Factory Farming's devastating impact: Animal suffering, climate and health crisis

Factory farming – the grain-feeding of confined animals – is the single biggest cause of animal suffering on the planet.

The sheer scale of agriculture with 98 billion animals being produced worldwide, and rising every year, is having a devastating impact on animal welfare and is the big reason why humanity is now facing a climate, nature, and health emergency.

Factory Farming’s Impact on Animal Welfare

Billions of chickens, pigs, cows and fish are confined in sheds, cages, feedlots, or pens where they suffer in pain, unable to express their natural behaviours like running, nesting, and foraging, until transported – often in distress – to slaughter.

Despite improved welfare standards in some countries, the number of animals, particularly pigs and chickens, experiencing extreme suffering on factory farms is rising as the world’s consumption of meat grows.

In standard production systems:

• Meat (broiler) chickens are bred to grow so unnaturally large and fast that it often causes a range of health issues (lameness, heart defects, organ failure, muscle disease, foot lesions, compromised immune systems) before their slaughter at just six weeks old.
• Laying hens are kept in cages that severely restrict natural behaviours such as exercise, dustbathing, perching and wing-flapping. Male chicks of the laying hen strain are seen as useless and so are gassed or minced alive when just a day old.
• Pigs are kept in cramped fattening pens, sows in narrow crates for weeks or months at a time where they can’t even turn around.
• Cows are kept in huge mega-dairies or often housed permanently indoors with no natural grazing, bred to produce unnatural volumes of milk and worked so hard that they are worn out and slaughtered at a fraction of their natural lifespan.
• Across Europe, over 100 million rabbits, are kept in crowded and bare wire cages, each with no more space than a single sheet of typing paper.
• Fish are farmed in over-crowded pens, fed on wild-caught fish or soya; and killed inhumanely.

These sentient beings are deprived of their most basic behaviours – caged and confined in barren environments with no stimulation or comforts - which leads to enforced mutilations such as tail docking in pigs or beak trimming in hens to prevent the animals from harming each other simply through frustration and poor living conditions.

We should be developing systems that allow animals the joy of life and a humane end, not just an absence of suffering.

Read more about the impact of factory farming on animal welfare.

Factory Farming’s Impact on Pollution, Deforestation and Climate Change

Industrial animal agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss, pollution, soil degradation, wildlife declines, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.

• Biodiversity loss – There has been a 68% decline in the average size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in just over 50 years as rainforests, savannah and pasture are destroyed.
• Pollution – Factory farming can create a range of pollution problems, fragmenting and even destroying natural habitats. Waste from factory farms can leak into water courses and, in the worst cases, leaving vast "dead zones", where few species can survive. Some of the nitrogen will also become gaseous, turning into ammonia, which creates problems such as water acidification and ozone layer depletion.
• Soil degradation – Industrial agriculture plays a big part in the decline of soils. The United Nations warns that, if we continue as we are, then the world’s soils could cease to be productive in just sixty years’ time.
• Wildlife declines – In the last 50 years since the widespread adoption of factory farming, the world has lost more than two-thirds of its wildlife. Wildlife habitats such as forests and savannahs are being destroyed to grow soy and palm oil to feed industrially farmed animals and to provide pasture for cattle - this is driving many species towards extinction. Feed for industrial farms is grown in vast monocultures, usually doused in artificial fertilisers and chemical pesticides. Many trees, bushes and hedges and wildflowers are removed, along with the seeds and insects relied upon by birds, bees, bats, and other wildlife for survival.
• Deforestation – As demand for factory farmed meat has grown, great swathes of rainforest in the Amazon and around the world have been devastated; fragile forests, grasslands and savannah cleared for more farmland to grow animal feed like soya.
• GHG emissions: livestock rearing is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the exhaust fumes from all the world’s trains, planes and cars put together. Livestock production is already responsible for 14.5% of global anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. Under a business-as-usual model of food production, in which meat and dairy consumption rises in line with a growing global population and rising GDPs, the agriculture sector alone would emit enough greenhouse gasses to take up the entire two degrees Celsius emissions budget by 2050.
• Food Waste – The biggest single waste of food is feeding human-edible crops to industrially farmed livestock who convert them inefficiently into meat, milk and eggs, while almost a fifth of the world’s total catch of wild fish is processed into fishmeal and fish oil, largely used to feed farmed fish. In this way, enough food to feed four billion people (half of humanity today) is wasted.

Read more about the impact of factory farming on the planet.

Factory Farming’s Impact on Health: Obesity, Antibiotic Resistance and Pandemics

Factory farming undermines our health, producing cheap, low-quality meat, milk and eggs and threatening people’s access to a healthy diet.

Two billion men, women and children are overweight or obese, with poor diets being responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor. The overconsumption of meat, dairy and eggs in developed regions exceeds both dietary guidelines and new planetary diet guidelines. 

Obesity costs the NHS around £6.5 billion a year and is the second biggest preventable cause of cancer, according to the Department of Health and Social Care. Only drastic changes to our food system and what we eat can improve this.

Nearly three-quarters of the world’s antibiotics are fed to farmed animals, primarily to ward off diseases inevitable in poor farm conditions. If we don’t do things differently, then we face a post-antibiotic era for humans and animals alike, where currently treatable diseases will once again kill.

Factory farming has had a big impact on the nutritional quality of our food; compared to pasture-fed beef or free-range chicken, the intensively farmed equivalent can have up to twice the saturated fat.

Factory farming is also a major pandemic risk. The caged, crammed, and confined conditions of factory farms provide the ideal breeding ground for new and more deadly strains of virus, heightening the threat of future pandemics. Swine flu and highly pathogenic Avian flu being but two examples.

Read more about the impact of factory farming on people.

Beyond Factory Farming: A Sustainable Food System for a Healthy Planet

We cannot continue increasing the number of animals raised in industrial systems if we want to have a sustainable food system and a healthy planet.

We have to produce food differently, eat much less meat, and farm fewer animals. Animals should be farmed in harmony with the environment, in nature-friendly, regenerative systems that restore soil health and biodiversity, whilst conserving precious resources like water and allowing animals to experience the joy of life.

We can end factory farming by:

• Changing farm systems and practices that cause pain and suffering;
• Changing diets towards eating more plants, less and better meat; and
• Changing the food system to one more in balance with nature

We work with all sectors of the food industry and offer a range of tools and services to help drive farm animal welfare improvements and support the move towards more sustainable and regenerative food systems. Find out how you can transform your food business.