The Trump Administration’s warp-speed restructuring of the federal government, mass integration of government data and vast tracking of immigrants would likely not be possible without a key technological partner: Palantir. The software company provides the digital architecture powering what former employees describe as an authoritarian agenda. Yet the company’s staggering commercial sector growth — up by 121 percent over the past 12 months — has attracted far less scrutiny. America’s largest meat company, Tyson Foods, became an early commercial adopter of the software in 2020, establishing a blueprint for how large food corporations can leverage Palantir’s surveillance technology.

Palantir advertises its partnership with Tyson as a flagship example of how its software is “transforming food and beverage businesses for the AI era.” Tyson uses Palantir’s Foundry platform, which has been described by a former employee as a “super-charged filing cabinet” for its unique capacity to digest endless amounts of data. It’s easy to see how this data-mining technology could be incredibly useful in managing complex food supply chains with many variables — and indeed, Palantir claims that it saved Tyson $200 million over the course of two years.

Yet Tyson’s deployment of Palantir also showcases the limits of the technology in protecting a vulnerable workforce. The company used Palantir to forecast Covid-19 infections among its meatpacking workers, according to Scott Spradley, Tyson’s former Chief of Technology. This data was then used to prepare for supply chain disruptions as workers fell predictably sick, while Tyson extensively lobbied against mandated worker protections.

Tyson Foods did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Palantir’s Expansion into the Food Industry

The U.S. food industry’s workforce is particularly vulnerable to surveillance technologies. An estimated 2.1 million immigrants work across the entire U.S. food supply chain, from farmworkers to food processing workers to grocery store workers — a workforce that has long been subject to heightened surveillance to further immigrant control and raids, which have significantly expanded under the Trump Administration. And this heightened risk of deportation  makes food chain workers — fearful of speaking  out because of their immigration status — more vulnerable to corporate abuse.

While there is no indication that Palantir is currently being used by food companies to monitor employees, food corporations have been investing in other AI technologies to this end and Palantir has facilitated the internal surveillance of employees in other industries.

For instance, Tyson and JBS, the world’s two largest meat companies, have invested in smart watches used to monitor workers’ movements. In a press release, a JBS spokesperson describes this technology as a “wearables and analytics platform” that will “provide us insight into how each employee responds to ergonomic and process changes by digitizing individual worker motion.” This raw data is fed to an AI algorithm, which converts it to metrics displayed on a dashboard for supervisors to monitor.

Palantir is not part of these smart watch projects, and it has repeatedly stated that it does not harvest any raw data. Instead, Palantir is able to quickly integrate existing data already stored by the company without making any changes to the underlying datasets. Yet as Tyson’s venture capitalist arm invests in smart watches and other forms of AI, it’s easy to see how the mass integration of data across varying data fields could lead to privacy concerns. Experts have warned about the compounding risks to privacy “that arise when huge datasets are merged and analyzed, which is the premise behind Palantir’s business model.”

Tyson first contracted with Palantir in 2020, as meatpacking plants emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic, to predict infections among its poultry plant workers down to nearly an exact figure. “In a very short amount of time we started working on figuring out how bad the spread is going to be, which plants are going to be affected, how quick are they going to be affected,” said Tyson’s Scott Spradley in a keynote speech at a Palantir-sponsored conference.

“I remember telling our CEO, “Hey, this plant in seven weeks is going to have 880 people infected and we’re going to shut that plant down,” said Spradley. “So that day hit. 883 people were infected because we were driving prediction with Palantir.”

Though Tyson had the technology to forecast infections, the company didn’t use this data to heighten protections among workers in advance of projected outbreaks at its meatpacking plants, at least none that were made public. Instead, this software was largely used to protect Tyson, ensuring that infections among workers didn’t disrupt the company’s intricate supply chain. By forecasting worker infections, Tyson could plan in advance for irregular inventories from plant closures and labor shortages, as Spradley explained: “This plant’s going to go down, so we need to start shifting product to this place.”

In Spradley’s speech, the only protective measure for workers mentioned was Tyson’s vaccine mandate, which relied on Palantir to verify vaccination records.

It was later revealed, in a 2022 House investigative report, that Tyson and other meat producers lobbied the first Trump Administration to shield the industry from liability for worker deaths and illnesses and exempt the industry from the stay-at-home mandate. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis determined that Tyson and other major meatpacking companies failed to take adequate coronavirus precautions, “despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants.” Tyson possessed especially detailed awareness of the risk that Covid-19 posed to its workers, raising ethical questions about the responsibility that companies have to act on the data availed by Palantir.

Tyson is part of a growing wave of major food corporations — including General Mills, Wendy’s, Beyond Meat and Aramark — to embed Palantir in their operations. The U.N. World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian food aid program, is another adopter of Palantir. As the software giant appears poised for further growth in the food sector, supported by energy-intensive data centers being rapidly built across the country, it’s worth asking, sooner rather than later: what are the risks of a food system that runs on Palantir?

Palantir’s Ethical and Human Rights Concerns

Like many emerging forms of AI-driven technology, Palantir is malleable and responsive, designed to reflect the motives of its users, whether that is generating more profits or improving efficiencies or protecting its workers. Named after the ‘seeing stones’ in Lord of the Rings, Palantir can give companies and governments an unusual level of insight, but this doesn’t guarantee this information will be harnessed for good.

And in the wrong hands, like the seeing stones, the integration of vast pools of data has the risk of being weaponized for unethical or even illegal ends.

These risks are something that Palantir’s employees acknowledge, to an extent, even before being officially hired. In the final step of the hiring process, prospective employees typically undergo what is known as the “founder interview,” meeting with one of the company’s four founders, according to a former Palantir employee, who asked for anonymity due to a lifelong non-disparagement agreement he signed with the company.

In this final interview stage, “they would ask you a disarming question to catch you off guard, then try to read your soul to see if you were going to put the mission at risk or not,” the former employee told Sentient over Signal. “An example of a question a lot of people got (mine was similar to this) was: ‘How would you feel if software you wrote resulted in people dying due to a bug?’ Follow up: ‘What if this wasn’t a bug, but the software’s actual purpose?”’

“They made no excuses that Palantir’s software was powerful and would be used to ‘get the bad guys’  and ‘protect Western democracy,’ whatever that meant,” adds the former employee.

By now, it has become clear that these questions were not just far-flung hypotheticals. Palantir’s contracts with military and law enforcement agencies have demonstrated that the company is a willing partner to institutions that, whether by design or accident, kill people. Its 2024 contract with the Israeli military has especially provoked outrage, prompting accusations of enabling Israel to commit a genocide. Palantir also recently inked a $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army, building a “comprehensive framework” for the military’s data. And Palantir is behind a new $30 million mass surveillance system, deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to track and deport unauthorized immigrants.

There are mechanisms built into Palantir’s design to limit the company’s clients from accessing sensitive data, according to the former employee. For example, there are safety controls to prevent employees in intelligence agencies from accessing information that they don’t have clearance to see, with an option to flag someone who does have the permission to view this data in order to share it. There are also audit logs, owned by Palantir’s clients, that can monitor what information individual employees access in the system.

