Indigestion: Living amid hog CAFOs—now with methane digesters attached
Release Date: 11/14/2023
This Is Your Farm on Forever Chemicals
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, author Mariah Blake and former organic farmer Adam Nordell tell the dark tale of how the highly toxic, long-lived class of chemicals called PFAS made their way from government labs to corporate factories to a farm near you—and the happier story of how ordinary people are organizing to minimize the harm from this mess.
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The Dish on MAHA and Food
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich and Theodore Ross of the Food and Environment Reporting Network, co-hosts of Forked podcast, tease out the contradictions and paradoxes of food policy in the age of Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Soil Microbes Matter
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, Leo Horrigan tells us about his new book and all the ways we could use microbes to regenerate healthy soil, sink carbon, and grow more nutritious crops.
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Landing Young People
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, Michelle Hughes despairs over federal funding freezes for land- access programs and rebounds with an optimistic vision for the long-term future in which young farmers regenerate not only soil, but the industry as a whole.
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Land's End
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, author Michael Grunwald and host Tom Philpott grapple with the future of food in a warming world.
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Black to the Land
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, author Brea Baker teases out the 20th century’s great dispossession of Black farmers, and reports on a budding revival of African-American agrarianism.
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The Land Owns Us
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, James Skeet waxes philosophical on European-style, settler-oriented, colonialism-informed agriculture and re-imagines an agricultural practice that relies instead on indigenous regenerative intelligence.
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Monopoly Money: On the Iowa Hog Barons Behind Your Bacon
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, author Austin Frerick discusses the barons who dominate US food production, including an Iowa farm couple who spun enormous, manure-spewing hog operations into a vast fortune.
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Confused by Nutrition Research? Blame Big Food
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, Marion Nestle reveals the food industry's recipe for cooking up academic nutrition research that serves its interests—not yours.
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Is Animal Agriculture Contributing to Bird Flu Spread?
Unconfined
In this episode of Unconfined, two leading experts, Meghan Davis and Erin Sorrell, take us from farming communities to policy circles to explain how bird flu spreads, who is at risk, and what we can do to slow this outbreak.
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.