A poultry worker sprays disinfectant at a family-owned turkey farm in Clayton County, Iowa, that houses 18,000 birds at various stages of growth. The purchased chicks grow to 24 pounds in eighteen weeks on a diet of corn and soy meal with added mineral supplements. The females tend to be sold as whole turkeys, while the males become sandwich meat and drumsticks, and the turkey manure is spread on nearby cornfields. Mortality on such farms runs around 4 percent. In 2022, turkey farming was a $10-billion industry that employed nearly 40,000 people in Iowa. Large farms like this one are classified as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, and the number of CAFOs in Iowa has grown dramatically in recent years, leading to concern about water pollution from agricultural runoff in many of the state’s rivers.