“The problem is all the safeguards in the world don’t mean anything if nobody uses this feature,” adds the former employee, who never anticipated this system would be abused when he was initially hired. “You still have to trust that your government will follow their own laws, another modern-day situation that back then seemed unimaginable.”

And these built-in measures have repeatedly proven insufficient. In July, Palantir was questioned by members of Congress about likely violating multiple federal laws by merging across federal agencies to create a searchable “database” of Americans, raising concerns about how this software is enabling the mass surveillance of both unauthorized immigrants and U.S. residents. The U.S. government relies on Palantir’s Foundry platform to compile this potentially illegal database — the same platform that Tyson deploys.

As it stands now, it’s not clear how most food companies are utilizing Palantir beyond the often vague, public-facing statements. But as Palantir further expands into the commercial sector, so do concerns about using the software to compile sensitive data.

While it may be common for defense technology to be wrapped in opacity, arguably for the sake of protecting national security, Palantir maintains a similar level of secrecy even in non-military contexts, Ilia Siatitsa, a program director and senior legal official at London-based nonprofit Privacy International, tells Sentient. She sees this as a problem.

“We have to just rely on promises from a company, but how is that good enough? How is that sufficient? Companies have never lied before? That’s what I find, from a public policy perspective, problematic,” says Siatitsa.

“Once [Palantir] moves the same product to the food industry, for instance, or the health sector, or all these other public sectors, then I think the citizens have a right to know a bit more about what exactly the product is doing, how it’s used and what exactly they aggregate and for what purpose,” says Siatitsa.

Siatitsa points to Palantir’s partnership with the U.N. World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization. When this partnership was announced in 2019, Privacy International and other nonprofits wrote an open letter to David Beasley, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, warning that “the partnership has the potential to seriously undermine the rights of 90 million people the WFP serves.”

“Nothing has been transparently shared about the procurement process that WFP set up to engage Palantir,” states that 2019 letter. “Given the gravity of these concerns, building in transparent checks and balances — such as third-party audits, open procurement and contract or agreement transparency — seems essential.” But this letter didn’t result in any greater levels of disclosure. Even today, “we have no information how this collaboration is going,” says Siatitsa.

As for Tyson, it remains unclear how the company is currently utilizing Palantir. In his 2022 remarks, Scott Spradley appeared to be brimming with excitement about all the ways Palantir can be further integrated into Tyson’s operations. “And we’re just continuing to find more and more, once you get all your data into Palantir, into Foundry, your kind of use case exploitation is unlimited,” said Spradley. “There’s nothing that you really can’t…we haven’t found a zero sum game there yet.” Of course, there are legal limits to how companies and governments can deploy Palantir, but that is increasingly appearing irrelevant.

For Wendy Johnson, a livestock and organic grain farmer in Charles City, Iowa, October is usually the time she visits her local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office. 

There, she’ll sit down with one of their employees and go over the practices she implemented on her farm over the past year, along with documentation that proves she met the requirements of whichever U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) contract she was operating under. Once that’s done, she gets paid for the work she did. 

But this October is no normal year for Johnson and thousands of other farmers who rely on USDA contracts to operate their farms. 

That’s because of the ongoing government shutdown, which started on October 1, 2025. As of this writing, federal offices continue to be closed, and most government employees are furloughed, including the people who help farmers like Johnson access USDA grants. 

“I can’t even ask questions to my local NRCS office for planning for 2026 because they’re not open,” Johnson said. “I am starting to think, ‘are they just going to close forever?’ That would be awful.”

The shutdown has come as a double-whammy to farmers who were already dealing with the fallout of tariffs that went into effect earlier this year. Prices for soybeans plummeted because China, once the largest buyer of U.S. soybeans, stopped purchasing them in response to high U.S. tariffs, shrinking the soybean market for farmers. On October 30, China agreed to start buying U.S. soybeans again at 25 million metric tons per year, settling some of the issues soybean farmers faced throughout 2025. 

But input costs like fertilizer prices remain high due to retaliatory tariffs from countries like Canada, where most of the potash fertilizer American farmers rely on is imported from. That means the cost to farm is rising while commodity prices diminish. 

High interest rates on loans mean farmers might accumulate more debt to make ends meet, especially if payments on USDA contracts continue to be delayed. 

All of this, in combination with a government shutdown, could create a lethal storm for American farmers. 

“When you’re removing those cost-share opportunities while simultaneously putting tariffs into place… they’re asking for an explosion,” Johnson said. 

Other farmers fear the impacts of this “explosion” on the future of agriculture. 

Gene Steh, a soybean, corn, and wheat farmer who lives near Mitchell, South Dakota, has been farming for 46 years. He started farming during the 1980s farm crisis when hundreds of thousands of farmers defaulted on loans and just as many left the business completely, gutting large swaths of rural America that had been built by small and mid-size producers. 

Steh said that while he’s always been concerned about the state of agriculture, he’s more worried now than ever before as the value of commodities diminishes. 

“I worry about younger people that are trying to get started that have borrowed a lot of money and are trying to get through next year, and they love to farm,” Steh said. “I just hate to see the younger generation have a tremendous setback in the next five years or so.” 

Farming has become almost unviable for small and mid-size producers because of how tight the profit margins can be. The Biden administration was attempting to improve this by increasing staff at USDA offices and allocating more funds to conservation programs via the Inflation Reduction Act, but much of this work has been paused or totally reversed by the Trump administration. Earlier this year, more than 2,000 USDA staff were laid off, many of whom worked for NRCS, implementing Biden-era conservation programs.

“We don’t have folks in county offices that can help design the kind of conservation practices that would help farmers save money,” said Jesse Womack, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “Good conservation helps farmers reduce reliance on inputs [like fertilizer], and that can make you more profitable per acre.” 

Making farmers more self-reliant can make it easier for them to stay in business during times like a government shutdown or a tariff war. But with mass layoffs and the reversal of conservation funding, many farmers’ wheels are now left spinning in place. 

“We are watching a lot of our leaders in this country totally ignore how difficult producers have it right now and really neglect their duty to make tools and services readily available and easy to use for producers,” Womack said. 

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In response to the increasingly steep tariffs imposed by President Trump, China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans, 97 percent of which go to feed livestock. That’s a big deal, as soybeans are the largest U.S. agricultural export by far, and China is the biggest buyer of them for their expanding factory farm industry. China’s boycott has U.S. soybean farmers panicking, praying for a bailout and wondering what they’re going to do with the piles of soybeans that no longer have a buyer.

China Is Boycotting U.S. Soybeans

The predicament soybean producers find themselves in is the result of Trump’s trade war with China, which began in February when the president imposed a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports. This kicked off a back-and-forth between the two countries, with each levying progressively more severe tariffs on one another.

In May, months after imposing a 10 percent tariff on soybeans, China stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans altogether, and it hasn’t bought any from the U.S. since.

