Note: this project includes aerial imagery of large-scale enclosed animal facilities; the imagery does not show individual animals and primarily appears as warehouse-style structures viewed from above.
Research
About the Project
Have you ever heard the term Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)?
These are massive meat, dairy or egg facilities with hundreds of pigs or thousands of poultry living indoors with no access to sunlight or fresh air.
Each CAFO produces a significant amount of animal waste. CAFOs add pollutants to our air, soil and water, and are harmful to human health. They are often placed in or near communities of color and low income rural communities. In North Carolina, there is a lack of transparency around Poultry CAFOs. This means that we can’t tell how many poultry CAFOs are operating at any given time and where they are. Even though new ones pop up every month, we can only get estimates every 5 years.
This makes it really difficult for communities to protect themselves and advocate against these polluting industries. In this project, your classifications will help our team document where CAFOs are located and what animals are being reared in them.
For more information about CAFOs and the impacts on environmental and human health, please see the Education tab. We appreciate your participation in this project. Thank you.
Methodology
We obtained our data from NC One Map, which hosts satellite imagery of all of North Carolina's counties.
Previous researchers have used AI to predict the locations of poultry CAFOs (e.g., Stanford University, NC State University, the Environmental Working Group). These AI-based models can be useful for research purposes to identify CAFO locations, but in some instances the data were only 70-80% accurate or not shared publicly. In both cases, while this may be sufficient for a research study, the outcomes are less effective for communities on the ground living near CAFOs. Additionally, as environmental justice practitioners and scholars, we try to minimize our use of AI tools because of the harm that they cause to the communities we work with and the environmental impacts of data centers.
Following the project, we will share the data publicly on CleanAIRE NC's Airkeeper Dashboard as well as at our annual North Carolina Environmental Justice Network Summit.