By Grace Hussain for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Paula Boles says her husband, Dale, didn't want to be a farmer, but when his father passed away he found himself in possession of the family farm. Growing up, he helped raise cattle, rice and tobacco. But together the couple decided to transition the farm into something new - a chicken farm - and that's when their problems began.

It's a story common to the contract chicken farming business. The Boles were told by Tyson that raising broiler chickens would allow the couple to make easy money in retirement. Instead, they found themselves spiraling into debt, struggling to stay afloat while Tyson continued to profit. "I considered ourselves indentured servants 'cause that's...the way we were treated," says Paula Boles.

Boles says she and her husband didn't just suffer financially. Raising broilers for Tyson jeopardized their mental health and strained their marriage. For the Boles, the path out of that crisis was to become one of the few early adopters to transition out of raising livestock - converting their chicken houses to greenhouses.

They aren't alone. Though the movement is still small, it is growing, thanks in part to efforts by projects like Transfarmation and Rowdy Girl Sanctuary. For the Boles, transitioning away from raising meat for corporations has helped reduce their stress and provide freedom that they hadn't enjoyed during their years of raising chickens.

In part that's because contrary to what they were told by Tyson, the business of raising chickens for the poultry conglomerate controlled their lives. Paula recalls having to get up at 3 AM to check on the birds and the sheds anytime an alarm would go off, alerting them to something amiss. The demand was so great that Dale Boles even missed their son's college graduation, as he was unable to leave the farm.

Factory Farming Linked to Stress

In 2018, the CDC identified farmers as the occupation with the highest rate of suicide. While that specific finding was retracted due to an inaccurate interpretation of the data, mental health struggles remain a challenge in the agriculture industry.

As a therapist focused on serving farmers in rural Minnesota, Ted Matthews has firsthand experience with the mental health crisis in farming. One of the major stressors Matthews points to is the increasing size of farm operations. "Not that long ago if you had 100 or 200 cows you were a big dairy," he says. But today some dairies have tens of thousands of cows. As competitors grow in size, it's becoming harder and harder to compete, driving smaller-scale farmers into predatory contracts with conglomerates like Tyson and Smithfield.

Once they've signed a contract, the farmer loses all control over how animals are raised and, as was the case for the Boles, they don't even own the livestock they're housing.

That lack of control over everything from stocking density to feed represents a major stressor for farmers, says Tyler Whitley based upon his meetings with dozens of them. Whitley spearheads Transfarmation, one of the projects focused on helping farmers transition out of livestock, like the Boles.

Trapped in a contract with Tyson, Paula watched as thousands of chicks were dumped unceremoniously into their chicken sheds, with no regard for the condition of the animals. "You can tell within 24 hours whether you're screwed or not," says Boles, as some of the flocks were from hatcheries that produced "better birds."

As the flock got older, she would walk through the sheds filled "wall to wall and door to door" with chickens. Sometimes while making the trek she'd see a bird stiffen and fall back, a sure sign of a heart attack. "It was just really inhumane," she says.

If the dead weren't removed daily, the other birds would start pecking at the carcasses. Cleaning up the expired chickens was no easy task. "Out of that many birds, you're going to have some die everyday," she says. And as they grew heavier, several trips were required to haul their dead bodies out.

She recalls feeling especially distraught when, just a few short weeks later, they would be caught, placed into cages and loaded onto the trucks. It wasn't uncommon for birds to die during loading or on the trip to the slaughterhouse. For Boles, the animal suffering was compounded by the fact that every dead bird represented money lost and more debt.

From Chicken Barns to Growing Greens

Eventually, they were able to leverage their retirement savings and Dale's construction experience to transition their chicken sheds to greenhouses for growing greens. Now ,they help guide other farmers looking to do the same.

Even though they now have greenhouses instead of chicken houses, the Boles are still dealing with the fallout of running a broiler farm. In 2020, Dale had a heart attack that the first responders didn't think he would survive. The cause: stress-induced heart damage that Paula believes was from their time running the chicken farm. His survival was thanks to "the grace of God," she says.

