Industrial agriculture today threatens America’s landscapes and waterways as well as our culture and values. North Carolina’s hogs now outnumber its citizens and produce more fecal waste than all the people in California, New York, and Washington combined. Some industrial pork operations produce more sewage than America’s largest cities. But while human waste must be treated, hog waste, similarly fetid and virulent, is simply dumped into the environment. Stadium sized warehouses shoehorn 100,000 sows into claustrophobic cages that hold them in one position for a lifetime over metal grate floors. Culverts below collect and channel their putrefying waste into ten acre open air pits three stories deep from which miasmal vapors choke surrounding communities and tens of millions of gallons of hog feces ooze annually into North Carolina’s rivers. Such practices have created a science fiction nightmare. The festering effluent that escapes from industrial swine pens has fertilized blooms of Pfiesteria piscicida, a toxic microbe that thrives in the fecal marinade of North Carolina’s rivers. This tiny predator, which can morph into 24 forms depending on its prey species, inflicts pustulating lesions on fish whose flesh it dissolves with excreted toxins then sucks through a mouth tube. The "cell from hell" has killed so many fish – a billion in one instance –that North Carolina must use bulldozers to bury them beneath the rancid shores of the Neuse River and Pamlico Sound. Pfiesteria also causes brain damage and respiratory illness in humans. Two years ago, Pfiesteria sickened dozens of people including fishermen, swimmers, and bridge workers.

Industrial farming is also for the birds. Some corporate farms crowd a million beakless chickens in cramped, dark cages soaking up antibodies and laying their guts out for modern Mengeles like Frank Perdue and Don Tyson for the duration of their miserable lives. And the chickens are coming home to roost. Industrial farming isn’t just bad for chickens and hogs, it destroys family farms, aquifers, soils, and pollutes the air and water. Billionaire nest barons Tyson, Perdue and hog tycoon Wendell Murphy, have used their market power to drive a million family farmers out of business including virtually every independent egg and broiler producer in America. Each corporate farm puts 10 family farmers out of business. The same process of vertical integration has bankrupted 5 out of 6 of America’s hog farmers over the past 15 years and hammered the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of democracy rooted in family owned freeholds. Industrial meat moguls site their stinking farms in the poorest communities and pay slave wages to their miniscule work force for performing one of the most dangerous and unhealthy jobs in America.

Massive political contributions by this tiny handful of agriculture barons allow them to evade laws that prohibit other Americans from polluting our waterways. Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America’s water pollution. Last year, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of Chesapeake Bay and threatened Maryland’s vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwest Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and now saturate local waterways. Moreover, industrial meat is unsavory. Factory raised meat is soft and bland. Many Americans have forgotten that you are not supposed to be able to cut chicken with a fork.

Sustainable pork and chicken are still available to those who look. Americans can still find networks of sustainable family farmers who raise their animals to range free on natural grass pastures and natural feeds without steroids, sub-therapeutic antibiotics or other artificial growth promotants and who treat their animals with dignity and respect. These farmers bring tasty premium quality meat to customers while practicing the highest standards of husbandry and environmental stewardship.

Sustainable meats taste the best. This is another case where doing right means eating well.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is President of Water Keeper Alliance. He serves as Senior Counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper, and as Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at the Pace University School of Law Environmental Litigation Clinic. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Virginia Law School and was awarded a Masters Degree in Environmental Law from Pace University School of Law.