With the spotlight on industrial farms, their capacity for cruelty and appetite for oil, nonindustrial farms are increasingly hopeful, economically attractive systems that don't take more from the earth than it can replace or recharge. Run efficiently, they can cut out three-quarters of the costs of larger farms, using pasture instead of windowless confinement buildings to house animals, solar power and biomass (wood, crops, manure, garbage) to reduce energy costs. Smaller farms do not emit greenhouses gases the way factory farms do: putting meat on the table from industrial farms contributes to large-scale climate change and intractable environmental problems.

Nonindustrial farms reduce this impact in major ways at a reasonable cost. How? They use scattered systems that rely on renewable energy and don't concentrate animals in large numbers in such relatively small space that the earth can't absorb their byproducts.