Indigestion: Living amid hog CAFOs—now with methane digesters attached
Release Date: 11/14/2023
The Weird, Beautiful Oyster
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, Dave Love explains oyster farming, why it’s impossible to industrialize it, and how oysters offer benefits ranging from amino acids to storm surge buffers.
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Abundant Salmon, Troubled Waters
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, veteran journalists Douglas Frantz and Catharine Collins expose what lies beneath those rosy salmon filets that grace our supermarket seafood cases.
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A Livable Future for Fisheries
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, Philip Loring discusses practical ways for fishers, grocers, and consumers to contribute to the repair and restoration of global fisheries.
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Fish Stories
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, author and life-long fisherman Paul Greenberg makes the case for eating more wild-caught U.S. seafood—and much less factory-farmed shrimp and salmon from abroad.
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Chicken Heaven
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin tells us about Tree Range Farms, a poultry ecosystem alternative to the industrial food animal production model that injures workers and degrades the environment. Find out how his farmers create chicken heaven.
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Farm Like Our Health Depends On it
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, the formidable husband-and-wife team of David Montgomery and Anne Biklé draw on their deep experience as environmental scientists, gardeners, and celebrated book authors to show that regenerative farming isn't some crunchy fad or marketing jargon to be seized by pesticide purveyors. Rather, it might hold the key to keeping our farms humming as the climate warms and curing our epidemic of diet-related health troubles.
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It’s Not Enough to Sustain: We Must Regenerate
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 must regrow new soil, and we can do that using plants, fungi, and microbes in an ecological system that’s been doing pretty well without our help for billions of years.
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The Injured Workers Behind Your Chicken Habit
Unconfined
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 Administration, and has since emerged as a leading advocate and researcher on the topic. In this episode of Unconfined, she lays in stark detail all the ways the federal regulatory system has failed to live up to its obligation to ensure the safety of the people who produce America's favorite meat.
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Danger on the farm: What’s putting workers at such high risk?
Unconfined
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 gored, dying of asphyxiation in grain bins, or drowning in manure pits, these workers remain mostly invisible—and grossly under-protected by the agency that’s supposed to look out for their safety. Christina helps us understand what’s behind...
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Poultry Workers Fight for Their Rights
Unconfined
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 Licolli, co-founder of the Arkansas-based worker center Venceremos, about the creative ways workers are fighting to improve their lives in the home state of meat behemoth Tyson, which holds a 25 percent...
info_outlineUnconfined 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 environmental justice advocate Sherri White-Williamson, who grew up in eastern North Carolina and watched its transformation from a stronghold of small-scale African-American agrarianism to a global epicenter of industrial-scale hog production—and what it’s like on the ground to add methane digesters to the mix.