Factory Farm Field Trip

Two days ago, I went on a field trip with two of the other CAFO Culture Research Assistants, and our advisor, Professor Braddock. We drove around southern Virginia, and visited several factory-farm affiliated sites.

I was struck by a few things on our visits:

(1) The smell. The area near the Smithfield facility we visited smelled HORRID, and the smell persisted for quite a while. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but we were all, nevertheless, a bit overwhelmed.

(2) The puns. Smithfield uses a ton of (rather awful) puns as part of their advertising campaigns. I saw trucks that said 'Trans-pork,' 'Perfect any way we slice it,' and 'Rack 'em up,' to name a few.

(3) The invisibility of the factory farm facilities. Many of the sites we saw were set back from the road quite a ways. The Murphy-Brown site we tried to visit was down the end of a long (not publicly-accessible) access road -- you couldn't see anything from the road. I know that factory farming is an invisible issue, with many consumers remaining completely unaware of the environmental and ethical issues that result from meat production & consumption. But I hadn't understood how shielded the facilities themselves were from the public eye.

A sign at the Murphy-Brown facility we drove past.

The view down the road towards the Murphy-Brown facility (the one the sign in the previous picture refers to)

Lindsay poses ironically with Smithfield pig sculpture.