Factory farming is a broken system: torturing animals, destroying the planet and putting our lives at risk.

Despite this, it remains the dominant system for producing meat, dairy, and eggs. In the USA, 99% of the meat we eat is factory farmed;¹ while in the UK roughly 73 - 85% of farmed animals live in factory farms.²

In this series, we explore the many harms of factory farming and some of the ways that we can, together, make farming kinder to people, the planet and animals.

The impacts of factory farming on the environment are increasingly well-known, and we all agree that it causes animal suffering. But the story of the damage factory farming does to us directly is far less well known. In this first of three articles, we explore some of the ways factory farming puts our health at risk, increases global hunger and devastates the lives of its workers.

Health Risks

The cramped, unsanitary environments of factory farms are breeding grounds for pathogens that can leap from animals to humans, setting the stage for the next global pandemic. Since 1940, half of new diseases that transfer from animals to humans have been attributed to animal agriculture.³ History sends us a stark warning of the devastating potential of these conditions with outbreaks like H1N1 bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, SARS, Q-fever, Nipah virus all originating in animals.⁴ Even COVID has been linked to the use of animals for food (although the debate about its origins are ongoing).⁵ These diseases underline the delicate balance we have upset by prioritizing industrial efficiency over biological safety.

The threat of pandemics, however, is just one dimension of the public health crisis posed by factory farming. The perils extend to our dinner plates, with over a third of foodborne diseases (which cause 600 million illnesses and 420,000 deaths each year)⁶ linked to animal-source foods.⁷

Factory farming is also making it harder to fight back against disease. Roughly three-quarters of the world's antibiotics are administered to livestock in an attempt to combat the filthy conditions in which those animals are kept⁸. This practice means that factory farming is one of the main causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which claim 1.27 million lives annually⁹ and threaten to become the leading cause of death globally by 2050. ¹⁰

Factory farming is a public health time bomb. We must fix factory farming now, not just to prevent the next pandemic but to address the ongoing crises of foodborne illnesses and antibiotic resistance. The stakes have never been higher, and the cost of inaction is measured in human lives.

Global hunger

Almost no one thinks that the way we treat animals in factory farms is ok, but it is often justified as necessary to produce enough affordable food for us all. It’s not.

Factory farming contributes to global hunger through its inefficient use of crops. It’s a cruel irony that in a world where millions go hungry, we divert a third of global crop calories to feed livestock, yet all this only produces 12% of the calories we eat.¹¹ This means that 30% of global crop calories are lost by feeding them to animals instead of directly to people. Meanwhile, just 18% of our protein comes from meat and 43% from all animal sources combined, including wild-caught fish.¹²

Why do we feed so many crops to farmed animals? Most factory-farmed animals are not raised on grazing land, but instead inside giant windowless barns. This means all their food has to be brought in from somewhere else and, to make sure they grow as fast as possible so they can be slaughtered quickly, producers feed factory-farmed animals on high protein crops like soy.

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 food.¹³

Impact on Workers

Imagine stepping into a workplace where injury is not just a possibility but an expectation. In the United States, meat and poultry processing is notoriously one of the most dangerous factory jobs, with injury rates more than twice the national average. ¹⁴ Even the air they breathe is dangerous, full of chemicals that cause serious long-term health effects.¹⁵

Beyond the physical dangers, the repetitive, brutal nature of the work takes a heavy toll on the workers’ mental health. They are subjected to traumatic experiences that psychologists suggest lead to PTSD and other severe mental health disorders¹⁶. This is not just a job; it’s a relentless assault on both body and mind, stripping away the mental well-being of those who endure it.

Most of us, thankfully, can choose not to watch traumatic slaughterhouse footage or the undercover footage activists collect from inside factory farms. But for these workers, this is their daily reality and they have no choice but to keep on looking these horrors full in the face, day after day. This is what happens when an industry prioritizes profits over human and animal health and dignity.

To make matters worse for factory-farm operators enduring horrific conditions in an effort to make a living, many of them end up financially ruined due to predatory contracts negotiated by massive agriculture companies. For example, in the US chicken industry, operators often take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to start a factory-farm. Then, chicken companies impose unexpected costs and force owners to absorb losses from high mortality rates among chickens, leaving many trapped in a cycle of increasing debt.¹⁷

Impact on Local Communities

It's not just farm workers that bear the burden of factory farming – communities living near these facilities are harmed, as waste products, chemical pollution and foul smells from factory farms spill over into the surrounding environment. In fact the harms to local communities are so great that the American Public Health Association has twice called for a moratorium on new factory farms.¹⁸ They point to the respiratory problems and elevated blood pressure caused by the toxic pollution.

But it’s not just about health. The manure smell of factory farms is so intense that many local communities have to stay indoors with their windows closed at all times. The inability to socialize and enjoy the outdoors has been linked with unusually high rates of depression and anxiety.¹⁹ What’s more, living near factory farms has even been linked with socio-economic decline.²⁰ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the communities who bear these burdens are disproportionately poor and marginalized, meaning our food system is not just unkind but unjust as well.²¹

Farming is broken, let’s fix it

While reading about the damage that factory farming continues to do can fill us with a desire to see a different world; it can feel frustratingly like there is nothing we can do. How can things ever be different?

Firstly, we should remember that factory farming hasn’t been around forever. It was only invented in the 1960s. If we invented it, we can also invent new, better, healthier and more humane ways to make food. In fact, that’s already happening.

Many farmers are experimenting with finding ways to make less intensive farming practices possible. By raising animals outdoors on pasture land, we can dramatically reduce the need for antibiotic use.²²

These less intensive approaches do use a lot of space, so they need to be paired with some people in the Western world also reducing the amount of meat that they eat. There is some evidence that this is already happening, with meat eating dropping in the EU, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.²³ If people ate the equivalent of one burger per day on average, this would be enough of a reduction to reduce the use of antibiotics for animal farming by two-thirds.²⁴

We’re also inventing new alternative ways to produce tasty proteins and even actual meat without animal agriculture. Entrepreneurs and inventors are pioneering ways to grow meat and make milk in fermentation tanks similar to the way beer is made. These new products allow us to eat the same meat and dairy products without factory farming and using a fraction of the resources.

Want to get involved?

We can all be involved in helping speed up the change to a kinder way of farming.

The charities we support are at the forefront of all these efforts: pressuring companies to end the cruelest practices of factory farming, helping make plant-based meals more available and supporting the development of alternative proteins.

By supporting these charities with even a small amount of your donations, you can be an important part of the movement to fix factory farming and make our food kinder.