Growing up in Fort Worth, Will Potter was immersed in cowboy culture. He spent time in stockyards, Wild West shows and barbecue joints; once, in his miniature cowboy boots, he walked through an enormous, supposedly fun Cattlepen Maze built out of the metal, prison-like restraints known as cow chutes.
As a child, Potter writes in his new book, “Little Red Barns,” he played with a toy barn that had a handle on top, which he could click neatly closed and carry around (I flashed back to my own toy, a Fisher Price model with plastic horses, cows and chickens). Even far from the cowtowns, most of us are raised on stories and songs of the family farm, where the barns are rust-red and picturesque, and cute animals gambol happily in a picket-fenced yard.
Though Potter was frightened by the Cattlepen Maze and saw a graceful sadness in the longhorns on display, he didn’t think much about the lives of livestock. But now, as a seasoned journalist based in Colorado, he’s done a great deal of thinking about those animals and how we (mis)treat them.
“Little Red Barns,” his second book, is the reportage of his epic, emotionally and physically draining 10-year investigation into American factory farms — also known as CAFOs, “concentrated animal feeding operations” — and the dedicated activists seeking to expose the mass suffering within. Like his first book, “Green Is the New Red” (2011), an exploration of how agencies such as the FBI target environmental and animal rights activists, it’s impassioned and deeply researched.
I approached “Red Barns” gingerly, expecting harrowing descriptions of slaughterhouses and a litany of woes that would flatten me — and possibly, finally, drive me to the veganism I’ve long resisted because of my fondness for cheese.
Such reluctance to engage with the ongoing tragedy of corporate meat production, after all, is the ugly cross that animal rights activists have to bear. Environmentalists advocating for wild landscapes and creatures have breathtaking panoramas and wildlife charisma to help with their public calls to action. Look at this beauty! they can say. Help us save it! But activists trying to put a stop to the heartbreaking misery of animals being raised for food by large corporate entities have no beauty to sell. All they’ve got is: Look at this torture!
Most of us prefer not to. Luckily, “Little Red Barns” isn’t a depressing litany, though it may well change your mind about buying industrial meat.
The book is a lucid indictment of a food system whose normalization of cruelty on a staggering scale is rivaled only by the tightly controlled, government-sanctioned regime of non-transparency that enables it.
Discussing the history of undercover efforts to expose abuses in farm factories — in which the advent of phone cameras and other concealable, portable video equipment in the 2000s played a key role — Potter describes the subsequent rise of “ag-gag” laws, passed to stop reporters and activists from filming such private abuses and making them public.
Keep in mind, Potter notes, that the U.S. agriculture lobby spends as much on buying influence with politicians every year as the fossil fuel lobby; in 2023 alone, it spent $177 million.
Over the past few years, there have been a number of high-profile exposés of factory farm abuses. Potter cites horrifying videos that show hundreds of piglets, held by their legs, having their heads bashed on concrete as workers crack jokes and of sows being beaten and sodomized with metal rods. He writes: “The industry didn’t like this story. … So they started to tell a new story. In this version, the villain wasn’t the worker caught beating and sexually assaulting animals. … It was the activist with a camera. … Factory farms were being attacked by violent extremists, the industry said.”
In fact, through their ubiquity, the standard practices at U.S. factory farms are more quietly devastating than the incidents of extraordinary viciousness. Responding to concerns about the coffin-size gestation crates that commonly hold pregnant pigs, one executive at the National Pork Producers Council sarcastically remarked: “So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets. … I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around.”
The scale of this indifference to the animals we teach our children to love is mind-boggling. Billions of cows, pigs and chickens are raised globally in a given year — the United States has exported its meat-making economies of scale across the planet, and the biomass of creatures being kept for killing and eating now makes up about 60 percent of the mammal biomass on Earth. (Humans make up about a third; our remaining wild animals, 4 percent.)
One chapter, titled “Poop Tours,” offers a particularly vivid portrait of the far-reaching and vile pollution produced by mega-farms. Potter visits waste lagoons — enormous lakes of feces, hormones and antibiotics in which workers sometimes perish. Meanwhile outgassing and leakage turn surrounding areas into toxic hellscapes. “The crust of the lagoon isn’t enough to protect the air from noxious qualities of ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and methane,” he writes. “The gases aren’t just an odor problem — they are so powerful they also damage crops and entire ecosystems.” One person whose home has been rendered nearly unlivable by the stench of nearby CAFOs is retired-teacher-turned-activist Helen Reddout. As Potter drives with Reddout through her once-bucolic community, their windshield wipers scrape gobbets of waste off the yellowing glass; they watch brown, liquefied feces being sprinkled in great, soaring arcs over croplands.
We tend to take our food for granted, shrugging off the distant unpleasantness of factory farms as the price of a tasty slab of bacon. And yet this food empire isn’t an economic inevitability. It is, Potter explains, a result of a concerted, decades-long campaign by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress and their corporate-ag sponsors to consolidate production and squeeze out small farmers (historically, often Black). More recently, it’s the work of a few very, very rich companies. Potter reports that “four companies operate about 75 percent of the world’s corporate beef packing plants and abattoirs. Another four control about 70 percent of pig slaughter.”
Even if we put humaneness and decency aside, the climate damage and extinctions being wrought by our funneling of resources into meat — when plant-based foods are both healthier and more efficient at delivering nutrients — mean we have to look far deeper than the Old MacDonald song, with its vanished quaintness, and past the illusive images of cowboy cool that still serve to reassure us that our farms and feedlots are fine places.
Let’s tell ourselves the story, Potter writes, that’s true.
Lydia Millet’s novel “A Children’s Bible” was shortlisted for a National Book Award, and her short-story collection “Love in Infant Monkeys” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also author of the nonfiction book “We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.”
Little Red Barns
Hiding the Truth, From Farm to Fable
City Lights. 367 pp. $21.95, paperback