Skip to content
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Annelie Geissler
Categories

TRANSFORMATION

Leah Garcés

A Fight for Freedom and Farming in Rural America

Garcés illuminates how policies have failed farmers, marginalized rural communities, and farmed animals for decades, and elucidates how we fix a food system that has harmed so many. This is a groundbreaking story of transfarmation, not just of the farms themselves, but of the spirit of rural America.
The pandemic proved our food system was as fragile as a house of cards. Slaughterhouse workers, deprived of basic protections to keep them safe from the virus, began to fall ill and even die. The resulting plant slowdowns rippled down the food chain: animals destined for slaughter had no place to go. Despite record demand at food banks, farmed animals were exterminated en masse, their bodies piling up in freezers or ground into pulp. Farmers, already among the most likely to die by suicide, were driven deeper into darkness. During this time of loss, the people closest to factory farming - farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and adjacent communities - saw a chance for a new start. Tired of being vulnerable to the fragility and oppression of factory farming, they begin to build a new way. Thought leader, writer, and activist Leah Garcés, in her book TRANSFARMATION: A Fight for Freedom and Farming in Rural America, gives readers a front-row seat to an inspiring movement of farmers and rural communities standing up to big animal agriculture. Readers will fall in love with unsung heroes, from struggling farmers who switch to growing hemp and mushrooms to slaughter-bound farmed animals who are rescued to become beloved pets. Garcés illuminates how policies have failed farmers, marginalized rural communities, and farmed animals for decades, and elucidates how we fix a food system that has harmed so many. This is a groundbreaking story of transfarmation, not just of the farms themselves, but of the spirit of rural America. Leah Garcés was the founder and Executive Director of Compassion in World Farming US and is now the President of Mercy for Animals. She has degrees in zoology and sustainable development and has been fighting for better food and farming systems for her whole career. She has written and edited several reports and books on animals in agriculture.
Available products
Book

Published 2024-09-01 by Beacon Press

Comments

More importantly illustrates a hopeful and sustainable path out of that deeply broken system to a more humane world for all involvedanimals and people.

Factory farms are a crime against nature, and TRANSFARMATION convincingly argues that we can feed ourselves, must heal ourselves, without them.

What a wonderful antidote to the negativity and cynicism all around us. Leah Garcés gets things done!

By giving birds, pigs, and cattle proper names, Garcés heightens readers' sympathies for abused creatures while making a good case for alternative farming methods.

Impassioned treatise.Garcés makes clear how animals and humans suffer under the status quo, and she offers practical suggestions for reform, including bolstering animal welfare protections and improving labor standards for farmers. This strikes a chord.

A brilliant, essential read, clear-eyed and kind, showing how animal agriculture is cruel not just to farm animals but to farmers, farmworkers, and the land, and how there's a happier, gentler path forward for all of us. It comes from one of the world's authorities on transforming what we eat and how we eat.

A book that gives me hope that radical transformation is possible and is happening [and] a must-read for all those who want to see a brighter, more sustainable, and ethical future.

Garcés has given us a powerful road map in TRANSFARMATION, with her ideas and her dignified approach to farmers and workers just as badly trapped in the misery of factory farming as the animals it consumes.

Heartfelt, insightful, grounded, and upbeat, this book provides deep breaths of fresh air and fresh thinking.