Intensive animal farming
Based on Wikipedia: Intensive animal farming
Imagine a chicken that grows from hatchling to market weight in six weeks instead of eighteen. Imagine a single farm worker feeding ninety people instead of eleven. Imagine eggs shifting from luxury food to everyday staple, their price falling so dramatically that farmers had to triple their flock sizes just to stay afloat.
This is factory farming—or as it's more formally known, intensive animal farming. It's the system that produces most of the meat, milk, and eggs consumed in developed nations today. And it represents one of the most profound transformations in how humans feed themselves, all compressed into roughly seventy years.
The Revolution in a Cage
The story begins with an unlikely hero: vitamin D.
Before the 1920s, raising chickens was a seasonal affair. During winter months, birds deprived of sunlight simply didn't thrive. Egg production plummeted. Incubation failed. Meat production became nearly impossible. Poultry remained expensive and intermittent—more of a springtime luxury than a dietary staple.
Then scientists discovered that vitamin D could be synthesized and added to chicken feed. Suddenly, chickens could be kept indoors year-round. Production costs collapsed. What had been a seasonal proposition became an industrial operation.
But that was just the beginning. The discovery of antibiotics and vaccines in the mid-twentieth century made it possible to raise livestock in much larger numbers by controlling disease. Synthetic pesticides developed during World War Two found peacetime use in agriculture. Shipping networks expanded, making long-distance distribution feasible. Scientific breeding programs produced chickens that grew faster and laid more eggs.
By the 1950s, the transformation was complete. Chickens that once took eighteen weeks to reach market weight now needed only six. Hens that laid eighty-three eggs per year in 1900 were laying over three hundred by 2000.
How the System Works
The core principle of intensive animal farming is straightforward: maximize output while minimizing cost. To achieve this, livestock are kept at high densities in climate-controlled facilities.
Take egg production. Modern laying hens live in large warehouse-like structures holding tens of thousands of birds—sometimes over a hundred thousand. They're exposed to artificial light cycles designed to stimulate year-round egg production. The environmental parameters are carefully controlled: temperature, humidity, ventilation, all optimized for productivity.
In the 1930s, fifteen hundred hens provided full-time work for an American farm family. By the 1990s, a single facility might house thirty thousand birds. Today, the standard commercial operation runs closer to a hundred and twenty-five thousand.
The economics are brutal. In the late 1950s, egg prices fell so dramatically that farmers tripled their flock sizes—cramming three hens into cages designed for one, or converting single-deck roosting houses to triple-deckers. Prices fell further still. Large numbers of egg farmers simply left the business.
For consumers, this meant poultry and eggs lost their status as luxury foods. For the chickens themselves, it meant a new kind of existence: efficient, confined, and industrial.
The Pig Farm Warehouse
Intensive pig farming—called piggeries or hog lots—follows similar principles but with different challenges.
Pigs lack sweat glands. They cannot cool themselves through perspiration. In nature, they wallow in mud to regulate temperature. They have limited tolerance for heat stress, which can kill them. So intensive piggeries must control temperature through mechanical ventilation or drip water systems.
Pregnant sows are often confined in gestation crates—metal stalls barely larger than their bodies, preventing them from turning around. They give birth in farrowing crates, similarly restrictive enclosures designed to prevent the sow from accidentally crushing her piglets.
These stalls reduce production costs but raise obvious welfare concerns. Some countries like the United Kingdom, and some U.S. states like Florida and Arizona, have banned them. But many of the world's largest pig producers, including the United States and Canada, still use them widely.
Grower pigs—those being raised for meat—typically live in group housing or straw-lined sheds. The indoor system allows farmers to monitor each pig's condition, ensuring minimum fatalities and maximum productivity. Feed can be individually portioned. Medications can be administered through the food supply. Waste can be easily collected and managed, often through lagoon systems.
Piglets receive a battery of treatments shortly after birth: castration, tail docking to reduce tail biting, teeth clipping to prevent injury to the sow's nipples and reduce later tusk growth, ears notched for identification. These procedures are usually performed without painkillers. Weak runts may be killed immediately.
The smell remains a persistent problem, difficult to manage even with modern waste systems.
The Numbers Behind the Transformation
The scale of this transformation is staggering. Agricultural production across the world doubled four times between 1820 and 1975. The global human population grew from one billion in 1800 to six and a half billion by 2002.
Yet the number of people involved in farming dropped precipitously. In 1930, twenty-four percent of the American population worked in agriculture. By 2002, that figure had fallen to one and a half percent. In 1940, each farm worker supplied eleven consumers. By 2002, each worker supplied ninety.
The concentration of the industry is even more striking. In 1967, America had one million pig farms. By 2002, there were only a hundred and fourteen thousand. In 1992, twenty-eight percent of American pigs were raised on farms selling more than five thousand pigs per year. By 2022, that figure had reached ninety-four and a half percent.
For chickens, the shift occurred even more dramatically. Today, just four companies slaughter and process eighty-one percent of cows, seventy-three percent of sheep, fifty-seven percent of pigs, and fifty percent of chickens in the United States.