This is a big deal because Chinese exports make up an enormous share of the U.S. soybean market. The U.S. exports around 50 percent of all soybeans it produces, and over half of those exports go to China — “primarily to feed its factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and fish,” writes Marina Bolotnikova in Vox.
In other words, as a result of China’s boycott, around a quarter of all soybeans produced in the U.S. no longer have a buyer. Needless to say, this leaves a large hole in the pockets of U.S. soybean farmers — a $12.6 billion dollar hole, to be exact, if 2024 numbers are any indicator.

Of course, this also has a reciprocal effect on China, as it no longer has the 25 million metric tons of soybeans that it would otherwise have purchased from the United States. To make up for this shortfall, China has increased its soybean imports from other countries, specifically Brazil. Soy farms in Brazil drive deforestation, especially in the Cerrado, a savannah known for its biodiversity and ability to store carbon deep underground.

China’s soybean boycott hurts all U.S. soybean farmers, whether you sell within the U.S. only, or rely heavily on exports. The rules of supply and demand mean that a sudden excess in a product’s supply causes its price to fall, and falling prices are felt by all producers and sellers of soybeans.

“Even if you find yourself to be a farmer who sells to a biodiesel plant, you’re still going to suffer from the depressed prices from the extra soybeans lingering on the domestic market,” Andrew Muhammad, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Tennessee, tells Sentient. “Everybody’s negatively affected.”

American Soy Farmers May Turn to Biofuel Markets

As a result of all of this, many soybean farmers now have a massive excess of beans with no clear way to offload them. What happens next?

Some farmers might try to export them to other countries. But that’s easier said than done. “There aren’t really alternative markets large enough to absorb these extra soybeans that we have available because of the Chinese not buying,” Muhammad says. “It’s not like you don’t see any increases, but you just don’t see enough to fully make up for lost export sales of China.”

Soybean producers may seek out alternative domestic markets for their products, Rabail Chandio, assistant professor in economics and extension economist at Iowa State University, tells Sentient. In the future, they might pursue the market for biodiesel fuel, which can be made from soybean oil.

Though the demand isn’t there just yet, that could change, market experts say. But while that would benefit farmers financially, more biofuels would likely not benefit the planet, analysis from the World Resources Institute suggests. Crop-based biofuels emit more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.

Will a Bailout Help?

With international markets unable to pick up the slack, many soybean farmers are instead betting on a bailout from the U.S. government to make up for their lack of sales.

In early October, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant suggested that the administration would be announcing “substantial support for the farmers” later in the week. Reuters reported the same day that this would take the form of a $10-$15 billion bailout aimed at offsetting the various financial difficulties farmers have faced as a result of the president’s trade war.

That didn’t happen, however; according to Politico, the bailout was postponed due to the government shutdown, though it’s worth noting the administration never explicitly confirmed the bailout in the first place and hasn’t confirmed that the shutdown played a role in delaying it.

Regardless, Trump himself has hinted at a bailout as well, and given that his first administration gave farmers a bailout after launching a similar trade war in 2018, it’s not unreasonable to assume that another one is in the cards.

At least in theory, a bailout would temporarily put money in the pockets of soybean producers who are hurting as a result of China’s boycott. This would ease some of the financial pain they’re feeling, but it could lead to even bigger problems down the line.

“Bailouts always backfire,” Muhammad says, “in the sense that they create perverse incentives.”

What Happens Next

The predicament soybean farmers find themselves in is a perfect illustration of the unintended consequences tariffs can have on domestic agricultural producers. Trump surely wasn’t intending to hurt U.S. soybean farmers when he imposed tariffs on China, but that’s exactly what’s happening.

As China increasingly turns to Brazil to meet its soybean demand, deforestation is also likely to accelerate. Brazil is already the world’s largest soybean exporter, and both legal and illegal land clearing for soy cultivation — largely to grow feed for factory farms — has driven significant biodiversity loss and carbon emissions.

Soy alone covers 11.7 million hectares (28.9 million acres) in Brazil, half of which lie within the sensitive Amazon biome. This pressure is compounded by ongoing deforestation for cattle ranching, a leading cause of forest destruction and a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. What might ease this pressure? Climate scientists, including researchers at Project Drawdown, recommend reducing meat consumption in the U.S. and other Global North countries, where demand continues to be a significant driver.

As the U.S. government shutdown enters its second full week, lawmakers appear no closer to resolving the impasse. As a result of Congress’s inability to pass a government funding bill, an estimated 750,000 federal workers have been furloughed, and more are working without pay. Farmers and agricultural producers are among those impacted by the shutdown — but how much disruption will they face?

If the shutdown is only short-term, the impact to farms and ranches will likely be “very modest,” Vincent Smith, professor in agricultural economics at Montana State University, tells Sentient. “It’s much more difficult to know what a three-month or six-month government shutdown would do.”

Even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been forced to furlough nearly half its staff, many of its most essential functions will continue — unless the shutdown goes on long enough. Let’s take a look.

What Are We Losing During the Shutdown?

Around 42,256 of the nearly 86,000 staffers at the USDA have been furloughed as a result of the shutdown, and many of the agency’s normal functions and duties have been put on pause, and won’t resume until the government opens.

This includes many of the USDA’s subsidy programs for farmers. The USDA offers various forms of financial assistance to agricultural producers, including loans, disaster payments after extreme weather events, price supports and funding for conservation efforts. Much of this will cease due to the shutdown. The Farm Service Agency will not give out loan payments or process new loans.

Disaster assistance payments related to significant weather-related disasters aren’t being processed due to the shutdown, and neither are payments from the Supplemental Disaster Assistance programs authorized by the American Relief Act.

All 8,849 staff members at the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) have been furloughed. The National Organic Program has ceased operations, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has stopped collecting and publishing agricultural research data.

In addition, the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened mass layoffs of federal workers if the shutdown impasse isn’t resolved quickly, though these may be illegal.

So the shutdown is clearly having an effect on both federal workers and agriculture. But a lot of significant USDA activity is continuing despite the lapse in funding.

Which Agricultural Programs Are Still Running?

Over 90 percent of the staff at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service remain at work, some without pay. Food safety inspections of meat and poultry processing plants are continuing during the shutdown, and so are investigations and laboratory work on disease outbreaks and public health threats, such as avian flu, swine fever, rabies and the New World screwworm.

Around 71 percent of the USDA’s spending goes toward nutritional assistance, and these programs are still operating during the shutdown —  for now. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients are still receiving their funds, and the program is still accepting new enrollees, though their applications may take longer to process than normal.

The USDA will continue to disperse SNAP benefits through the end of October, according to the agency’s shutdown plan, and many recipients have already received their October benefits. The Child Nutrition Program, which provides healthy meals for children at daycare centers, after-school programs and other institutions, will also be funded through the end of October.

There’s been concern that the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) could run out of funding during the shutdown. However, Axios reported Tuesday that WIC will continue to be funded “for the foreseeable future” using tariff revenues.

