The other day I was on my lacrosse bus with the team driving to Notre Dame to watch a college lacrosse game and I passed some vast farm lands. I was aimlessly looking out the window when all of the sudden I spotted it, the very thing I have been studying for the past month now, a real life factory farm. It was everything I had ever read about, with the unwelcoming long metal building and the mud soaked ground with no green grass in sight. However the most shocking part was the feces reservoir which looked like a small swimming pool, yet it was full to the brim with disgusting black sewage. I knew from the many sources I had poured over that these reservoirs, aside from overflowing and causing considerable harm to the water supply, had a tendency to have a terrible odor so I braced myself. Sure enough, I only smelt it for a short minute before we put enough miles between it, yet it was putrid.
I have read so many places about the terrible affects of these factory farms on the townspeople nearby and the environment but it never became real to me that this was a problem effecting America and even effecting places only an hour from me until that moment. Suddenly all those first hand accounts about the stench that I had read in Andrew Kirby's, "Animal Factory," became so much more credible because I had experienced it first hand.
It was especially interesting to me to see the type of town that has these factory farms. There is a reason that in these lower-class rural communities they would put a foul smelling contamination like a factory farm, but in the Northshore suburbs they wouldn't dream of it. This class divide was hinted at in Michael Pollans novel, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and Kirby's. It was all the more real to me to see it in person.
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