Animal Factory
The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment
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Narrated by:
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William Hughes
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By:
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David Kirby
About this listen
Swine flu. Bird flu. Unusual concentrations of cancer and other diseases. Massive fish kills from flesh-eating parasites. Recalls of meats, vegetables, and fruits because of deadly E. coli bacterial contamination.
Recent public-health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. In Animal Factory, best-selling author and investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms and tracks the far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, water, and food.
In this thoroughly researched book, Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. These farms (known as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs), confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of fecal and biological waste as well as other toxins. Weaving together science, politics, law, big business, and everyday life, Kirby accompanies these families in their struggles against animal factories. A North Carolina fisherman takes on pig farms upstream to preserve his river, his family’s life, and his home. A mother in a small Illinois town pushes back against an outsized dairy farm and its devastating impact. And, a Washington state grandmother becomes an unlikely activist when her home is covered with soot and her water supply is compromised by runoff from leaking lagoons of cattle waste.
Animal Factory is an important book about our American food system gone terribly wrong—and the people who are fighting to restore sustainable farming practices and save our limited natural resources.
©2010 David Kirby (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Lentil Underground
- Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
- By: Liz Carlisle
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the "Lentil Underground" begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America's Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to "get big or get out." But 27-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. Unlike the chemically dependent grains American farmers had been told to grow, lentils make their own fertilizer and tolerate variable climates, so their farmers aren't beholden to industrial methods.
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Fingers on the pulse of sustainable ag
- By shakinfist on 06-30-20
By: Liz Carlisle
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The Meat Racket
- The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business
- By: Christopher Leonard
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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How much do you know about the meat on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard spent more than a decade covering the country's biggest meat companies, including four years as the national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. Now he delivers the first comprehensive look inside the industrial meat system, exposing how a handful of companies executed an audacious corporate takeover of the nation's meat supply.
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Hits the nail on the head.
- By Anonymous 8888 on 02-04-15
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The King of California
- J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire
- By: Mark Arax, Rick Wartzman
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 19 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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J. G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions, and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields". The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.
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Interesting story of California Ag history
- By Jean on 08-11-14
By: Mark Arax, and others
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The Soil Will Save Us
- How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming
- By: Kristin Ohlson
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.
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Rambling, mile wide, inch deep treatment of a subject
- By Charles Phillips on 10-17-18
By: Kristin Ohlson
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Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
- Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland
- By: Miriam Horn
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.
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great stories
- By GMMT on 05-15-18
By: Miriam Horn
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The Boom
- How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
- By: Russell Gold
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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Bushwhacked
- Life in George W. Bush's America
- By: Molly Ivins, Lou Dubose
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.
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Richly informative & entertaining...
- By Native Texan on 10-29-03
By: Molly Ivins, and others
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The Idealist
- Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty
- By: Nina Munk
- Narrated by: Susan Nezami
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential best seller The End of Poverty - disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
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Sachs tries hard but the system is not there
- By Amazon Customer on 11-13-15
By: Nina Munk
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The Swamp
- The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
- By: Michael Grunwald
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.
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This is not Jiminy Cricket's river
- By Robert R. on 09-02-18
By: Michael Grunwald
What listeners say about Animal Factory
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Glenda
- 03-29-11
Excellent
I would highly recommend this book to anyone concerned about the food we buy in the stores. Easy to listen to and I now look at meat in the stores in a whole different light.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Michael M.
- 04-30-12
Balanced view, until the end...
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
The author presented a very non-partisan critique of the indistrial food system throughout the book, until the end. The lack of "change" and the maintenance of the status quo in the current administration is excused, citing 2 wars and the economy.
Regrettably, every administration in the past 20 years has worsened this condition. For me, this detracted from the credibility of the entire book at the end.
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- Tim
- 07-19-12
Another Erin Brockovich
If Erin Brockovich wasn't became so mainstream in Hollywood, I can see the studio writing a screenplay for "Animal Factory" and Julia Roberts being the lead activist taking charge. The material that is presented is good, but after a while, it became too much, where I lost interest in listening another tragic stories about water pollution, cancer, animal waste, chicken farms, pig farms, and especially the court system and politics. The book looses its focal point when it goes on and on with the White House and politics with the entire food industry. Instead of reading about the animals, you are about to read the legal system. If you are looking for a straight read on what we consume, read "Eating Animals" or the classic "Fast Food Nation". They are much more linear to the subject.
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- Anthony
- 12-17-11
Same ol'story
What would have made Animal Factory better?
The text needs far more diversity in subject matter and far more depth in exploration.
Would you ever listen to anything by David Kirby again?
Yes, the narration is very good,
Which character – as performed by William Hughes – was your favorite?
NA
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Not much of anything. I am most devoted to humane treatment of animals but this book took us nowhere new. It's the kind of book that people who rant rather than think use to defend their position. Animals need to be properly raised and the environment needs to be cared for. But this book just contributes to the notion that animal wellfare is extremist, tree hugger nonesense.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Art
- 10-21-12
Too long, too anecdotal, & too much heat with too
What disappointed you about Animal Factory?
I was disappointed with the lack of science in the discussion of health concerns. For example, historically most cancer clusters have been a recognized statistical artifact (i.e. a sampling issue, not a health issue) in public health for many years. However, the author devotes many sentences itemizing these anecdotes and only a relatively brief allusion to the lack of causal association with CAFOs.
There is a legitimate argument to be made regarding pollution and the cost to society, but it is obscured by many pages of health effects innuendo.
What didn’t you like about William Hughes’s performance?
He did not pronounce scientific names correctly.
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Animal Factory?
Shorten family anecdotes in favor of a more thoughtful discussion of lack of health evidence, and legitimate debate on pollution, costs to society, and farm subsidies.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Demi
- 04-30-19
great topic but very boring and too long...
To be fair I thought this was a book about the animal factories other than a book about "the fight against animal factories". If that is what you are looking for (ie. a detailed account of how cow poop smelled so bad that people living on the farm can't stand it anymore and the organization and drama it took to join forces...and how a middle ages men volunteers to be the river inspector and spent a few years figuring out where the algae bloom came from...) then this is a good book. It is just way too boring for me. While I feel bad for the struggle of people in the book, that really wasn't what I am looking for,
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