Beyond that, though, it’s unclear. Though the agency does have some contingency funds that it could use for SNAP and the Child Nutrition Program if the shutdown stretches into November, it hasn’t confirmed how long those funds will last, and the administration hasn’t revealed how much tariff revenue will be diverted to keep WIC running.

It’s worth noting that the most recent government shutdown also took place under a Trump presidency, and SNAP recipients continued to receive their benefits throughout. At 35 days, that was the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

Programs related to preventing and combatting wildfires are continuing unabated, as is protection of federal land and infrastructure that’s necessary to “ensure health and safety of the public.” Certain conservation and disaster prevention initiatives, such as dam monitoring programs and the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, are also unaffected by the shutdown.

In addition to all of this, the USDA’s work on the newest version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is continuing during the shutdown. That might sound like an odd thing for the agency to prioritize, given that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been cagey about when the guidelines will be released and they have already been delayed once, but the government is required by law to release the new version by the end of the year.

How Will All of This Affect Farms and Farmers?

The sheer number of USDA programs that have been halted due to the shutdown may seem alarming. And it is having some immediate impact; the lapse in funding for the National Organic Program, for instance, means that the USDA hasn’t been conducting its usual oversight of Certified Organic farms to ensure that they comply with the agency’s organic standards.

However, Smith says that the shutdown’s cumulative impact on American agriculture as a whole will be minimal. The interruption in services will largely amount to “an inconvenience,” he says, not a major financial burden or existential threat.

“[Farmers] will be delayed in filing for benefits, and filing paperwork they need to file to be eligible for disaster aid, and so on,” Smith says. “And that is, for almost all those farmers, an inconvenience.”

Take Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, two major USDA programs that have been suspended due to the shutdown. These are government-subsidized insurance plans for farmers: When either the market price of certain commodities or a farm’s actual revenue drops below a certain level, the ARC and PLC give them a payout to cover the difference. It is, in essence, taxpayer-funded profit insurance for farmers.

There’s a larger debate to be had over whether these programs should exist in the first place, as almost no other industry in the U.S. enjoys government protection against falling profits. But the merits of the programs notwithstanding, the pause in ARC and PLC payments will only have a minimal impact on farms for a number of reasons.

For one, the programs are both highly concentrated to a relatively small share of the overall farming sector. Only 27 percent of U.S. farmland is covered by the programs in the first place, and around 85.5 percent of payments go to growers of just three crops: corn, wheat and soybeans.

But more importantly, almost all farmers in the U.S. also earn money from non-farm sources, and on average, it’s the non-farm income that provides the bulk of their annual income.

“It’s a university professor who owns the family farm,” Smith says of farming households. “It’s a real estate broker who owns the family farm. It’s the local farmer who works as a postman, and whose wife is a school teacher.”

In 2023, for instance, farming households in the U.S. didn’t make very much money from farming. In fact, most farms lost money: Median farm-related income was -$900 for farm households that year. This might sound catastrophic — except for the fact that, thanks to off-farm earnings, the median total income for U.S. farmers that year was $97,894. In total, only 23 percent of farm households’ income came from actual farming in 2023. The average farm in the U.S. holds around $1.4 million in wealth.

For these reasons, the delay in Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage payments “is not in any way a financial crisis” for American farmers, says Smith. Even a three-month pause to these checks would not “cause catastrophe, unless the operator of the farm is a very poor manager and has an unrealistic view of the nature of agricultural markets,” Smith says.

Though new farm loans will be halted, less than 2 percent of all farms received USDA loans in 2024. “That is an extraordinarily small number of farms,” Smith says. “It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be sympathetic to their plight, but it is not a situation that would justify…major subsidies for losses incurred during the shutdown.”

Will the Shutdown Raise Food Prices?

Because the shutdown is unlikely to significantly affect the bottom lines of agricultural producers, Smith doesn’t foresee any increase in food prices.

“In terms of the supply chain of food to the supermarket, and the price that someone on SNAP benefits would have to pay for Hamburger Helper, the impacts are going to be essentially unseeable,” Smith says.

However, other policies of the Trump administration, such as tariffs, have already caused food prices to rise since January 2025, and these effects will continue.

The Bottom Line

Though the shutdown is unlikely to have catastrophic effects on food and farming in the U.S., that’s not reason to be sanguine or complacent about it.

As mentioned earlier, SNAP benefits could be at risk if the shutdown stretches beyond October. In addition, the Trump administration’s threats of mass layoffs of federal workers appear to be still on the table.

Moreover, because most USDA research will be paused during the shutdown, Smith warns that the president could use this as a pretext for permanently cutting research funding, which would have a serious impact on the agricultural sector.

If the Trump administration uses the shutdown as an excuse to substantially cut research budgets, “the long-run impacts will be severe on agricultural productivity and nutrition-related technological developments,” Smith says. It’s worth mentioning, though, that Trump had already cut funding for, or outright eliminated, a number of USDA research programs even before the shutdown.

A government shutdown is never a good thing. They happen when Congress is unable to fulfill its most basic duty (funding the federal government), and are a symptom of deep institutional dysfunction.

But while the current shutdown will have some impact on federal agricultural policies, it’s not wreaking havoc on the U.S. farm sector — at least, not for now.

Along a cordoned-off stretch of highway in Ohio, state troopers and other emergency responders work late into the night, wrangling hundreds of piglets that sprang loose from an overturned semi-truck. The driver failed to negotiate a curve while hauling a trailer of 1,900 piglets, according to Ohio State Highway Patrol records. Most escapees were left to roam the interstate ramp. But some were flung to their deaths.

The aftermath of this crash is captured in police bodycam footage from November 2023, obtained by the legal advocacy group Animal Partisan. It shows a livestock farmer approaching Sgt. Jeremy Wheeland, of the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP), to ask a favor: direct the media to stop filming before the emergency crew unloads the dead piglets from the trailer.

It’s part of a broader pattern of police deference to the meat industry in preventing media access. In videos from three livestock crashes reviewed by Sentient, police deliberately block the media’s access to crash sites beyond what is reasonable to protect public safety, citing concerns about animal rights activists.

In the crash involving piglets, the sergeant’s decision to limit media access came at the direct request of the livestock farmer who raised the piglets.

“One favor I’d like to ask, if you can help. So we have these camera crews here,” says the farmer, referring to a local news crew set up nearby. “Is there any way we can tell them, for their safety, they can’t be here filming this because animal rights people love…” He pauses mid-sentence, appearing to search for the right words. “We’re treating these pigs right, but they take this the wrong way.”

Though Sgt. Wheeland doesn’t agree to order the media to stop filming, he takes steps to limit their coverage. “So, ask them to step back a little bit?” He responds, reassuring the pork producer. “Yep, I can do that.”

Wheeland’s bodycam then captures him walking over to the camera crew from WDTN Channel 2 News, a broadcast station out of Dayton. “I have a slight request,” he says, “So, it’s fine that you’re out here, but maybe not zoom in so much on them actually taking the ones out.” He goes on to explain that some of the pigs they remove from the trailer will be dead, which could draw unwanted attention. “It’s just, well, the concern, like the owner, the concern he has is with, like, animal rights people and so forth, you know what I’m saying,” adds Wheeland.

