Lake Erie Advocates
Formerly Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie (ACLE)
Get Informed
In this 30 minute video, Dr. Deanna Osmond, Ph.D. in Agronomy from Cornell University, and author of dozens of studies on soil nutrients, speaks at an Ohio State University conference, Sept. 8, 2021. In her very understated way she explains why many of the "Best Management Practices" the Ohio EPA is using to draft TMDLs (total maximum daily loads) for Lake Erie are either ineffective or actually increase the Dissolved Reactive Phosphorus fueling the toxic algal blooms every summer.
Chris Winslow, director of the OSU's Sea Grant program, moderates the Q&A in which he says "When giving talks like this we keep calling these 'best management practices,' but there really isn't a 'best' right? These are 'management practices' and it truly depends on which field and which management practice; that's kind of misleading folks."
Informative Films
The Erie Situation: Panel Discussion
Peaceable Kingdom
Can a change of heart change the world?
This award-winning documentary explores a crisis of conscience experienced by several farmers questioning their inherited way of life. Growing more and more connected to individual animals under their care, they struggle to do what is right, despite overwhelming social and economic pressure to follow tradition. Open your eyes. Trust your heart. Take the journey.
Mad Cowboy
"I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. I grew up on a dairy farm in Montana, and I ran a feedlot operation there for twenty years. I know firsthand how cattle are raised and how meat is produced in this country. Today I am president of Earth Save International, an organization promoting organic farming and the vegetarian diet."
Farm to Fridge
Mercy For Animals presents this powerful film which takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration behind the closed doors of the nation's largest industrial farms, hatcheries, and slaughter plants.
Cock Fight
Meet the farmer blowing the whistle on Big Chicken.
Earthlings
A 2005 American documentary film about humankind's total dependence on animals for economic purposes. Presented in five chapters (pets, food, clothing, entertainment and scientific research) the film is narrated by Joaquin Phoenix.
Meet Your Meat
In a moving narration, actor and activist Alec Baldwin exposes the truth behind humanity’s cruelest invention―the factory farm. "What you are about to see is beyond your worst nightmare."
Death on a Factory Farm
Death on a Factory "Farm" This HBO documentary follows an investigator with a hidden camera document charges of animal cruelty on a central Ohio hog farm.
Operation Fair Oaks Farms
Fair Oaks Farm is the largest dairy in the United States and the nation’s largest agritourism destination. The farm has a joint venture with Coca-Cola Company. Undercover investigators for Animal Recovery Mission (ARM) documented systemic and illegal abuse at the facility in Fair Oaks, Indiana.
Food, Inc.
The current method of raw food production is largely a response to the growth of the fast food industry since the 1950s, changing more since then than the several thousand years prior. Health and safety of the food, of the animals, of the workers, and of the consumers eating the food are often overlooked by the companies, and by government to provide cheap food regardless of negative consequences.
An Inside Look at Factory Farms
‘Keeping people in the dark enables this industry to exist without scrutiny’ — Photographer Jo-Anne McArthur uses her camera to expose the real conditions inside factory farms.
In US news and current events today, this photographer is exposing the brutal realities of factory farm animals.
Photographer Jo-Anne McArthur made this film to expose the conditions of farm animals, heightened by the greedy meat industry. Here's what it's like for factory farm animals who are mass produced and then slaughtered.
"We're Cooked"
Meet the People Getting Paid to Kill Our Planet
"We're Cooked"
See the True Cost of Your Cheap Chicken
The Erie Situation explores the confluence of science, public sentiment, politics and the powerful farming lobby as Ohio wrestles with how to confront the drivers of toxic algae in Lake Erie. What’s at stake? Who’s at risk? The Erie Situation and our panel confront this growing crisis tonight.
For more information regarding the film, please visit: https://plasticoceans.org
Tune in to PBS WGTE on September 12th at 9:00pm to watch The Erie Situation.
Resources and Publications
Journal of Rural Studies: “No matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican or neither”: Pragmatic
politics in opposition to industrial animal production
Scholars call for unusual, visionary pathways forward to counter authoritarian control in situations of helplessness and inequality. Popular strategies for change in such contexts often call for large-scale state interventions achieved through party-line politics. This paper examines two groups that stopped the construction of industrial hog facilities in the United States and find that rural emancipation comes through direct action, with the state as a secondary, rather than primary, vehicle for change. Pragmatic rural politics predicated on immediate concerns and pathways for action underscore effective protest against corporate agribusinesses. Those involved pursue ends rooted in their shared commitment to a livable and prosperous rural future.
Cover Crops Debunked
Kansas State Univ. research shows yet another of H2Ohio's taxpayer-funded "best management practices" actually makes things worse for Lake Erie. Add it to buffer strips, grassed waterways and no-till as part of a package recommended by the Farm Bureau and passed by the legislature to reassure us "something" is being done.
Dr. Jeff Reutter's comments on Ohio EPA's draft of TMDL for Lake Erie
In less than two pages, the retired head of OSU's Sea Grant program calls out the OEPA for trying to rely on Phosphorus measurements universally understood to be outdated and antithetical to cleaning up Lake Erie -- but favorable to the Farm Bureau.