Factory farming has failed us at every level

4 minute read - August 9th 2024

You’ll struggle to find someone who thinks factory farming is a good thing.

But, people might tell you that it’s just a necessary evil. We’ve got to feed everyone, right? Opposing factory farming just isn’t practical. It is a naive call to go back in time.

Well, is that true?

In fact, it is clinging to factory farming that is the naive refusal to recognise the reality of a food system that is destroying the planet, putting our health at risk, torturing animals and actually making it harder to feed the world.

Factory farming is cruel, destroys the planet, puts our health at risk

Factory farming is a major driver of climate change, contributing around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions¹— more than the entire transportation sector.

US factory farms produce 13 times the sewage of the entire human population of the USA², which often end up polluting the local environment.

Factory farming is also one of the biggest drivers of deforestation³. Almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture⁴ and a staggering 80% of that land is used for animal products⁵.

Factory farming also puts our health at risk.

Since 1940, half of new diseases that transfer from animals to humans have been attributed to animal agriculture⁶.

The cramped, unsanitary environments of factory farms are breeding grounds for diseases that can leap from animals to humans, setting the stage for the next COVID-style pandemic.

Factory farming is also making it harder to fight back against disease. Roughly three-quarters of the world's antibiotics are administered to farmed animals in an attempt to combat the filthy conditions in which those animals are kept⁷. This practice means that factory farming is one of the main causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which claim 1.27 million lives annually⁸ and threaten to become the leading cause of death globally by 2050⁹.

By sticking with this broken system, we’re not only leaving the world in a worse state for future generations but destroying our environment and putting our health at risk in the here and now.

But let’s not forget about the most immediate victims. The animals that suffer every day in factory farms.

Chickens are kept for their entire lives in spaces so small they can barely move¹⁰. Mother pigs are constrained so they can’t turn around to tend to their babies¹¹. Pigs become so stressed that their tails are cut off - without anaesthetic - because otherwise there is a risk that in their distressed state they’ll bite each other’s tails off¹². Baby cows are separated from their mothers at birth so they can’t drink the milk destined for our grocery stores¹³. Fish farmed in sea cages suffer from sea lice that eat their skin and eyes, causing many deaths¹⁴.

Maybe this is just the cost of feeding us all?

Well, it turns out that putting an end to factory farming - by raising farmed animals on pasture instead of crops, making plant-based alternatives more available to people and developing healthy alternative proteins - would help feed an additional 4 billion people without using more land for growing food¹⁵.

This is because we divert a third of global crop calories to feed livestock, yet all this only produces 12% of the calories we eat¹⁶. Because a lot of the energy from that food goes into other things than simply growing the edible parts of the animals.

This means that 30% of global crop calories are lost by feeding them to animals instead of directly to people. Overall, animal products contribute just 37% of our protein and just 17% of our calories.

Factory farming is failing us right now and it is leaving the legacy of a polluted and overheating world to our children.

So, what can we do about it?

Ok, so maybe you're persuaded that we’d be better off without factory farming, but you're also thinking that seems like an impossible dream. Factory farming has money, size and political power on its side - can we really do anything about it?

Not only can we fix factory farming - we already are.

As alternatives to factory farming become more available, many people believe that we are now able to evolve our food system away from factory farming. Together with farmers, food companies and charities, we can help speed up this change.

The easiest way to help to bring an end to the broken system of factory farming is simply to support those charities with a proven track record of bringing change:

• Improving the lives of billions of animals by pressuring companies to cut out the cruellest practices.

• Working with lawmakers to hold factory farms accountable for the harm they do.

• Supporting new technologies that will help us feed the world healthily and without breaking our planet.

• Making healthy plant-based alternatives easier for people to access

You can find out more about what makes an organisation super-effective here. Thanks to the work of organizations like these and others, the end of factory farming could come sooner than you think. But nothing is guaranteed and, as we’ve seen, factory farming is doing incredible damage every day that this system continues to exist. So, I hope you’ll join us in trying to fix factory farming as soon as possible.

Footnotes

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2013): “Tackling climate change through livestock” -- “Representing 14.5 per- cent of human-induced GHG emissions, the livestock sector plays an important role in climate change”. Our World in Data (2019): “Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions” -- This source shows a detailed breakdown of food system related emissions. 26% of global emissions are attributed to food, of which 52% is attributed to farmed animals (30% from direct methane emissions, fuel use, and manure management, 6% from animal feed, and 16% from land use). This 52% figure doesn’t include the contribution of animal products to supply chain emissions (which make up 18% of food system emissions). ↑

2. American Public Health Association (2019): “Precautionary Moratorium on New and Expanding Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” -- “In the United States, CAFOs produce an estimated 369 million tons of animal manure a year, approximately 13 times the sewage produced by the U.S. population”... “typically stored in open or covered pits or liquid lagoons”, “often at rates far exceeding the capacity of nearby farmland to absorb it” -- “ a public health and ecological hazard through the degradation of surface and groundwater resources”. ↑