It appears that the news crew followed the sergeant’s orders. WDTN Channel 2 News aired a live broadcast of the scene and news report, but they didn’t show footage of any of the dead piglets.

This effort to block the local news from documenting the aftermath of a crash is observed in video footage from two other commercial livestock truck crashes. The bodycam footage, also obtained by Animal Partisan, shows state highway patrols in both Ohio and Michigan taking clear steps to block media access, including positioning cars to hide the scene of the crash from public view, discussing turning off their bodycam footage and giving the news media explicit instructions about what they can document.

It’s a level of interference that raises concerns about First Amendment violations, and the close relationship between the livestock industry and law enforcement, says Will Lowrey, a lawyer at Animal Partisan who obtained the videos.

“There is some complicity between law enforcement and the animal agriculture industry that is, in many cases, seeking to keep animal rights activists on the outside — not to let them see what’s happening, not to let them get a glimpse into some of the horrific conditions these animals are suffering,” says Lowrey. It’s partially this effort to conceal the scene that prompts him to file records requests for livestock truck crashes. “That’s all the more reason that we want these videos,” he tells Sentient. “We want to see. We have a right to see it.”

There is very little public data or research on the frequency and causes of livestock truck crashes, an often overlooked aspect of industrial animal agriculture.

The most recent data was published in a pamphlet outlining how to respond to livestock transport crashes, published in 2021 by the Extension Disaster Education Network of the University of Wyoming. These guidelines note that around 291 wrecks involve commercial livestock every year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The vast majority involve a truck rolling over due to driver error, with an estimated 56 percent involving cattle, 27 percent involving pigs, and 11 percent involving chickens.

These videos offer a rare glimpse into what happens when transportation of live farm animals goes wrong. “It’s very profound to witness the scene. You can hear the pigs screaming, and you can see them standing there shocked, and it goes on and on and on,” Lowrey tells Sentient. By the end of the nearly 1.5 hour video, capturing a crash from June of 2024, injured pigs can still be heard squealing along the roadside.

Infringing on First Amendment Rights

While law enforcement has the authority to limit the public’s access to a crash scene for the sake of public health and safety, the bodycam footage captures multiple occasions of state police forces explicitly acting to protect the livestock industry, raising concerns about the police’s infringement on protected rights under the First Amendment.

For instance, Sergeant Wheeland is captured directly discussing with other officers about the need to safeguard the meat industry’s reputation. “The owner asked, ‘Hey, just for the sake of not just the business, but the industry, you know, can they scale it back just a little bit?’ So that’s what I asked them to do.” Yet he also acknowledges to the other officers that he doesn’t have much authority to tell the press what to do. “That’s a fine line, what I can tell them they can and can’t…you know,” says the sergeant, presumably referring to First Amendment rights.

But for Lowrey, this isn’t a fine line. He claims that the police’s effort to block WDTN Channel 2 News’ access to the crash is a violation of the First Amendment, prompting him to file an administrative complaint with the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

“It is clear that the Ohio State Highway Patrol was suppressing speech,” says Lowrey. “It’s clear just based on the conversation that happened that they were looking to shut down speech. And the speech I’m specifically referring to is the video recording by the news crew of dead and injured piglets,” he says. “They did that at the behest of the pork industry.”

Lowrey argues this is viewpoint discrimination — prohibited under the First Amendment — when the government, including law enforcement officials, restricts freedom of speech based on perspective. In this case, the restricted viewpoints are those of animal rights activists.

The complaint led to an internal investigation, but it did not address the First Amendment concerns. Instead, Wheeland and other troopers received informal counseling for using “unprofessional language” and for muting or turning off their body cameras at times while responding to the 2023 crash, according to OHSP records.

“I agree that this was a serious First Amendment violation,” wrote Andrew Geronimo, the director of the First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University, in an e-mail to Sentient. “The right to speak includes the right to gather information, and law enforcement should not be directing members of the media or the public in what to record or not record.”

While there are exceptions, it would need to be an “exceedingly important reason — and embarrassment to a particular industry should not be sufficient,” Geronimo added.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol disputed that its requests to the media violated First Amendment rights.

“In certain situations, such as when animals must be euthanized or other sensitive circumstances arise, we may respectfully request that close-up images not be captured or broadcast,” wrote Sgt. Brice Nihiser, a member of the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s public affairs unit, in an email to Sentient. “These requests are made solely out of consideration for the public and those directly affected, not as restrictions on press freedoms nor as directive orders to the media.”

“The Ohio State Highway Patrol is committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all individuals, including the freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment,” added Nihiser. “Our troopers receive annual training to protect these rights while ensuring safety at incident scenes.”

A Pattern of Blocking Media and Activist Access

The Ohio State Highway Patrol’s efforts to block media access occurred again in a June 2024 crash of a truck hauling 150 pigs along the interstate. The recovered bodycam footage from June 2024 captures the aftermath of the accident and shows at least twenty full-grown pigs, mangled and bloody, piled under the overpass ramp.

Just before 6 a.m., reporters with Channel 7 WHIO-TV are shown driving toward the crash site. As they roll to a stop, they are greeted by state trooper Alexander Price, who allows the reporters to move closer to the crash but tells them twice to “stay out of the scene.” Half an hour later, as a pair of reporters set up tripods, they are approached by a member of the fire department. The reporters then pack up their belongings and leave — at least exit the frame of the scene captured in a nearby police body camera.

As the emergency crew prepares to kill the injured pigs later that morning, Fire Chief Ronald Fletcher raises his concerns about the media witnessing the process, with state troopers. “Our guys that are gonna do the ‘hog work’ would like to not necessarily have the news media in range of them having to shoot a bunch of hogs… I already ran them off once,” he says. A state trooper agrees to position their vehicles so the media “can’t even see it,” as the emergency crew euthanizes the injured pigs.

A similar incident occurred in Michigan in December 2023. Bodycam footage from this hog transport crash shows a local sheriff from Branch County discussing with a Michigan State Police trooper how to block the view of the pigs being euthanized, including shutting down the road. As they prepare to pull dead pigs from the wreckage, the sheriff informs an officer about the plan to use trailers to block the view and voices concerns about “PETA people” catching wind of it. The footage also shows an officer saying the sheriff didn’t want any photographs taken because “the animal rights people” would “have a cow.”

Efforts to prevent animal rights activists from documenting livestock crashes are familiar to Daniel Paden, PETA’s vice president of evidence analysis. While living along a route used by trucks hauling pigs from Smithfield Foods in eastern North Carolina to a Virginia slaughterhouse, he often arrived at early hours in the morning to capture the scene and advocate for quick euthanasia of injured animals to end their suffering.

“On a number of occasions, we very clearly saw Smithfield personnel go to law enforcement on the scene, point at us, act angry, upset, frustrated and then lo and behold that those officers come and will tell us, ‘You need to move. You need to leave. Not record,’” says Paden.

