Collected Articles on Industrial Livestock Production to Launch with Conference in Iowa

A highly anticipated series of evidence-based articles on the public health and environmental impacts of industrial livestock production will be published on September 24, 2024, by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book, Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health, is edited by James Merchant and Robert Martin. Retired Senator Tom Harkin (Iowa) wrote the foreword for the book. Merchant is the founding dean emeritus of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, and Martin is a senior adviser to the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), where he served as a policy and food systems program director from 2011 to 2023. 

Previously, Martin led the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production that produced a watershed report, Putting Meat on the Table: Farm Animal Production in America, which first addressed many of these same issues from a system perspective. This volume is intended to update the evidence on the public health and environmental damage of these operations to inform the work of policymakers, students, academics, and advocacy groups working to reform this aspect of the food system.

In the book, Merchant and Martin bring together public health and other experts to explore the most critical topics related to industrial livestock production. Some of the more well-known contributors to the book include worker safety and health policy expert and advocate Debbie Berkowitz, who was a guest on the Center’s Unconfined podcast; ranchers and author Nicolette Hahn Niman and Bill Niman; John Ikerd, an author and professor emeritus of agricultural economics; and public health researchers such as Tara Smith, Greg Gray, and Christopher Jones.

Researchers affiliated with the Center made important contributions as authors on a range of topics.  The chapter titled “Air Pollution I: Occupational, Community, Regional, and Global Health Effects” was co-authored by D’Ann Williams, an assistant scientist at the Center, and the chapter, “Air Pollution II: Nuisance, Quality of Life, and Behavioral Health Impacts” was co-written by Chris Heaney, an associate professor affiliated faculty at the Center. The concluding chapter, titled “Still a Jungle Out There: Advocacy to Mitigate Environmental and Public Health Impacts of Industrial Meat,” was written by the Center’s senior research associate, Tom Philpott.

The essays explore the ecological, community, social, and public health impacts of industrial livestock production, and how they endanger the health of farm and meatpacking workers, neighbors, and surrounding communities, most of which are rural and populated by poor communities and communities of color. The book chapters cover topics such as the history, structure, and trends in the food animal production industry; the effects of these operations on water and air pollution; infectious disease health effects; community and social impacts; environmental justice and sustainable agriculture; and the impacts of COVID-19 among meatpacking workers. Public health hazards of industrial livestock production addressed in the book include antibiotic-resistant bacteria due to the misuse of antibiotics, as well as water polluted with nitrates, microbes, and other harmful chemicals. Authors also address the livestock industry’s undermining of local economies in rural communities, and the sweeping political influence at both the state and national levels that serves as a roadblock to mitigation efforts and regulation. 

On September 25-26, 2024, The Harkin Institute for Public Policy, based at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, will co-host a conference with CLF to launch the book. The conference is open to the public, and panel discussions will be livestreamed. Harkin represented Iowa as a congressman in the US House of Representatives from 1975 to 1985 and the US Senate from 1985 to 2015.