Sky’s Story
Warning: this post contains graphic and disturbing content
I've always felt morbidly drawn to places like slaughterhouses and factory farms. Places where suffering is carefully hidden behind closed doors and concrete walls. In 2018, I started organizing vigils where we would look in the trucks approaching slaughterhouses, and take photos and videos of the condition of the pigs inside. But over time, I got increasingly curious about what actually goes on at the places where the animals were born and abused before they got loaded onto those trucks, and what I'd be able to see outside of the actual farms.
I didn’t know anyone who lived in my area that knew what going to an animal ag facility entailed, and my activism circle didn’t really have a lot of direct action going on, but I felt like I needed to do more than I was doing. I started looking at satellite imagery to see if I could find any farms near me, and in the course of my research I learned about the Counterglow map.
I found what I thought was a sow farm only 20 minutes from me so I decided to go check it out. The first few times I went there, I only drove by, but on one of those times I noticed an open door. I decided to park really quick and go look in. I was shocked to see a young cow staring right at me when I looked through the door. I was so curious as to what type of farm this could be, it didn’t look like anything I'd ever seen before. After looking into it, I found out it was a veal farm. I noticed the sides were kept open in the summer for ventilation. This would be the perfect opportunity to look right in a farm without entering the building. I went home but I was already thinking about when I’d be able to come back and get a closer look.
I made a plan with some friends to go to the farm together. It close to the road, so we could see the entire property while driving by. One of them dropped us off and we walked up the side of the barn and looked in. There were hundreds of baby calves inside looking back at us. In Indiana, veal crates are banned, so the companies get around that by keeping four calves to a pen, which isn’t much better in terms of space. They were crowded on slatted concrete and dirty, covered in what looked to be diarrhea. It was heartbreaking, especially because they were very sweet and curious. We petted them through the wired windows. That experience made me want to learn more about veal farms in particular and get more experience in the field.
In 2019, after the Fair Oaks dairy investigation was released by ARM, I saw in the video that the farm they investigated was in North Manchester, Indiana, only 40 minutes from me. They didn’t release the address, but there was drone footage over the farm, so I used that and got to work scanning CAFOs in that region on the map until I was pretty sure I’d found it. I looked up the property owner information and sure enough, it was owned by Midwest Veal- it was the same facility. The company had published a statement about shutting down the farm for remodeling, leading me to think it was abandoned. I recruited a team to go check it out anyway because I thought we might still find something valuable there. We were all shocked when we drove through the driveway of the property and stumbled upon a concrete box with 5 dead and bloody calves inside. Some of them hadn’t been dead very long, so it seemed like the company had been lying about closing the farm down.
This was the first time any of us had seen such violence in person. One calf had her neck snapped backwards. We found multiple corpses decayed down to skeleton and muscle littered throughout the fields, presumably picked up by vultures from the dead box and carried to the fields. They had to be only a few weeks old, they were so small. My friends took photos and videos while I stayed in the driver's seat so we could leave quickly if we needed to. I went back a few times after that, and every single time there were bloody bodies in the back. I’m hoping to use the footage we’ve gotten to raise awareness of the “collateral damage” of the dairy industry.