Paden would push back and argue he has the right to be on public property and would respect the safety boundaries set up by the police. “The answer again and again was ‘Well, you know, the company doesn’t want you here, ’” he shares. “It really did feel like law enforcement was acting at the behest of the pig industry, and not the city or the state that they are serving, and the public.”

Over time, as he continued to assert his right to observe the crashes and met with some of the police agencies responding to these crashes, Paden said he found that the police began to shift away from their earlier deference to the livestock industry. The officers appeared to recognize “that their role at these crashes was not to be the security arm of Smithfield Foods,” says Paden.

The Michigan State Police, Branch County Sheriff’s Department, and Fire Chief Ronald Fletcher did not respond to a request to comment on the claims made in this article.

A Collaborative Relationship Between Police and the Livestock Industry

The collaborative relationship between the meat industry and law enforcement is not limited to the aftermath of livestock crashes, observes Justin Marceau, a civil rights litigator who runs a legal clinic for animal rights activists at the University of Denver.

“It’s difficult to generalize across all law enforcement, but there is a consistent pattern of police aligning with the interests of industrial agriculture—often working to limit transparency rather than facilitate it,” Marceau wrote in an email to Sentient. “In the context of livestock truck crashes, it’s not uncommon for officers to restrict journalists, advocates, or even bystanders from documenting the aftermath, despite clear public interest.”

In his work, Marceau has noted that the police play a key role in enforcing the growing criminalization of animal rights activists, including nonviolent rescues and “ag-gag” laws that prohibit documenting of livestock farms. “These dynamics suggest that law enforcement often serves as a buffer between the public and the realities of animal agriculture,” he wrote, “prioritizing industry protection over transparency or accountability.”

In northern California, animal rights advocates have also noted the “extremely cozy relationship” between the animal agriculture industry and the sheriff’s department, says Almira Tanner, the lead organizer for Direct Action Everywhere. For instance, in 2021, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau honored the sheriff’s office with its “Friend of the Farm Bureau” award for their close work together, including co-hosting an event.

More recently, at the Animal Liberation Conference in May, she said she saw police vehicles escorting “slaughter trucks into the slaughterhouse so that activists aren’t able to document what’s happening.” The trucks were flanked by police cars in a “convoy” with one police car in front and another behind to block their view — a tactic familiar to observers of livestock truck crashes.

Background. Roughly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions are driven by food systems, and meat, especially beef, is the largest driver of those food-related emissions. Yet a 2023 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found 74 percent of U.S. respondents thought eating less meat would have little to no effect on climate change.

Sentient Media set out to analyze how often climate news reports animal agriculture as a cause of climate change. Sentient analyzed 940 of the most recent climate news stories across 11 news outlets. Out of the stories studied, 96.2 percent made no mention of meat or livestock production as a cause of climate change.

Article Selection. Sentient team members downloaded copies of the most recent climate news stories available on each site, reviewing and omitting stories that were opinion pieces or a mention of climate change in passing (say, for instance, a story about a podcast that touches on climate change).

The news outlets, primarily U.S.-based, are as follows:

Washington Post: 100 articles

Reuters: 100 articles

The Boston Globe: 100 articles

NY Times: 100 articles

CNN: 73 articles*

WSJ: 49 articles*

New York Post 56 articles*

Los Angeles Times 100 articles

Star Tribune: 66 articles

Chicago Tribune: 97 articles

The Guardian: 99 articles

Total: 940 articles

(*) number of maximum relevant articles available

A number of outlets had minimal coverage of climate change relevant to the study (e.g., not a minor mention) available on their online platforms. In those cases, we reviewed less than 100 articles, but as many as we could find.

Methods. Sentient Media ran two computational methods: one categorized articles using the same search parameters used in a 2023 study published by Sentient and data researchers Faunalytics, while the other analyzed them using Anthropic Claude API, with each category defined by detailed classification criteria. (Search parameters for stories tagged animal agriculture included, among others, “meat”, “dairy”, “livestock”, “chicken farm”,“cattle shelter”, “seafood”, and “fisheries”.)

Findings. Using the Anthropic method, the analysis showed 96.2 stories did not mention animal-based farming as a cause of greenhouse gas emissions. This means only 36 out of 940 climate stories had both mentioned and contextualized the climate impacts of animal agriculture.

Of the 11 news outlets, the New York Post had the biggest share of contextualized meat- and food-related climate stories, with 14 percent or eight out of its 56 stories studied. The New York Times, Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times mentioned animal agriculture in at least 15 percent of their respective climate reporting but very few addressed climate impacts.

Using the same parameters as the 2023 study on a more carefully selected set of articles, we found only 10.9 percent mentioned animal agriculture. More details on the limitations follow.

The 2023 study found that 93 percent of climate news stories failed to mention meat and livestock farming as a cause of climate change. One way this year’s study differs, in addition to incorporating analysis involving a large language model, is that Sentient culled more irrelevant articles from the total. That was a limitation of the earlier study, which was noted in the report, in which Faunalytics and Sentient researchers noted that the 93 percent figure was lower than what would likely be the true figure.

The search parameters used for the 2023 analysis was a blunter way of searching, as we noted in the study then, as the results included all stories with any mention of livestock farming, not necessarily just those that noted in the reporting that livestock farming, particularly cattle ranching, is a source of greenhouse gas emissions. Some stories, for instance, reported on ranchers and other livestock farmers experiencing the impacts of climate change like extreme heat, without mentioning livestock farming as a source.

The use of artificial intelligence tools, including training large language models, is characterized by intensive energy and water consumption. However, AI-related emissions, while increasing, are still minor compared to that of global livestock production, which is responsible for at least 12 percent of emissions. Similarly, while ChatGPT and Google’s Bard use 18.2–18.9 billion liters of water, animal farming and by-products require over 5 trillion liters of water.

For this search in particular, each time running the analysis used approximately 3,000 watt hours. This is about the same as 1 load of laundry (washer and dryer). Anthropic in particular doesn’t release exact numbers on their electricity usage, however, as other large AI models have, so this is a very rough estimate.

Limitations. Though we manually reviewed the articles for inclusion, we may still have included some that aren’t appropriate for the analysis. We only looked at a limited number of articles due to cost and time limitations.

In addition, this analysis is not meant to suggest that fossil fuels and other drivers of climate change should have less media attention or that all stories included in the search must mention animal agriculture. The point is to illuminate opportunities for reporting, and illuminate the lack of coverage on animal agriculture’s role in climate journalism.

The Environmental Protection Agency has axed proposed rules aimed at reducing pollution from slaughterhouse waste, including animal manure and blood. The proposal was initially advanced during the Biden administration. The EPA says, among other things, the withdrawal of the proposed new rule is an action that “advances the goals of President Trump’s executive actions on defeating the cost-of-living crisis and unleashing prosperity through deregulation.” The withdrawn rule was meant to reduce pollutants from animal blood, bone, muscle, manure and other sources, all of which are carried in wastewater from meat and poultry slaughterhouses.

