BE PART OF THE CHANGE TO TREATMENT OF ANIMALS

What Is Factory Farming?
Factory farming refers to the conditions in which animals are raised year-round, in huge numbers, for the meat industry. On intensive animal farms, people raise pigs, chickens, cows, and other young animals in buildings or pens known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The animals are bred to grow quickly and are fed monocropped foods. They are then slaughtered and “processed” into kitchen-ready foods on a mechanized assembly line, that dictates the pace of workers’ labor.
Inhumane Treatment
By supporting the passage and enforcement of food libel and ag-gag laws, companies take advantage of their economic power and restrict the freedom of speech of consumers, farmers, and farm workers alike. Freedom of expression is considered a human right.

Chickens Are Debeaked
A beak functions like a hand does to humans and contains nerves. When a chicken’s beak is partially amputated, researchers observe behaviors indicating pain and depression for the animal. The unnatural and stressful conditions of living in a warehouse where one can hardly move lead chickens to peck at themselves and each other. In countries where it is legal to do so, food companies will typically remove part of the beak of egg-laying chickens to prevent this type of injurious behavior.

Cows and Pigs Are Tail Docked
Cows use their tails to help keep flies at bay. It is common and legal in most of the U.S. to amputate the tails of cows without anesthesia. Animal welfare advocates, including veterinarians, strongly oppose tail docking in cows and explain that it has not been shown to provide the proposed benefits. Docking cows’ tails is said to cause pain and discomfort, even when they do receive anesthesia and painkillers.

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Major food companies dominate the supply chain from the birth of a farmed animal until it reaches the shelves, freezers, and refrigerators of supermarkets, cafeterias, and restaurants. These companies can control the rate and methods of production across large swaths of the markets in chicken, beef, pork, and other animal products. Their packaging at the store is labeled with euphemisms that belie a traumatizing reality evident to anyone who learns about how meat is made. If you want to learn more about the conditions of meat production yourself, then this article is for you.

What Is Factory Farming?
Factory farming refers to the conditions in which animals are raised year-round, in huge numbers, for the meat industry. On intensive animal farms, people raise pigs, chickens, cows, and other young animals in buildings or pens known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The animals are bred to grow quickly and are fed monocropped foods. They are then slaughtered and “processed” into kitchen-ready foods on a mechanized assembly line, that dictates the pace of workers’ labor.

The term factory farming typically denotes a critique of food companies that have historically prioritized maintaining their power and profits while contributing to harm in their communities: to individual farmers and ranchers, farmworkers, local economies, and public health.

Because the meat industry is so vertically integrated—meaning that the same company owns much of the process from the birth of an animal until it reaches your dinner plate—factory farming can also be short-hand for meat production and animal agriculture specifically. In fact, slaughterhouse workers are often referred to as factory farm workers in online media.

People usually think of land animals when the term is used, but fish are also raised using factory farming methods.

When Did Factory Farming Start?
The roots of factory farming lie in the period of industrialization and urbanization in the United States from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th. Many individuals and groups began to compete for the profits that were available in creating and selling affordable food in reliably large volumes, across a national distribution network.

Before this, however, white settler-colonists, supported by prevalent white supremacist thinking, had long pursued the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the dispossession of their lands across the Americas, including the present-day U.S. The beginnings of modern animal agriculture via the breeding of domesticated animals in the U.S. are tied up with the way colonists asserted this ownership of land alongside their rights to enslave people and farmed animals.

American cattle ranchers in the beef industry in the mid- to late-19th century were actively entangled with the U.S. military’s continuing project of colonization and theft of American Indian land, according to Joshua Specht’s book, “The Meat Republic”. As Specht explains, the beef industry was pioneering in industrial animal agriculture: cattle farms were standardized, railroads and refrigerated cars shipped cattle to big cities, and a handful of meatpacking companies in Chicago were the first to use the assembly line year-round to slaughter animals, then process meat into food for distribution throughout the nation.


Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
In the early to mid-20th century, the chicken industry began raising chickens on a new and larger scale. The chicken industry—and later, much of the pork industry, and to a lesser extent, the beef industry—established itself by contracting with farmers who would only raise the animals, integrating these farmers into the rest of their national supply chains and leading to industry consolidation in the hands of a few major companies.

Other growth factors for the chicken industry, as Monica Gisolfi details in the book “The Takeover,” included technological elements like electrification and growing access to cheap chicken feed, reinforced by active state support in the form of government subsidies such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and programs and research to support industry needs such as vitamin-fortified foods. The whole system also relied on the exploitation of sharecroppers and tenant farmers by landowners.

