News Archive
Hoosier Environmental Council Attorney Advocates Protecting Animals and People
11/15/2018
Kim Ferraro, Senior Staff Attorney and Director of Agriculture Policy at the Hoosier Environmental Council, discussed "The Transition of Farming to Industry and the Need to Update and Policy for Protection of Animals and People" on November 8 at the IU McKinney School of Law.
Ferraro (left, with IU McKinney Professor of Law Carlton Waterhouse, Director, Program in Environmental, Energy and Natural Resources Law ) discussed the transformation of farming to big industry, and provided an in-depth look at the current state of farming laws at the federal and state levels. Instead of raising livestock on traditional farms where animals graze in open pasture, livestock are now “produced” in industrial facilities called concentrated animal feeding operations (“CAFOs”) where animals are confined and caged by the thousands. Although these industrial-scale facilities have industrial-scale environmental and public health impacts, state and federal laws and policies have not similarly transformed and continue to treat CAFOs as farms, Ferraro said.
Gaps in those laws leave air, land, water, people and animals unprotected, Ferraro said. In addition to recommending specific policy solutions for addressing the problem, she encouraged law students to consider what they could do, including examining their own eating habits. Americans eat six times more meat today than they did in the 1930s, Ferraro noted.
“We can save the planet with our food choices,” she said.
After her talk, Professor Waterhouse presented Ferraro with an “Environmental Protector Award” in recognition of her work.
Prior to her role at HEC, Ferraro was executive director of the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation (LEAF), the state’s only non-for-profit legal aid services organization focused on the environment, which merged with HEC in 2011. With both LEAF and HEC, Ferraro has achieved several legal victories that have helped communities impacted by industrial pollution, factory farm waste, reckless residential development, and coal ash contamination. A graduate of the Valparaiso University School of Law, she was named an “Up and Coming Lawyer” by The Indiana Lawyer.