The abandonment of the proposed rule, titled the Clean Water Act Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for the Meat and Poultry Products Point Source Category, was announced over Labor Day weekend.

Livestock operations in the U.S. produce 1.4 billion tons of manure and other waste, much of which is stored until it can be applied to crop fields, where mis- and overapplication can lead to the leaching of nutrients into nearby waterways. Slaughterhouses are also a source of pollution. Based on USDA slaughter figures for cattle, pigs, sheep and poultry, and EPA averages for the amount of wastewater produced per pound of live animal killed, Sentient estimates that slaughterhouses produced about 71 billion gallons of wastewater in 2024.

The proposed Biden-era rule aimed to tighten how slaughterhouse pollution is regulated. For example, the current rule, which was amended in 2004, limits fecal coliform bacteria — a group that includes E. coli — as well as nitrogen and ammonia in the water, but it only applies to about 150 of America’s 5,000 or so meat and poultry slaughterhouses, and does not cover phosphorus, a chemical element found in animal blood.
Too much phosphorus in the water causes algae to grow excessively, depleting the oxygen. Low-oxygen waters can destroy aquatic life and increase production of methane and nitrous oxide.

In its proposed new rule, Biden EPA officials wrote that the slaughterhouse industry “discharges large quantities of nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, that enter the Nation’s waters. Nutrient pollution is one of the most widespread, costly, and challenging environmental problems impacting water quality in the United States.” The decision to reverse the rule tracks with the Trump administration’s push to scale back on environmental regulations.

How Slaughterhouses Pollute Water

Nitrogen and phosphorus are found in animal blood, bone, muscle and manure but the main polluting agent in slaughterhouse wastewater is blood, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Recent blood pollution incidents include reports of crimson-colored discharge flowing from a Monroeville slaughterhouse in New Jersey, pig blood leaking into the storm water system in Austin, Minnesota and red-tinted water flowing into a creek in Postville, Iowa.

Every year, slaughterhouses and rendering facilities “discharge hundreds of millions of pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus, collectively known as nutrient pollution, along with heavy metals and dozens of other pollutants, into rivers and streams across the United States,” according to Earthjustice, a U.S. environmental advocacy group.

Problems linked to excessive nitrogen and phosphorus in surface water, the EPA’s initial proposal said, include “eutrophication and harmful algal blooms, that have negative impacts on human health and the environment.” It went on to say that “excess nutrients in aquatic environments … [can limit] the ability of the waterbody to support aquatic life. Examples include biodiversity loss, impacts to fish development and reproduction, as well as fish kills from hypoxic, or deoxygenated, waters.”

Currently, there are no federal standards governing phosphorus discharges from slaughterhouses, says Alexis Andiman, senior attorney at Earthjustice. “EPA has said that slaughterhouses and rendering facilities are the leading industrial dischargers of phosphorus water pollution. But right now, EPA’s water pollution control standards don’t control phosphorus at all.” Nitrogen, meanwhile, is somewhat regulated but the “EPA itself has repeatedly indicated that stricter regulations would be appropriate,” Andiman says.

The EPA under Biden had put forward three options in its rule proposal. Depending on which was eventually adopted, Earthjustice estimates that pollution from phosphorus and nitrogen would have been reduced anywhere from 15 to or as much as 85 percent.

Slaughterhouse Pollution Regulations Will Remain Patchy and Inconsistent

Most slaughterhouse pollution will remain unregulated by the EPA thanks to the new rule, says Andiman. This is because the EPA’s existing regulations do not cover slaughterhouses that discharge indirectly — meaning they send water pollution to publicly owned treatment works, she says. “Right now, EPA’s regulations cover only the direct dischargers” — those that pipe waste directly to rivers and streams — “but the vast majority of the industry consists of indirect dischargers … meaning their pollution is totally uncontrolled at the federal level.”

Under the withdrawn rule, the most stringent regulatory option would have required indirect dischargers to comply with new treatment standards for nitrogen and phosphorus, she says.

Without the new rules, Andiman says the EPA is essentially “allowing slaughterhouses and rendering facilities to continue to pollute,” even though it has acknowledged that “slaughterhouse and rendering facility pollution adversely affects over 60 million Americans,” people living “within one mile of a stream or river potentially impacted” by slaughterhouse discharge. According to the EPA, some of the proposed rules would have improved pollution in Black, Asian and Hispanic communities.

Andiman says the suggestion that Americans must choose between clean water and affordable food is a false dichotomy. “EPA’s own economic analysis shows that that’s not the case here. It’s possible to reduce slaughterhouse pollution and to do it without putting businesses at risk,” Andiman says. A chart in the analysis shows compliance with the proposed new rules would mean possible meat price increases of, at most, 0.05 percent.

EPA’s Decision Risks More Suffocation and Overwhelm

Farm animal advocacy staff attorney at Vermont’s Animal Law and Policy Institute, Taylor Waters, says withdrawing the rule means the risks of marine animal suffocation and water treatment plant overwhelm — where water cleaning machinery is pushed to its limits — will continue.

Animal blood is “incredibly risky,” says Waters. “As soon as it enters a waterway, it basically sucks all of the air out of it. It removes all of the oxygen,” Waters tells Sentient. If animal blood finds its way directly into a river or stream it can suffocate plant and animal life, she says, or, if it goes to a treatment facility, it risks overwhelming normal treatment capacities. Either way, she says, “it’s a huge, huge environmental issue.”

In response to criticisms of its rule withdrawal, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told Sentient that the “EPA is saving billions of dollars in costs the American people would otherwise see increases in the prices of the meat and poultry they buy at the grocery store while ensuring the protection of human health and the environment,” a statement that was included in an EPA press release.

The EPA email adds that it is “factually incorrect” to claim animal blood is unregulated, but did not address other criticisms including the issues of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, unsafe drinking water or risks that waterways will be unfit for outdoor recreation or aquatic life. The email goes on to say that the “Trump EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment and ensuring access to clean air, land, and water for ALL Americans. Environmental protection and powering our economy are not binary choices — we can and will do both.” The EPA’s decision comes at a particularly bad time, Waters says, as the Trump administration has also removed limits on line speeds at chicken and pork slaughterhouses.“ This means there will be even more blood and other byproduct discharge going through systems for rendering and treatment that could completely overrun water treatment facilities and natural waterways.”

Jeff Hiserman loves Muncy Creek Township so much he wants to be “buried in the backyard” of his home. That is, unless, Sunny Side Up Farms LLC, a 350,000 head cage-free, free-range” chicken farm and solar project, gets put in “200 yards” from his front door. The poultry project has been pitched as an integrated solar and chicken farm, a new land use practice known as agrivoltaics. But agrivoltaics projects typically envision animals grazing underneath solar panels — not hundreds of thousands of confined chickens packed into sheds. 

