Four reasons NOT to donate to fix factory farming

9 minute read — Published 1st July 2024

Donate to farmed animals, in this economy?

We get it. There are a million demands on your money. With so many important causes in the world, you might be skeptical about donating to our recommended charities tackling factory farming.

Before you decide to donate or not, let's explore some of the hesitations you might be having.

1. Is factory farming a necessary evil?

Very few people want to argue that there is nothing wrong with factory farming. Even the philosopher Roger Scruton, who argues that we have a moral duty to eat meat, thinks that the way we treat animals in factory farms is wrong.

But, maybe we need factory farming? How else are we going to feed our growing global population a healthy and protein-rich diet?

In fact, factory farming makes feeding the world harder. It is an extremely inefficient way to produce food because it relies on feeding animals on crops that have to be grown, harvested, and transported to the windowless warehouses where the animals are kept.

We divert a third of global crop calories to feed livestock, yet all this only produces 12% of the calories we eat.¹ This means that 30% of global crop calories are lost by feeding them to animals instead of directly to people.² Factory farming is also a bad way to source our protein as just 18% of our protein comes from meat and 43% from all animal sources combined, including wild-caught fish.³

Far from helping feed the world, completely eliminating factory farming would allow us to feed 4 billion more people without using any more land to grow food.⁴

2. Can we actually make a difference?

Even if we don't need factory farming, maybe there is nothing we can really do to stop it?

Firstly, let's be clear. Factory farming is quite new. The first factory farms for pigs were started in the 1920s, while chickens weren't factory-farmed until the 1960s.⁵

If we can invent factory farms, we can invent better ways to make food too. In fact, we already have: less intensive and environmentally damaging animal husbandry; plant-based proteins and cultivated meat, in combination, provide a viable alternative that is better for people, the planet, and animals.

Image courtesy of Andrew Skowron / We Animals Media

By donating to organizations that are promoting research into new food systems and making alternatives to factory-farmed meat more available, we can help speed up the transition to a kinder food system.

Secondly, there are plenty of changes that we can demand companies put in place to end the cruelest practices.

Battery-caged chickens are kept for their entire lives, 24/7 in a space about the size of an iPad, unable to even open their wings. Mother pigs are confined to sow stalls so small they can't turn around to look after their piglets. The most common slaughter method is CO2 gassing, which has been comprehensively demonstrated to cause extremely painful deaths for pigs.

The good news is that public campaigns pushing companies to boycott suppliers using these cruelest practices have been very successful. Charities like The Humane League have already secured commitments from some of the biggest companies like Walmart, KFC, and Unilever.

Donating to support these organizations can help push more companies to make these important changes and ensure that companies that have already made these commitments don't go back on their word.

3. Shouldn’t we help people first?

Of course, human suffering matters, and we should do everything we can to end it.

But factory farming doesn't just torture animals, it is destroying our planet and endangering our health too.

Animal agriculture contributes at least 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector.⁶

But it is also putting our health at risk. Three-quarters of the world's antibiotics are given to livestock in an attempt to combat the filthy conditions in which those animals are kept.⁷ Factory farming is one of the main causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which claim 1.27 million lives annually and threaten to become the leading cause of death globally by 2050.⁸

Meanwhile, factory farms are a ticking time bomb for the next COVID-style pandemic,⁹ which itself is widely believed to have come from livestock.

Fixing factory farming doesn't just make animals' lives better. It is the best way to tackle these risks to our health and environment. This makes donating to animal welfare charities one of the most holistic ways to improve the world overall.

4. Factory farming feels distant

For most of us, the direct abuse and torture of animals is kept out of sight. But, once you know, you realize that we're surrounded by the evidence of factory farming all the time.

99% of meat eaten in America comes from factory farms.¹⁰ There are 24,000 of these so-called farms in the USA, housing 1.7 billion animals at a time.¹¹ In fact, if all the factory farms in the country were evenly spread out, you'd never be more than 12 miles away from one.¹²

This is a problem all around the world. While the USA has the most factory farming, Europe is not far behind, and the greatest growth in factory farming currently is in East Asia.

Every time you walk into a grocery store and walk down the meat aisle, go to a restaurant for a steak, or grab a take-out burger, you come into contact with factory farming. When we think about it, it's easy to see how factory farming is a daily tragedy for our societies and in our daily lives.

Factory farming is broken: Let’s fix it

Factory farming tortures animals, destroys the planet, and puts our health at risk. But a different, kinder kind of farming is possible. We can all be part of making that change by finding and funding the most effective organizations leading the shift in our food system—we can be part of making profound change.

FarmKind is designed to help you do just that. We recommend charities that will make the most of your dollar and ensure that your gifts are used to do the most good possible. See how much of a difference your donation could make by clicking the button below.

Footnotes

1. 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” [↑] 2. With 88% of calories of from the 36% crops fed to animals being wasted, that’s 88% x 36% = 31.7% of total crop calories wasted. [↑] 3. Henchion et al. (2017): “Future Protein Supply and Demand: Strategies and Factors Influencing a Sustainable Equilibrium” – “Currently vegetal sources of protein dominate protein supply globally (57%), with meat (18%), dairy (10%), fish and shellfish (6%) and other animal products (9%) making up the remainder” [↑] 4. 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 × 10^15 calories) by shifting crops away from animal feed and biofuels to human consumption.” [↑] 5. Chris McGreal (2019): "How America’s food giants swallowed the family farms" – “By one calculation, the US has around 250,000 factory farms of one kind or another. They have their roots in the 1930s, with the mechanisation of pig slaughterhouses. By the 1950s, chickens were routinely packed into huge sheds, in appalling conditions.” [↑] 6. (a) Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2013): “Tackling climate change through livestock” – “Representing 14.5 percent of human-induced GHG emissions, the livestock sector plays an important role in climate change”
(b) 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). [↑] 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. (a) Roughly half of new diseases come from animals: Matthew Hayek, 2022: “The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture” – “Since 1940, an estimated 50% of zoonotic disease emergence has been associated with agriculture”.
(b) Intensive animal farming in particular causes many pandemics: Morse et al. 2012: “Prediction and prevention of the next pandemic zoonosis” – “Most pandemics—eg, HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, pandemic influenza—originate in animals”; “The emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia in 1997”, transmitted from bats to "intensively managed” pigs and then to humans. | World Health Organization, 2020 – “Zoonotic pathogens can spread to humans through any contact point with domestic, agricultural or wild animals. Markets selling the meat or by-products of wild animals are particularly high risk” [↑] 10. Our World in Data (2023): “How many animals are factory-farmed” – “Nearly all livestock animals in the US are factory-farmed”, “...the Sentience Institute has used publicly available data – in this case, published by the USDA Census of Agriculture (number of animals per farm) and Environment Protection Agency (CAFO definitions).. It estimates that 99% of livestock in the US were factory-farmed in 2017”. [↑] 11. Food and Water Watch (2024): “New USDA Data Shows Nearly 50% Increase In U.S. Factory Farmed Animals In 20 Years” – “There are currently 1.7 billion animals living on U.S. factory farms; an increase of 6% since 2017, 47% more than roughly twenty years ago in 2002.” “The U.S. is home to 24 thousand factory farms” [↑] 12. Average distance between factory farms = √(Total land area / Number of factory farms) = √(3.12 million square miles / 24,000) = √(130 square miles per factory farm) = 11.4 miles [↑]