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

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.

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.

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.

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.