Our Visit to Farm Sanctuary

Hi friends,

In the final stop of our cross-country journey, we stopped for a few days in upstate New York to stay at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen.

We are looking at several angles of sustainability when it comes to what we eat, since food accounts for a large piece of our environmental footprint. Vegetarian vs. meat? Organic vs. conventional? Local vs. global? There are many issues to look at here and when it comes to food it can be controversial. At the very least I'm hoping our videos spark some conversations on sustainable eating.

Farm Sanctuary is a home to downed and sick farm animals that come from the industrial factory farm system that brings us most of the meat we buy at the supermarket. We visited with the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, rabbits and others that are living out the rest of their lives at Farm Sanctuary, being cared for by the folks who work there. Carrick interviewed Matt Rice, the campaign coordinator at Farm Sanctuary, about the factory farming system and how that model is unsustainable to the environment.

I saw a statistic last year that eating vegan (no meat or dairy) has more of a positive environmental impact than buying a Prius. Of course, there are a lot of factors there to consider, but in general the idea makes sense. The majority of food grown in this country is grown for farm animals, not people – in turn, farm animals consume a massive amount of food and water. While human sewage is treated and regulated in the U.S., farm animal waste has much less regulation for disposal, and it produces a great deal of methane, which is 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Factory farms are unsustainable because they aren’t responsible for the waste they create and they rely on cheap fossil fuels in fertilizing and harvesting the crops to feed the billions of animals.

When it comes to factory farms there is a lot of shocking material out there, with images that are hard to look at. Our videos are focusing on sustainability, so we’ll be looking at the environmental impacts of factory farms and not the animal cruelty and confinement issues with the graphic images.

People have a lot of choices when it comes to the food we buy and consume, and food can be a very touchy subject. I understand that leaving out meat and dairy can be a radical shift in how people eat. Many of the places we’ve visited on this cross-country journey have been good examples of how living sustainably will mean new ways of doing and thinking. It’s worth looking at different ways in which how we eat affects our environmental footprint, and to consider the benefits of eating lower on the food chain.

Be well,
Colin
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Our Renewable Nation, A Cross-Country Eco-Video Adventure
www.OurRenewableNation.org