Can contract livestock farmers find a second act?

Animal Outlook’s program is still in the early stages, and DeFreitas focuses on individualized farmer support. She is preparing for an upcoming farm visit with an architect that includes climbing “up in the rafters to measure the structure,” she explains, laughing. “It’s definitely hands-on.” DeFreitas knows how important it is to build trust with farmers who might be leery of working with an animal rights organization. The first farmer she met through the program was surprised when he wasn’t judged for raising animals, she recalls. “We recognize that farmers are our allies not our enemies,” she states emphatically. “They are trapped in horrible contract conditions. We’re not here to shame them, we’re here to applaud the fact that they’re trying to get out of it.”

In addition to converting greenhouses, DeFreitas is also working with a former dairy farmer in Massachusetts to convert milking equipment into use for distillation or brewing, already common practice in microbreweries. “The farmer is able to both grow and harvest the small grains that would be necessary for that, so they would be able to produce a large portion of their inputs for that kind of a system,” she says.

Every farmer’s situation is unique, which makes it difficult to generalize outcomes. Those who have little debt and stable off-farm income can convert their operations in as soon as a year, if everything goes well. For those who carry more debt, it takes longer.

A major issue in converting industrial animal operations is that alternatives, such as specialty mushrooms, vegetables or microgreens, don’t attract the same competitive markets. Speciality growers don’t qualify for the same government subsidies as commodity crops, meat and dairy. Fruits and vegetables are actually excluded from commodity subsidy programs and receive a fraction of the funding under the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program.

Lim, for example, excels at growing mushrooms — blue oyster, lion’s mane and shiitake specifically — but initially struggled to find buyers. The demand for speciality mushrooms that is booming elsewhere in the country has been slow to take off in rural North Carolina. After unsuccessfully trying to sell directly to customers at his local farmers market, concern set in that he would have to take a loss and eat his crops, or dehydrate them and sell dried mushrooms. These roadblocks to his farm transition are somewhat glossed-over on Transfarmation’s website, but behind the scenes, the organization has continued to support him reaching long-term viability.

After months of searching, Whitley was able to find interested wholesale buyers for Lim from two major food distributors. Once secured, Lim’s mushrooms would be sold to hospitals, restaurants and food hubs across North and South Carolina. “They come to the farm and buy it all,” Lim says, beaming. If all goes well, they will buy as much as he is willing to grow, up to 200 pounds each week, and will provide transportation directly from his farm. Transfarmation is also leasing one of Lim’s chicken houses to convert into an educational greenhouse and demonstration hub, where he can grow produce and show prospective farmers, government officials and lenders what is possible. Renovation on the greenhouse is nearing completion, and soon, “we will grow a lot of vegetables and fresh greens,” says Lim, relieved that his dream of earning a living by farming is finally coming true.

The work of programs like Transfarmation and the Farm Transitions Program originated with farmers themselves, and is a continuation of on-the-ground innovation that farmers have been developing for years out of sheer necessity. For Paula Boles, being able to successfully convert two Tyson chicken houses came down to her husband Dale’s background in construction and engineering. Over the last eight years, the couple has developed a thriving vegetable and flower farm — a stark change of pace from their years contracting for Tyson, when they held down five off-farm jobs between the two of them and had to drain Paula’s 401(k) to avoid bankruptcy.

In 2014, the Boles watched a documentary about Watts and his battle against Perdue Farms, and realized their chicken farming problems weren’t any fault of their own but the design of the system. In 2015, they terminated their Tyson contract and started brainstorming how to reuse their massive barns. There were no programs like Transfarmation or Farm Transitions yet, so they turned to nearby extension programs and found grant funding from Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission and Farm Aid.

They repurposed water feeders as irrigation lines, hung baling twine from the rafters to trellis tomato plants and turned a junkyard refrigerator into a germination chamber with grow lights. What they couldn’t use, they sold for cash. (“When you don’t have any money, you just figure it out,” she tells me.) After years of work, their once dusty, dimly-lit chicken houses are now sun-drenched and teeming with rare heirloom flowers, vegetables, hot peppers and microgreens that Boles sells to a local restaurant where she used to work weekends for gas and grocery money. “The thing that I used to lay awake and cry at night now brings me joy,” she beams. “It’s just opened up a whole new world of resources for me that I didn’t know existed.”

In 2022, Boles joined Transfarmation as an allied farmer — though not enrolled, she offers support to farmers who are part of the project — and she sits on the grower advisory committee for Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP), a project that helps mobilize rural communities harmed by industrial livestock production. In early 2023, Watts helped launch SRAP’s own Contract Grower Transition Program, which he leads alongside other former contract farmers he’s met through advocacy work and the RAFI hotline. Being staffed entirely by former contract poultry producers “just gives immediate street cred,” Watts observes, and unlike animal advocacy-led programs, SRAP’s team works with farmers who may want to continue raising animals under regenerative animal agriculture practices as an alternative to factory farming.

Watts readily acknowledges the economic privilege and sheer luck that made him a good candidate for a transition program: He had little debt and owned his own land. Most contract farmers carry too great a debt burden for these small programs to shoulder, and operate at too great a scale to pivot to specialty crops. “You can’t just start growing mushrooms and make that same kind of money,” says Watts.

Part of his work is in prevention, to help farmers avoid the pitfalls of entering into factory farming contracts to begin with. He likens his role to an air traffic controller, pointing farmers in whichever direction that they can get help, whether that’s referring them to enroll in Transfarmation, connecting them to regional Farm Service Agency funding, finding USDA grants for which they qualify or simply being a comforting voice on the phone. Working behind the scenes, Watts also pushes lawmakers to enact better regulations to protect farmers, like the recently passed Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments ruling that he says “was twenty years in the making.” It forces poultry companies that use the tournament system to be more transparent with contract growers about how they are paid.

Over the last 10 years of farmer advocacy work, Watts has seen incremental improvements in the USDA’s allocation of funds to support local and regional food systems, especially in underserved rural communities, that could make it financially possible for farmers to end contracts and transition to better practices — but for any farmer transition program to be effective at a larger scale, farmers need debt relief. “If farmers didn’t have the debt, they would leave the system in droves. But where are they going?” he asks. “We have to start putting our money into systems that we believe in.”