Within the last few decades, the United States went from raising livestock on traditional farms owned by farm families, to “producing” livestock in highly mechanized, industrial operations controlled by a handful of giant corporations. Indiana is home to nearly 2,000 of these industrial-scale animal factories.
Check out our Factory Farm Finder Map!
Our current food and farming system is unsafe, unsustainable, and cruel.
Indiana’s factory farms generate
times the amount of animal waste produced by Indiana’s human population.
In Indiana
of assessed stream miles are not suitable for recreational use because of E.coli contamination from animal waste.
The pollution strength of raw manure is
times greater than that of raw municipal sewage and is arguably more harmful than human waste.
Simply put, Indiana law does not adequately protect public health and the environment from factory farm waste. This is why HEC places education, citizen advocacy, and testifying in defense of rural communities as one of our top priorities. To that end, we have worked with a broad coalition of stakeholders in recent years to defeat dangerous bills that would have: further weakened Indiana’s regulation of factory farms; stripped local governments of their “Home Rule” authority to regulate factory farms; and given unprecedented special legal protections to factory farm operators to shield them from liability when they cause harm.
Indiana’s laws continually fail to protect us from the harm caused by factory farms. That’s why it’s imperative that we support federal legislation that will end factory farming in the US and move our food system towards more sustainable methods. Help make a difference right now by asking your members of Congress to support the Farm System Reform Act!
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