Asked during a September CNN town hall whether he thought others should become vegan, Booker said “no,” before pivoting to discuss the problems of factory farming. In an MSNBC interview, he laughed off the idea of a “radical vegan agenda,” reassuring voters he doesn’t think “government should be telling Americans what to eat.”

But Booker realized there was a place that vegans and farmers could come together: Both of them hate the ways agribusiness had consolidated and mechanized the meat market, forcing farmers into using massive, cruel, and environmentally devastating confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Booker realized that, as unlikely as it sounds, there was a space in the Venn diagram between the people who believe raising and killing animals for food is wrong and the people who chose, as their livelihoods, to raise and kill animals for food. Both could agree that the way we are doing it now is cruel, both to animals and to people.

“This is not how we raised livestock 70 years ago,” Booker says. “We’ve gone from raising animals in a far more humane, pasture-based model to one where we’re producing food in hyper-confined, concentrated, enclosed buildings that produce these massive lagoons of waste that are poisoning our streams and our rivers.”

In December of 2019, while campaigning in Iowa, Booker unveiled the Farm System Reform Act. It’s sweeping legislation, but at its core it does four things:

Imposes an immediate moratorium on the construction of new CAFOs and phases out the largest existing CAFOs by 2040. (More at the link)

In May of 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) signed on to the bill. That same month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, sponsored a companion bill in the House with six co-sponsors, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus.


“We can’t vilify each other,” Booker says. “If we can’t have compassion for people in these broken systems, then we’re not going to have the compassion or coalitions to end these systems themselves.”