The Global Spread
Factory farming began in Britain in 1947, when a new Agriculture Act granted subsidies to encourage greater output and reduce reliance on imported meat. The United States, United Kingdom, and other industrialized nations began intensive farming of beef, dairy cattle, and pigs in 1966.
From this American and Western European heartland, the system spread globally. In 1990, intensive animal farming accounted for thirty percent of world meat production. By 2005, that figure had reached forty percent.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, by the early 2000s, industrial production represented seven percent of global beef and veal, less than one percent of sheep and goat meat, forty-two percent of pork, and sixty-seven percent of poultry meat.
The system continues to expand, replacing traditional stock rearing practices in an increasing number of countries. Major concentrations exist in Brazil, the United States, China, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union.
The Contract Grower Trap
Small farmers often become absorbed into factory farm operations as contract growers. This is particularly common in poultry production.
The arrangement seems straightforward: the company provides the chicks and feed specifications, the farmer provides the facilities and labor, and everyone shares the profits. But the reality is more complicated.
Farmers must invest heavily in construction of specialized sheds to house the birds. They must buy required feed and drugs, often from the company itself. The profit margins are slim—when they exist at all. Half of all U.S. family farming operations lost money in 2007.
The meatpackers, through forward contracts and marketing agreements, are able to set the price of livestock long before the animals are ready for production. This gives them enormous leverage over farmers, who have already sunk capital into facilities and can't easily exit the business.
Many livestock producers would prefer to market their animals directly to consumers. But with limited U.S.D.A.-inspected slaughter facilities, livestock grown locally typically cannot be slaughtered and processed locally. The system funnels nearly everything through the large processors.
The Immigrant Workforce
In the United States, intensive animal operations—officially called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs—rely heavily on immigrant labor.
Research shows that many immigrant workers in CAFOs receive little or no job-specific training. Safety and health information about workplace hazards is often provided only in English, leaving workers with limited English proficiency significantly less likely to understand the risks they face.
As a result, many workers don't perceive their jobs as dangerous. This leads to inconsistent use of personal protective equipment and higher rates of workplace accidents and injuries. Immigrant workers are also less likely to report hazards or injuries, fearing retaliation or deportation.
The Controversies
Intensive animal farming raises a cascade of ethical concerns.
Animal welfare advocates point to the confinement, mutilations, stress-induced aggression, and breeding complications inherent in the system. Chickens bred to grow so fast their legs can't support their weight. Pigs confined in crates where they can't turn around. Cattle standing in feedlots ankle-deep in waste.
Environmentalists highlight the greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation driven by demand for animal feed, and eutrophication—excess nutrients from animal waste causing algae blooms that choke aquatic ecosystems. The system requires vast amounts of cropland to produce feed, cropland that could directly feed humans instead.
Public health experts warn about zoonotic diseases—infections that jump from animals to humans—and pandemic risks. They point to the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture, which contributes to antibiotic resistance, one of the most serious threats to modern medicine.
Critics argue that the animal agriculture industry actively supports disinformation campaigns and prevents policies to address climate change, protecting its business model at the expense of the planet.
The Paradox of Efficiency
Factory farming may not even benefit livestock producers as much as promised. It appears to contribute to overproduction, which drives prices down. When everyone can produce more for less, the market floods, and individual farmers make less money despite producing more animals.
The real winners are the large processors who control the slaughter and packing phase. With only a handful of companies dominating the market, they can dictate terms to farmers while keeping consumer prices low enough to maintain demand.
Regulatory barriers make it financially difficult for small slaughter plants to be built, maintained, or remain in business. This concentrates power further, making it nearly impossible for farmers to bypass the large processors.
The Transformation Complete
Look at what has changed in poultry alone. A century ago, the main sources of chicken meat were spring chickens—young birds raised seasonally—and stewing hens—old laying hens past their productive years. Both have been entirely supplanted by meat-type broiler chickens, bred specifically to grow fast and produce breast meat.
Male chicks from egg-laying breeds have no commercial value. Roughly fifty percent of all egg-type chickens—the males—are killed soon after hatching. The females lay eggs for one or two seasons, then they too are slaughtered, though their meat has little commercial value compared to broilers.
This is the logic of industrial efficiency applied to living creatures. Nothing is wasted, but nothing exists outside its economic function either.
What It All Means
Intensive animal farming represents a fundamental shift in humanity's relationship with the animals we eat. For thousands of years, livestock grazed on land unsuitable for crops, converting grass and waste into meat and milk. They were integrated into mixed farming systems, providing manure to fertilize fields.
Factory farming broke that integration. Animals became production units in industrial facilities, fed on grain that could feed humans directly, confined in conditions optimized for output rather than welfare, their waste accumulating in lagoons rather than enriching soil.
The system produces abundant, affordable animal products. It feeds billions of people. It requires far less human labor than traditional farming.
But it does so through a approach that treats animals as machines, concentrates power among a few large corporations, exploits vulnerable workers, and externalizes environmental costs onto the broader ecosystem.
Whether this trade-off is acceptable—whether the benefits justify the costs—remains one of the most contentious questions in modern agriculture. The answer shapes not just how we eat, but what kind of relationship we want to have with the living world that feeds us.