I recently went on a road trip through the California Central Valley and stopped at a grocery store in a small town. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in Tulare, the biggest dairy-farming county in the US.
When I imagine farmland, I picture bucolic scenes: escaping the smog of LA’s highways for the clean air and green pastures of the countryside. As I stepped out of the car, I was soon disabused of such idealism.
The stench was overwhelming and made me physically recoil. Residents were stocking up on bottled water. Earlimart, the town I was passing through, has a status of “failing” on California’s water board, with water quality at “high risk.” Factory farms are exempt from the Clean Air Act, and animal agriculture is the leading source of pollution in streams and rivers in the US, with farmed animals producing billions of pounds of manure that leaks into the waterways every year.
At USC, it’s easy to feel insulated from the more immediate environmental damages of factory farms, so I decided to pack my camera and check out a local block of dairy farms, inspired by my trip through the California Central Valley. I headed to Chino, an hour’s drive east of campus.
The smell was once again repulsive, but this time I saw a disturbing farming practice most people don’t think about. To make milk, cows must of course give birth, so what happens to all their calves?
They are typically separated from their mothers within their first couple of days of life.
Right where I had parked, I could see two mother cows with their umbilical cords hanging out of them. I could hear them crying out for their babies, who were kept away from the herd in a different pen and were about to be loaded into a trailer.
When the workers saw me watching this process from the street, one farmer called the police on me – he said he was upset at people recording the farm, and appeared displeased with the police when they told him I was within my legal rights.
These calves would soon be taken to a separate calf-raising facility. The same ear tags I’d observed at the farm were being worn by calves raised at a nearby facility. Most of the dairy farms I passed didn’t have any calves on site, but there were three farms raising hundreds of calves in wooden hutches.
The calves are confined in these hutches of about 13 square feet for roughly eight weeks with barely enough room to turn around. For reference, 153 square feet is roughly the size of a parking space. Imagine housing twelve or more calves in that area.
Some lawyers argue that these hutches violate California Penal Code 597t, which states that any animal “confined in an enclosed area shall [be provided with] an adequate exercise area.” But when factory farm investigators have documented illegal practices like those I saw in Chino, district attorneys have refused to prosecute them, ignoring Penal Code 597t and saying that these hutches are the “industry standard.”
These farms form the basis of many supply chains. For instance, 85% of the cheese used for pizzas in the US is produced by Leprino, which sources milk from Dairy Farmers of America, whose Central Valley dairies send their newborn calves to Grimmius Cattle. Their calf-raising operations are the largest in California, housing up to 100,000 calves per factory farm. Within the last 10 years at least, USC’s local Domino’s Pizza on Figueroa St. used cheese with processing code “06-55,” which signifies Leprino, according to the California Milk Advisory Board.
When I went back to the grocery stores in the USC Village, I observed three of four Trader Joe’s brand raw chicken products (and all four raw chicken products sold in Target) had plant codes P-6137A and P-7632, indicating they are sourced from Foster Farms, in Fresno, California. This corporation has at least 46 chicken factory farms in California, averaging over 800,000 chickens per farm.
Despite labels like “organic,” “free range” and “respect for animals” suggesting high welfare standards for the birds, several recent investigations of their California facilities (including humane-certified chicken farms, slaughterhouses, hatcheries and turkey farms) revealed a range of horrific conditions, such as workers driving over living chickens with forklifts.
When asked for comment, Foster Farms said in a statement, “Animal welfare is a top priority at Foster Farms. We adhere to the National Chicken Council’s Animal Welfare Guidelines and maintain comprehensive animal welfare programs across our operations. Our practices are regularly assessed through independent third-party audits, and we are committed to maintaining high standards of animal care throughout the production process.”
USDA has cited Foster Farms on 18 separate occasions for failing to abide by animal welfare laws, according to a 2023 legal complaint, including being scalded alive.
Californians have voted against practices like this. Proposition 12 passed in 2018 to prevent farmed animals from being housed in a cruel manner. This proposition included calves, though dairy calves are exempt – the law only extends to calves raised for veal, according to The Humane League.
Factory farms emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases, they are leading sources of deforestation, biodiversity loss, zoonotic disease, and antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and they’re rife with animal abuse and violations of workers’ rights. How do they still support so many food supply chains?
The paradox is that 99.7% of farmed animals in the U.S. are raised in factory farms, and so, knowingly or not, most people are likely indirectly supporting them with their purchases.
These industries are also profitable as the result of tens of billions of dollars of government subsidies each year, according to New Roots Institute.
While my experiences at these farms showed me how difficult it is to connect the food we buy to its source, I realized I can make deliberate choices about what I eat and ask the institutions I support to do the same.
There is a range of plant-based options on campus to choose from, and we can voice our support for more plant proteins in place of factory farmed products. USC has made sustainability a core commitment, and factory farms are incompatible with that mission. Our decisions may feel small in the moment, but when we all do our part, it isn’t long before the tiny droplets of change surge into a mighty flood.