While the Boles are by no means alone in their concern for the welfare of their animals, Matthews points out that many farmers view it as simply "part of the job." Some situations, however, are so horrible that basically everyone is impacted.

He points to hog farmers during COVID-19. Due to slaughterhouse shutdowns, farmers "had to euthanize pigs [who] were totally healthy." The farmers' job during that time basically became killing pigs and dumping the bodies. They have "nightmares about those kinds of things," says Matthews.

In Whitley's experience, even if poor animal welfare is considered just part of being a livestock farmer, it often contributes to why the farmers he works with want to transition their farms. "They'll name living next to a barn of screaming pigs or chickens [or] picking up dead chickens" as quality of life issues associated with being a farmer, says Whitley.

Compounding the issue is a reluctance to talk about their mental health. Farmers "don't look at it like mental health," says Matthews. "They look at it like mental illness," which makes them reluctant to seek help.

For Paula Boles, their experience has led to a better future, enabling her to help others struggling in her community. She spends her days growing flowers and produce in her chicken sheds turned greenhouses. Of the converted structures she says: "the same greenhouse I used to cry over at night [allows us] to grow...microgreens and bless people."


Grace Hussain wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Keystone State News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

American consumers spend roughly $11.6 billion on candy each Halloween, but even at that rate, candy companies end up with a surplus. Those leftovers end up in some interesting places, including farms, where some farmers end up feeding candy to their animals. Chocolate and other treats that can’t be sold, or candy bits leftover from production, are being sold to some meat and dairy producers to add to their animal feed. While the practice has been going on for years, more recently, the agriculture and candy industries have been framing the practice as “sustainable” — a way to curb waste that would otherwise go to landfills. Major meat producer Cargill, for example, deems it “upcycling” and a “win-win” for the animals and the environment.

A deeper dive reveals that both meat and candy companies also benefit financially from feeding candy waste to farm animals. And some food waste experts say consumers should be questioning why there is so much of this waste to begin with.

Where the Practice Originated, and Whether It’s Healthy

Feeding candy to farm animals was initially motivated by rising corn prices during times of drought, making the practice a way for producers to reduce feed cost. Candy can apparently fill in for corn as a required sugar source. As one former cattle nutritionist turned dairy farmer, Laura Daniels, claims via social media, sugar is needed to feed bacteria in the stomach of cattle that breaks down the fiber in plant foods they consume.

However, at least one farmer doesn’t see the benefit. “Empty, nutritionally void, chemical laden sugars are being foisted on cattle and their rumens,” writes Minnesota farmer Lauren Kiesz,“all in the name of the conventional food system’s four horsemen: bigger, fatter, faster, cheaper.” Kiesz, who says she farms animals exclusively on pasture, notes, “a mouthful of grass and a mouthful of Mounds are extraordinarily different.”

The debate doesn’t end there. While some advocacy groups for pigs kept as pets urge owners not to feed candy to their animals, there are hog farmers who also add candy waste to their feed.

And it continues. “Candy of all forms is unhealthy for pigs,” says the North America Pet Pig Association. Yet, according to National Hog Farmer, “Waste chocolate can also be added up to 30 percent of finishing pig diets to support optimal growth performance without affecting carcass composition or pork quality.”

Feed is the greatest expense for most animal farmers, so cheap candy waste offers an economical solution. “When producers find a way to blend in other, cheaper ingredients into the standard cow meal, they frequently will,” reports The Counter. “As long as the stuff doesn’t hurt milk and meat output, they’re going to make more money.

Many consumers learned of the practice of feeding candy to cows in 2017, when a truckload of red Skittles spilled onto a highway in Dodge County, Wisconsin. The story went viral, making news across the country. Those particular candies were reportedly defective, lacking the signature “S” due to a power outage at the factory. Interestingly, while the truck was reportedly on its way to a nearby dairy farm, Mars (the owner of Skittles) later denied that it had sold the candy to be fed to cattle.

