Mapping, Transparency and Accountability on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)

As industrial livestock systems expand across regions and sectors, the lack of publicly accessible, reliable data on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) poses major challenges for research, community advocacy, and regulatory oversight. 

This workshop brings together perspectives from research and practice to examine how better mapped CAFO data could support transparency, strengthen accountability processes, and enable communities to navigate and contest the impacts of industrial animal agriculture.

About the speakers

Rachel Mason (Independent Researcher, Hawaii USA) is a broadly-trained scientist with expertise in food systems, data science, and systems thinking. She will present her work on the research and advocacy possibilities enabled by a global map of CAFOs, outlining both the significance and methodology of building open, verifiable datasets on industrial livestock production. She will present CAFO mapping as a foundation for interdisciplinary inquiry, outlining how farm-level spatial data can inform analyses of environmental burdens and community impacts, while inviting dialogue on how such evidence might inform policy and advocacy.

Shady Heredia (CEDENMA & Stop Financing Factory Farming, Ecuador) is an environmental and animal advocate from Ecuador working on environmental justice, Indigenous rights, and the impacts of industrial livestock production. She will draw on her work with indigenous communities to document land degradation, seek accountability from development banks, and challenge the lack of transparency surrounding CAFO expansion. She will highlight how missing environmental impact data can impede community monitoring, and how participatory mapping and open data tools could strengthen local oversight and advocacy.   

Please join us and share the news with anyone who might be interested.

Header image credit: Stijn te Strake via Unsplash.