12/03/2015

Described by Joanna Lumley as ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for food and farming, a year and several reprints later, Bloomsbury is relaunching Farmageddon in a new-look paperback format. To celebrate, we’ve pulled together this short film showing some of the key moments of the three-year journey behind the closed doors of the factory farm industry.

Battle lines are drawn; they see a more industrial approach to farming, with little room for luxuries like animals out in fields, as the way forward. After all, we need to feed a growing population; billions of extra mouths expected on the planet within decades. That means, like it or not, animals confined in mega-farms, disappearing from the landscape and replaced by crops grown in prairies with the aid of chemical pesticides and fertilisers. At least, that’s the web of justification spun to prop up an outdated approach to feeding people; one that also happens to be the biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet.

What the intensive farming lobby doesn’t acknowledge is that the system already produces enough to feed everybody – and plenty more. Industrial farming makes up a third of global production and is responsible for the greatest damage and the greatest inefficiency. The biggest single area of food waste comes not from what we throw in the bin but from feeding human-edible crops to industrially reared animals, losing much of its calorific value in the process.

Farmageddon exposes the myths propping up factory farming. It calls for a rethink; one that focuses on food for people, rather than producing mountains of feed for confined animals. Already available in the UK, Netherlands, USA, Canada, South Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand, Farmageddon has now also been translated and published in Italy and Japan, with further translations scheduled in Poland, Taiwan (Chinese) and Czech by the end of the year.

For your new-look paperback copy of ‘Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat’, click here.