Questioning Candy Waste

The Hershey Company has been selling candy waste to Cargill since 2011; which the chocolate maker describes as an “innovative” “sustainability partnership.”

“Today we have an entire plant in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (U.S.), dedicated to this environmentally, economically, nutritionally friendly effort,” states Cargill on its site. “There, our team turns tens of thousands of pounds of Hershey’s chocolate waste per year into feed ingredients for cows, pigs and other species of livestock.”

As the farmer Kiesz notes, though, claiming that feeding castoff candy to cows is a net positive to the environment, is, “on closer inspection […] completely misleading.” She explains that with all steps considered, “middle-men, inputs, and expended resources” — including the added transport of the candy — “there is no way anyone can make the argument that our environmental system is better off.”

Dr. Kathryn Bender, assistant professor of economics at the University of Delaware, seems to agree. Bender says that while “it’s always great to see these innovative solutions,” meaning the diverting of candy waste to livestock, “the most ideal thing would be if we just didn’t have that waste in the first place.”

She says that programs such as the one employed by Hershey and Cargill should be there to aid companies in measuring and subsequently cutting their waste. “Oftentimes, there’s just a lot of food waste that’s not measured, and so programs like this can allow companies to start tracking what that waste is, and then we would hope that companies would say, ‘Okay, what can we do to decrease that waste?’”

But that doesn’t seem to be happening. According to news reports, candy companies have been selling their waste to animal farmers for over a decade, at least. It turns out that having such a fallback may be quelling the motivation of a company to cut their waste, says Bender. A similar example of these perverse incentives played out in a study she worked on regarding consumer food waste that showed waste increased when consumers believed it was being composted rather than going to a landfill.

Inside the U.S. Corn Surplus

While both Hersey and Cargill tout the benefits of the partnership, Dr. Tammara Soma, associate professor and research director of the Food Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University, says consumers should be questioning why so much candy is being produced to begin with. The reason, she tells Sentient, “is because we’ve commodified corn,” and we have so much high fructose corn syrup being produced as a result.

As Soma explains, because corn is “produced in such excess and is highly subsidized in the U.S., high fructose corn syrup —- which became a cheap sweetener in lieu of sugar cane or beet sugar — got put into everything.” She says this is what spurred the production of many corn syrup based items, “like all of the candies we see for Halloween.”

Corn (and, for the record, this is dent corn not the sweet corn you eat off the cob) is considered the most valuable commodity in American agriculture, with the U.S. being the largest producer and consumer of corn in the world. Though dent corn, also called field corn, is grown mostly for feed for livestock and for ethanol, it also plays a massive role in processed food. “Corn is in the sodas Americans drink and the potato chips they snack on,” writes Roberto A. Ferdman for the Washington Post. “It’s in hamburgers and french fries, sauces and salad dressings, baked goods, breakfast cereals, virtually all poultry, and even most fish.” It’s also in candy.

Tom Philpott, a researcher at John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and former food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones and Grist, tells Sentient that the agri-food industry, “is just always looking for another profitable way to get rid of this overproduction of corn.” He adds that “someone’s going to find a use for that and a way to make a buck off of it. Selling high fructose corn syrup to the candy industry is just one way.” And because corn syrup is so cheap, he says there is little risk to candy companies to overproduce, especially when livestock farmers are there, ready to pay for it.

Hershey’s classic chocolate bar contains sugar — another product Soma explains is produced in surplus — but many of the brand’s other products, such as Twizzlers licorice, Almond Joys and York Peppermint Patties, contain corn syrup.

Soma says the commodification and surplus of corn and sugar results in waste, including “too many surplus candies, that are then fed to commodified animals.” Because animal farming has become so industrialized, she adds, “the large scale [of animals] can somewhat absorb the large scale of waste.” And on top of that, everyone gets paid.