Since April, Hiserman and his neighbors have been gathering at the truck bay of the Muncy Area Volunteer Fire Department, where the zoning board hearings are held, to question the joint venture between Bollinger Solar LLC and Ag Ventures LLC. In Muncy Creek Township, these hearings resemble court: Counsel is present, and witnesses are called to the stand. Over the course of multiple hearings, counsel for the zoning board has questioned representatives from the poultry and solar companies, drawing out details about the project’s animal welfare and environmental impacts. The testimony revealed the chickens may not ever see the light of day, and the actual integration between the solar panels and the chickens is minimal, if in existence at all. 

When questioned on this, the solar project developer said that, to be honest, he was just “in the business of making money.”

Hiserman was sitting about 20 feet behind the developer when he said that. “I looked at my wife, and we both laughed out loud,” he says. “That was a pretty trying moment.”

Hiserman is a member of the Muncy Area Neighborhood Preservation Coalition, a group opposed to the project. A group of residents within the coalition have lawyered up, retaining attorney Zachary DuGan to represent them in their fight against the project. Hiserman himself cannot speak at the hearings because he is represented by counsel.

DuGan tells Sentient that at the crux of the case is the fact that this project, in its current proposed state, does not do enough to protect residents from the harmful effects of concentrated animal feeding operations, often called CAFOs or, colloquially, factory farms. 

According to a recent EPA report, Pennsylvania has approximately 468 CAFOs, compared to approximately 4,000 in the leading state of Iowa. Most are clustered in Lancaster County, southeast of Muncy Creek Township, which is in Lycoming County, though the number has been increasing each year.  

“The CAFO operation will negatively impact the health, safety, welfare of the surrounding residents,” DuGan says. Multiple residences are nearby, as is an elementary school and public water wells. His clients are worried about groundwater contamination, noise, dust, flies and “anything that would be common with the kind of CAFO use adjacent to residential homes.” 

“I think they have stepped into what they thought was going to be a waltz, and we’ve put them now in the trenches,” Hiserman says. “You came to play? So did we.”

“Climate-Smart” Agriculture

The climate pitch for agrivoltaics is that it optimizes land use. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a Department of Energy laboratory, describes agrivoltaics as: “creating energy and providing space for crops, grazing, and native habitats under and between panels.” 

Under the Biden Administration, credits for solar panels, especially those in rural areas, were booming: Grant recipients could receive up to $1 million for renewable energy projects, including agrivoltaics. Despite cuts to this funding by the Trump Administration, the developers have not backed down on the project proposal. In their conditional use application, the solar project developers characterized the chickens’ outdoor access as limited, writing that “poultry from the proposed CAFO may also be able to access certain areas beneath the panels as an agrivoltaic use, depending on the poultry integrator utilized at any given time.” The implication is that the chickens will be mostly confined and contained. As the developers write, “the Project is compatible with the nearby agricultural and residential uses.”

Certain egg integrators, like Cal-Maine, are known for their “cage-free” eggs. In industrialized agriculture operations, an integrator typically controls the entire process — in the case of eggs, they own the chickens, the feed and anything they produce, like the eggs. The land and the sheds serve as a site for the integrator. By pitching this as an agrivoltaic project then, the minds behind Sunny Side Up LLC might be hoping to attract integrators who pitch their eggs as “free-range” or “cage-free.”

“Cage-free” Includes CAFOs

On April 16, 2025, project manager Cody Snyder, of the CAFO part of the project, Ag Ventures, took to the stand in Muncy Creek Township. “This is a cage-free, free-range operation,” Snyder said at the hearing. The United States Department of Agriculture definition of “cage-free” does not require chickens to have access to the outdoors. Free-range chickens, on the other hand, must have access to the outdoors, which could mean a small plot of concrete outside of a facility, though it does not necessarily mean they actually go out. Large fans, which the developers noted they will have to dry the manure and keep the smell at bay, are often so strong they create “hurricane level” winds that deter chickens from leaving.

Under those federal rules, Sunny Side Up would likely meet the requirements to label the eggs “free-range” and “cage-free.” At a hearing, Snyder stated that each of the five barns on the property would house 70,000 chickens, and each barn would be 88 feet wide by 616 feet long. 

Per chicken then, this would likely give each bird under 1 square foot of space, not including the space taken up by the egg conveyor belt and manure storage area inside. In the same testimony, Snyder told the room, “I’ll be honest with everyone here. The chickens don’t go outside much.” 

“I think they’re just looking at the big dollar sign overall,” Hiserman says. “‘Let’s get 350,000 chickens. Let’s get 51,000 solar panels. Let’s make some bucks. We got 100 plus acres in the middle of nowhere in North Central Pennsylvania. Let’s do it.’ Well, it’s not so easy.” 

A Lot of Poop. A Lot of Problems.

The chickens at this egg-laying operation are projected to produce 10 million pounds of manure each year. That manure is typically stored and then applied to crop farms. Sometimes, as would be the case for the Sunny Side project, that involves having to transport the manure.  

Snyder testified that the operation would have capacity to store manure for a year but would likely export it away from the facility twice a year. “There is not really any land to put the manure,” he said, referring to the lack of large crop farms in the nearby area, “so we would be exporting this chicken manure.” But Snyder expressed confidence at finding takers, adding, “like I said, it is not hard to get rid of.”

Manure storage from concentrated animal feeding operations is a contentious topic, whether exported or not. Just the storage itself creates risks, from manure leaching into groundwater to the fumes generated as it decomposes. Transport adds more risk on top of that. 

In the case that chickens are allowed to range under the solar panels, there is currently no plan in place for their defecation outside. Even if just five percent of the flock is outside at any given time, that would be 17,500 chickens, producing approximately 500,000 pounds of manure per year. 

“Any manure that occurs outside will be left where it lies,” engineer Jonathan Zartman said at a hearing on August 4.

Any dead chickens would be placed in the manure pits to decompose. Broken eggs, too, would be placed in the manure area. 

Steven Barrows, a resident and doctor, raised concerns in his testimony on April 24 about the health risks for the community. “I’m duty-bound to protect my patients and all of those children,” Barrows said at the hearing, referring to the elementary school located near the proposed CAFO site. 

Barrows tells Sentient that studies show children who attend school near CAFOs are more likely to display asthma symptoms. “I think that provides enough justification for outright denial of the project, let alone all the other concerns,” he says.

The proposed site is located a quarter of a mile from Ward L. Myers Elementary School, but the project designers insist that this operation will not be a hindrance to the local community.

There is another hearing scheduled for the industrial poultry part of the project on September 4 at 7 p.m. At this meeting, clients represented by DuGan will present their case to the township supervisors, calling witnesses with expertise related to the many impacts the project poses, including engineering, ecology and human health. DuGan tells Sentient he expects that presentation to take multiple meetings. 

After the record is eventually closed for testimony and evidence, the town supervisors will decide if conditional use should be approved, conditionally approved, or denied.

“I’m channeling my anger in this direction, because that’s where it needs to be channeled,” Hiserman says. “Put the energy into how we are going to win this thing and win it convincingly, so that other people can use this technique and maybe we can keep this kind of atrocity from happening.”