What Happens in Factory Farming?
To food companies, animals are something to sell for profit, rather than living beings that can feel pain and joy. Below are some examples of common practices in the raising of animals for meat that have received widespread criticism.

Inhumane Treatment
By supporting the passage and enforcement of food libel and ag-gag laws, companies take advantage of their economic power and restrict the freedom of speech of consumers, farmers, and farm workers alike. Freedom of expression is considered a human right.

Chickens Are Debeaked
A beak functions like a hand does to humans and contains nerves. When a chicken’s beak is partially amputated, researchers observe behaviors indicating pain and depression for the animal. The unnatural and stressful conditions of living in a warehouse where one can hardly move lead chickens to peck at themselves and each other. In countries where it is legal to do so, food companies will typically remove part of the beak of egg-laying chickens to prevent this type of injurious behavior.

Cows and Pigs Are Tail Docked
Cows use their tails to help keep flies at bay. It is common and legal in most of the U.S. to amputate the tails of cows without anesthesia. Animal welfare advocates, including veterinarians, strongly oppose tail docking in cows and explain that it has not been shown to provide the proposed benefits. Docking cows’ tails is said to cause pain and discomfort, even when they do receive anesthesia and painkillers.

dairy farmer
Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
Cruel Confinement
Animals are separated from their mothers and raised in tight quarters, with very little or no room to move, unable to escape their own feces and waste.

Genetic Manipulation
Food companies develop breeds of faster-growing animals with traits that mean more meat from each carcass, maximizing profits: chickens with unusually large breasts, stockier pigs with leaner meat. The result has been chickens who are unable to walk, and pigs that are nervous and highly excitable, with weak hearts.

Forced Molting
Forced molting is still common practice in the factory farming industry. Molting is a natural behavior for chickens that occurs when the chickens shed their old feathers and growing new ones. They also stop producing eggs. Forced molting happens when producers starve the chickens for one to two weeks to ensure that all of the hens stop producing eggs at the same time. After the forced molting, hens lay eggs faster.

Unhealthy Levels of Ammonia
The smell of ammonia, also known as NH3, is a common feature of factory farms. Ammonia is a gas that accumulates with the feces and urine that are allowed to collect beneath animals living in confined spaces. It is also used as a fertilizer, spread by farmworkers.


Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
Ammonia can irritate the eyes of chickens, cause nasal and lung distress in pigs, cows, and sheep, and can be toxic when ingested by animals in fertilizer or contaminated feed and water. But its effects aren’t limited to animals. Ammonia exposure from factory farming often damages the lungs, eyes, and skin of farmworkers and nearby residents, and leads to respiratory problems like asthma. Of the 17,900 human deaths per year from air pollution in the U.S., ammonia from factory farming is likely responsible for 12,400 of them, making it one of the deadliest air pollutants in America, per the Washington Post.

Why Is Factory Farming Bad?
Critics of factory farming tend to focus on the quality of life of farmed animals, the health of the earth, and the well-being of ordinary people—values that make it hard to accept factory farming methods. Below are some ways in which meat production companies violate these values.

Animal Welfare
Young animals are taken from their parents, raised in tightly packed spaces, and are denied access to fresh air and the outdoors. For food companies who pay farmers for animals by weight, an animal’s health is less important than whether they are simply alive, at which point they can be used for meat and sold at a profit. As a result, the animals live in unsanitary conditions, pain, loneliness, and poor health. One consequence of poultry breeding is that birds grew too fast for their legs and bodies to support them.

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Environmental Impact
Raising animals for meat directly pollutes the air and water, and degrades land. The environmental impact of companies invested in animal agriculture is most directly experienced by the economically exploited and racially minoritized communities that live near factory farms. Below are some examples of how food companies harm the environment.

Air Pollution
Climate change advocates are increasingly aware that meat production is responsible for about one-fifth to 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Water Pollution
Livestock waste and the use of pesticides and fertilizers to produce animal feed contaminate waterways and groundwater. Run-off from factory farming contributes to dead zones in the ocean.
The same unsafe living conditions of chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals in farms also threaten the health of workers who are charged with handling the animals. Breathing in the dust and gases from factory farming leads to respiratory problems, something most workers at pig farms experience, per the Food Empowerment Project. Animal farm workers who are chronically exposed to hydrogen sulfide, a gas that arises from liquid manure, can experience skin and eye irritation. The amount of liquid manure itself can be a hazard. Workers have died from asphyxiation as a result of the release of hydrogen sulfide.

Workplace hazards in animal agriculture also include needle pricks, animal-to-human infections, extremely cold or hot weather, and physical injuries.