Feeding candy to cows is not only done to curb waste and allow major corporations like Cargill to claim to be more sustainable. It also saves them money. Large companies like Hershey would otherwise likely have to pay private waste haulers, Soma explains, to either transport and dump the waste in landfills, or to be dealt with by anaerobic digesters that turn food waste into biogas. Instead, candy companies can charge meat and dairy producers to take the waste off their hands — producers who then save money thanks to the cheaper feed. They can also continue over-producing, rather than working to cut waste, while claiming to be sustainable.

Sentient reached out to Cargill for this story, but did not receive a reply.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, Soma says that without the option of using commodified animals to absorb the surplus candy waste, “we would be able to question more why cows would ever need to eat highly processed candy derived foods,” as well as question why there is so much waste being produced to begin with, and be pushed to seek better solutions.

Overall, she says, “we need to critically question industrial agriculture and industrial commoditized food systems,” which she says are “very wasteful, very extractive, focused on profits alone at the expense of the environment, promotes monoculture and takes nature out of the equation.”


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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For decades, Florida's upstream farmers and downstream aquaculturists have been at odds over water quality and environmental impacts.

Now, the new initiative "Healthy Farms-Healthy Bays" seeks to bridge the divide and foster more collaboration to protect Florida's fragile ecosystems. It has released a new report outlining its vision, as well as specific steps to protect water quality and conserve Florida's working lands.

Randall Dasher, a Suwannee County farmer and co-chair of the initiative, played a key role in uniting groups to work on creating a healthier watershed.

"It is about coming together and collaborating, getting across the table from each other in a nonthreatening way," Dasher explained. "Because too much of that has gone on. That just makes people be less likely to listen and hear, and talk about best practices."

The partnership, supported by the Florida Climate Smart Agriculture Work Group and a $100,000 grant from the VoLo Foundation, brings together farmers, aquaculturists and environmental experts to tackle challenges like nutrient runoff, declining water quality and the effects of climate change.

Ernie Shea, president of the nonprofit Solutions from the Land, said the initiative marks a turning point in how Florida's agriculture and aquaculture can work together when it comes to climate change.

"We're all affected," Shea pointed out. "Climate change takes no prisoners; it affects all sides of operations. And what we've done with Florida Climate-Smart Agriculture is bring together the entire value chain - the producers, right up through the associations that represent farmers."

The Suwannee River Basin was chosen as the focal point for their efforts. A team of farmers, aquaculturists and university experts conducted a two-year analysis to identify the most pressing challenges and propose solutions. One key recommendation is accelerating best practices to reduce nutrient runoff, from planting cover crops to using microbial sprays and reducing chemical inputs that affect water quality.


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Native grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem in North America.

A South Dakota advocacy group hopes its educational campaign will reach a wider audience after receiving a regional award. The South Dakota Grassland Coalition's recent television public service announcement, part of its "Where Good Things Grow" campaign, recently won an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy award.

Quality grasslands help clean air and water, sequester carbon, reduce erosion and provide wildlife habitat.

Ron Nichols, one of the campaign's creators, produced the television spot.

"The television spots in particular are designed to help people understand that we are all connected to the grasslands and that they're definitely worth protecting and improving their health," Nichols explained.

He said it was "affirming" the film's message resonated with the region and met the high standards of an Emmy Award. Nichols also hopes it will educate people about threats to grasslands including conversion to cropland, woody encroachment and the effects of poor management.

The one-minute film features footage of rancher Kelsey Scott and her nephews caretaking land on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Nichols emphasized he appreciated the opportunity to film a local rancher practicing good grassland management.

"Rather than going out and trying to get an actor, these spots are genuine," Nichols stressed. "They really reflect what's happening out on the land in South Dakota."

Along with the rancher's cattle, the PSA includes images of sage grouse, buffalo, pronghorn and a diverse sampling of grassland plant species.

Joe Dickie and his son, Charlie, filmed the scenes and images featured over several years traveling through South Dakota's grasslands. He is glad to showcase the results of regenerative ranching practices.

"Running cattle, resting the land, not overgrazing, being really aware of riparian areas along water," Dickie outlined. "Really just doing the right things for the environment."

The PSA aired more than 4,000 times this year.


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