Investigative journalist Will Potter is the author of Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable, which illuminates the “frightening truth about animal agriculture’s role in accelerating climate collapse” and “shows how the authoritarian measures being taken to maintain control over this key aspect of the global food supply chain are directly linked to the proliferation and empowerment of far-right militias.”
CA: What aspects of our food system are kept hidden from public view?
Potter: Factory farming is dependent on secrecy. This is how 99 percent of animal products reach American consumers—nearly 10 billion animals raised for food in the United States every year. Over the last 100 years, consumers have grown increasingly removed from farms and food. When we need something, we just go to the grocery store. Most people are unaware of the radical changes in the food system, and have never witnessed the standard industry practices of factory farms: animals crammed by the tens of thousands into windowless sheds, mutilated without pain relief, or slaughtered at breakneck line speeds. But it’s not just animal suffering that’s concealed.
The exploitation of workers—often immigrants and people of color in dangerous, low-paying jobs, and an increasing number of children—and the environmental destruction tied to factory farming are equally obscured. In other words, what’s hidden is the true cost of cheap meat.
CA: How are they kept hidden?
Potter: This system is deliberately hidden from consumers through industry collaboration with government and counterterrorism agencies. Big Ag has pushed through “Ag-Gag” censorship laws that criminalize photography, journalism, and whistleblowing on farms and slaughterhouses. These laws were in direct response to a wave of undercover investigations and groundbreaking journalism that exposed animal cruelty violations, like workers beating and sexually abusing animals, and also routine factory farm practices. Corporations have worked closely with the FBI and politicians to brand those who document factory farms as “terrorists” in order to shoot the messenger, and avoid responsibility. Now these laws have spread globally, and international counterterrorism agencies have branded factory farm investigators as terrorists as well.
What I realized in my research for Little Red Barns, though, is that there are even more powerful forces at play to hide factory farms from public view. We are raised on a romantic narrative of farming—from Old MacDonald to picture books—that is reinforced throughout our lives in advertising campaigns. This sanitized image of red barns, happy cows, and family farmers masks the industrial reality, and the decline of the small farm.
CA: What are the ties between factory farming and fascism?
Potter: In Little Red Barns I found a direct connection: the FBI was repeatedly warned by the Justice Department, Congress, and others that its relentless focus on animal activists as “terrorists” was allowing the rise of far right violence. These warnings were ignored, culminating in January 6 and a proliferation of white supremacist and fascist groups. More broadly, though, I argue that the tactics that factory farms have used to silence dissent, criminalize journalism, and marginalize their opposition as “terrorists” have become a new playbook, globally, for repressing social movements. Big Ag’s efforts to shut down nonviolent activists and journalists have been foundational to the authoritarianism we’re witnessing today. Beyond these direct relationships, though, I’ve also come to see factory farms and fascism linked in deeper ways. At their core, both require the normalization of mass violence, extreme concentration of power, and silencing of dissent through surveillance and repression. All the while, fascists promise a return to a mythological past—embodied in the idyllic image of the little red barn.
This Q&A, along with dozens more, is published in the special "Animals Issue" of Current Affairs.