3. Our World in Data (2021): “Drivers of Deforestation” -- “The expansion of pasture land to raise cattle was responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation. That’s 2.1 million hectares every year -- about half the size of the Netherlands” ↑

4. Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture ↑

5. Our World in Data (2019): “Land use” -- “If we combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use… Despite the vast amount of land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories, and 38% of its protein” ↑

6. Matthew Hayek, 2022: “The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture” -- “Since 1940, an estimated 50% of zoonotic disease emergence has been associated with agriculture” ↑

7. (a) Tiseo et al. (2020): “Global Trends in Antimicrobial Use in Food Animals from 2017 to 2030” -- As of 2017, “73% of all antimicrobials sold globally are used in animals raised for food”. (b) Hannah Ritch (2017), World Economic Forum: “Three-quarters of antibiotics are used on animals. Here's why that's a major problem” -- “Use of antibiotics for livestock greatly exceeds that of uses for humans: Although data collection on antibiotic use in some regions is poorly documented, it's estimated that global veterinary consumption of antibiotics in 2013 was around 131,000 tonnes. In relative terms, antibiotic use in livestock and humans is similar, averaging 118 mg/PCU (population-corrected unit, explained below) and 133 mg/kg, respectively. However, since total livestock biomass greatly exceeds that of human biomass, total antibiotic use for humans is estimated to be much lower -- around 40,000 tonnes in 2013. This means antibiotic use in livestock is likely to account for approximately 70-80 percent of total consumption.” ↑

8. The Lancet’s Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators (2022): “Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis” -- “We estimated that, in 2019, 1.27 million deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·911--1·71) were directly attributable to resistance” ↑

9. Jim O’Neill (2016): “Tackling Drug-Resistant Infections Globally: Final Report and Recommendations: -- “We estimate that by 2050, 10 million lives a year and a cumulative 100 trillion USD of economic output are at risk due to the rise of drug resistant infections” ↑

10. See the Wikipedia entry for battery cages, still the way the majority of eggs are farmed globally, however FarmKind’s recommended charities have spared hundreds of millions of chickens from these systems. In particular, see the heading ‘cage size’. ↑

11. See the Wikipedia entry for gestation crates, the standard practice that has only recently begun being phased out by some producers thanks to the advocacy of charities like those recommended by FarmKind ↑

12. Nannoni et al. (2014): “Tail Docking in Pigs: A Review on its Short- And Long-Term Consequences and Effectiveness in Preventing Tail Biting” -- “In spite of European legislation attempting to limit this practice, tail docking is nowadays the only preventive measure against tail biting which is widely adopted by farmers. Docking consists in amputating, usually without anaesthesia or analgesia, the distal part of the tail, in order to reduce its attractiveness and to sensitize it, increasing avoidance behaviour in the bitten pig. Tail docking results in both acute and chronic effects on pig welfare” ↑

13. (a) Dairy cows are separated from mothers within hours: Budzynska & Weary (2008): “Weaning distress in dairy calves: Effects of alternative weaning procedures” -- “Dairy calves are typically separated from the cow within hours of birth but continue to be fed milk artificially for several weeks.” (b) Weaning naturally occurs are 7-14 months: Whalin et al. (2021): “Understanding Behavioural Development of Calves in Natural Settings to Inform Calf Management” -- “Different from natural settings, where weaning from the mother is a gradual process (culminating when the calf is 7 to 14 mo old)… dairy calves are usually weaned abruptly, with milk feeding stopped by 9 wk of age”. [Note that while milk feeding lasts for 9 weeks, separation from the mother happens within hours, with milk fed artificially after this]. “Abrupt weaning may cause challenges such as depressed growth and increased distress behaviours such as walking and vocalizations, compared to calves that are gradually weaned”. ↑

14. (a) Sea lice being a common issue: Sea lice are common enough that the Scottish Government has a policy for their management on salmon farms.”Infection with L. salmonis”, a species of sea lice, “is one of the most important health issues for the Scottish salmon aquaculture industry”. (b) Sea lice infestations cause death: Knut Wiik Vollset (2019): “Parasite induced mortality is context dependent in Atlantic salmon: insights from an individual-based model” -- “The current Norwegian risk evaluation of sea lice on salmon uses a mortality rate based on lice per gram salmon smolt, which corresponds to a mortality of 0% if there are <2 data-preserve-html-node="true" lice per fish, 20% if 2--4 lice, 50% if 4--5 and 100% if >6 lice for a 20 gram salmon smolt” ↑

15. Cassidy et al (2013): “Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare” -- “In this study, we demonstrate that global calorie availability could be increased by as much as 70% (or 3.88 × 1015 calories) by shifting crops away from animal feed and biofuels to human consumption… which could feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2--3 billion people arriving through population growth)” ↑

16. Cassidy et al. (2013): “Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare” -- “36% of the calories from global crop yields being feed to farm animals and only 12% of those calories make it to human consumption” ↑