How Leah Garcés Convinces Factory Farmers to Go Plant-Based

In a world driven by hostility, Leah leads with curiosity – and the results are extraordinary. How can we replicate her success?

Mushrooms that were grown at a former factory farm.

This is the era of hostility. 

Americans increasingly see those who disagree with them as not just incorrect but dishonest, immoral, and dangerous. A 2022 poll by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that 44% of Democratic men under the age of 50 support assassinating a politician on the other side who they believe to be harming the country. 

This is why the story of Leah Garcés, an animal rights activist who befriends factory farmers, is so surprising. Leah is the CEO of the animal rights organization Mercy for Animals. And her Transfarmation program has convinced a dozen factory farmers, including one that condemned Leah as a “bio-terrorist,” to convert into plant-based businesses. I sat down with her to discuss the project.

Leah’s strategy for achieving transformation is even more surprising than her success. It’s quite simple: curiosity.

“How has this system affected you?” Leah asked Craig Watts, the poultry farmer who called her a “bio-terrorist.” Not so well, it turns out. Craig was stuck in a Ponzi scheme. He was encouraged by poultry giant Perdue to take on massive debt to build industrial chicken sheds. But constant problems - from mechanical failure to disease outbreak - forced him to take out more and more debt to sustain his facility. He could never pay it off. 

Understanding how the system was affecting Craig was key to Leah’s understanding of how to create change. Farmers like Craig needed a new and more sustainable business model — e.g., mushroom farming, in Craig’s case. But the value of curiosity, for Leah, went beyond getting new information. 

Curiosity created connection. Leah discovered that Craig was a father of small children, and she and Craig bonded over the challenges of parenting. Curiosity created openness. Leah’s questions provoked Craig to start asking questions, too, and he learned that animal rights activists are not bio-terrorists and have many of the same concerns about concentrations of corporate power. Curiosity even created compassion. When Leah asked how Craig was feeling, Craig started wondering how others in the system were feeling, too. This includes the animals. He rarely eats animals today. 

Some of the remarkable mushrooms being grown on facilities that have shifted away from factory farming.

The power of curiosity isn’t limited to Leah’s case. A study of 1700 executives by scholars at Harvard Business School found that curiosity was among the most critical factors in a leader’s ability to create change. It’s hard to lead when you’re not interested in your team members’ ideas.

And yet curiosity is in short supply. Young Democrats in the SPLC poll don’t want to learn what motivates Trump. Increasingly, they want to kill him. And hostility, not curiosity, has become the mantra of social movements from #FreePalestine to #MeToo. “If you are not calling [insert injustice] out, you’re complicit!”

How do we change that? Part of the answer is knowledge. If we know that curiosity creates change, and that hostility blocks it, we’re more likely to cultivate the former in ourselves or others.

But knowledge is not enough. There are evolutionary impulses that drive our hostility towards “others” even when we know it’s counter-productive. (One hundred fifty thousand years ago, when homo sapiens diverged from other humanoid species, those “others” would be very likely to kill us!) To combat these ancient prejudices, we have to reprogram our instincts. And experiments show that the best way to do this — to build our curiosity muscle — is to constantly expose ourselves to new ideas, places, and people. When we do this, new people and ideas no longer feel threatening — and provoke hostility — but create curiosity instead.

Leah has done this with Craig and other factory farmers. The results have been transformative: hog farms filled with suffering beings turned into mushroom farms with beautiful produce instead. You may not have a challenge as great as Leah’s. Maybe the disagreement you’re dealing with is something as simple as whether veganism can be healthy. But all of us can push ourselves to talk to someone with different or even adversarial beliefs.

By doing so, you might discover that you’re more curious than you expected – and more effective at creating change.¹

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What’s Up This Week (Month)

• Tracy Murphy is going to trial on October 3 near Buffalo, New York — and I’ll be representing her. Tracy is a sanctuary owner who was charged with larceny after taking in two stray cows. I blogged about the situation back in 2023, and now the case is finally going to trial. Stay tuned for more.

• The Ridglan special prosecutor proceeding is still on for Oct 23 in Madison, WI — and Ridglan successfully “quashed” our efforts to subpoena them for incriminating documents. We were not surprised by this result, which occurred at a hearing on Sept 12. The legal waters we are navigating are new, and the judge is doing her best to be fair to all parties. It was nonetheless a disappointing result, as we know Ridglan is hiding evidence of animal cruelty. We are still confident, however, that the evidence we have should be more than sufficient to charge Ridglan with crimes on October 23. 

• Expect to hear much more about the rescue of the King’s Sheep. Three activists with Animal Rising are going to trial on Nov 4, the day before the American election, for rescuing lambs from King Charles’ estate. Charles, bizarrely, has a passion for sheep slaughter. But his obsession will present a tremendous opportunity for all of us to get the issue of animal rights on the table.

That’s all for the week! And let me apologize for the great delays in the past month in getting this newsletter out. Being pulled back into Tracy’s case has taken over my life.

1. Some of you might ask: how does curiosity fit with direct action? How can one be curious while also confronting injustice? The simple answer is that, not only are curiosity and direct action compatible but they are essential to one another, when correctly targeted. Evidence shows that we need to have curiosity towards individuals while we confront systems that we seek to change. If we confront without curiosity, we can’t win people over to change. If we have curiosity without confrontation, even if people are persuaded or sympathetic, there’s no energy to push for change. But I’ll speak more about this in a future newsletter.