

Unconfined Podcast with Guest Patty Lovera As we continue our series on the bio gas boom in CAFO country, food policy expert Patty Lovera walks us through the costs and benefits of using anaerobic digestion to harvest methane from animal waste . At this point, there's a " complex layer cake of federal subsidies " that are trying to make the process profitable , but it's unclear whether this so-cal...

Unconfined Podcast with Guest Sherri White-Williamson In the opening three episodes of Unconfined, we're focusing on a topic that's generating a lot of excitement among meat industry execs and concern among people who live in CAFO country: methane digesters. Tom and Christine open with a brief explainer: What are methane digesters, and how are they related to biogas and methane? Then we hear from...

Introducing Unconfined, the Podcast About Industrial Farm Animal Production.  Unconfined Podcast   US consumers enjoy access to a veritable cornucopia of meat. We consume an annual average of more than 220 pounds of chicken, pork, and beef per person—one of the highest rates of carnivory in history. What makes it possible is a factory-like model of meat production that took root in Midwestern stoc...