These farms are home to the specialist agricultural key workers, the ones that keep us all fed.
The farms of that dale were tied together by the choice of stone for their walls, but the similarities stopped there. Every one had been built by a farmer to his own tastes and then extended by subsequent generations. Often the original house had been converted into a stable and a more grand farmhouse was build close by, two storeys or more with a fine slate roof.
The corporations pushed the farms into ever decreasing profit margins until they sold or became victims of their own shotguns. Then they bought them up for pennies, "modernizing" and making everything "efficient." Nothing changed for the far away consumers, but for the animals and the land there was no room for sentimentality. The notion of kindness came with no identifiable increase in profit and so it was cast aside. The CEO's demanded maximum profit just the same way they did when making widgets in a factory.
They were farms but not the ones conjured in slick advertising. Each building was a steel and iron behemoth, none of them with windows, only adequate ventilation and strip lighting when necessary - the animals grew faster in the dark. The livestock were units for sale, each one carefully managed for cost control. An open door once a year counted as access to pasture and for the most part their backs were never kissed by the sun. Every eye was sallow and slow to move, every head hung low to the detritus on the ground. An inability to move combined with rapid weight gain gave them pressure sores and deformities, yet their feed was organic and so their meat was sold at a premium. Should the farmers not agree to house their animals in this way, they were of course free to become bankrupt. Freedom for stock meant inefficient conversion of grain to muscle mass and loss of animals from both sickness and predation...
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