New Article: Factory Farming is a Blight
The practices of industrialized animal farming are aesthetically and morally revolting. These practices can be phased out.
This article by Liv Boeree was published at Palladium Magazine on November 1, 2025.
I had a quintessential British country-girl upbringing: my family rode horses, kept gundogs, and donned tweed to stalk gamebirds with shotguns. The entire local economy revolved around animals in some way, and every single person I knew, from ruddy-faced farmers to hardened huntsmen, cared about their well-being. There was even a local saying: animals eat first, humans second. Every creature under one’s domain deserved respect, even the ones you ate.
Of course, it’s not just the British who care for their animals; many nations have made great leaps in animal welfare over the years, especially for popular pet species. It wasn’t long ago that cat-burning was considered a fine form of public entertainment across Europe. Today the European Union has some of the best animal welfare laws on Earth. Even the rugged frontier of the United States has become so pet-friendly it’s hard to drive more than a block without seeing a dog groom-and-pamper service.
Despite this, I can confidently say there has never been a worse time in history to be a domesticated animal under the care of humans. The reason for this is modern factory farming. As of 2022, 98% of pigs, 99.9% of chickens and 75% of cows in the United States are kept, for a significant portion of their lives, in tightly confined and deeply unnatural conditions known as factory farms. These ratios are similar across other developed nations.
These industrial operations can vary in scale, but their key differentiator from conventional farming is their efficiency. A factory farm optimises for economic efficiency above all other values, which of course massively impacts the quality of life of their animals. A particularly egregious example of this is “gestation crating,” the practice of forcing female pigs to live in cages so short and narrow they cannot even turn around or comfortably lie down for months on end. Such confinement for a cat or a dog for more than a few minutes would be unthinkable to most of us, and yet the vast majority of pigs on Earth—a species more emotionally intelligent than a dog—live this way almost permanently.
Other species like chickens and turkeys fare no better. The average broiler hen lives its short life in such densely packed conditions that many are on death’s door through infection or injury by the time they are slaughtered. The roughly eight billion male chicks that are born and immediately thrown into a macerator to be literally crushed alive annually by the egg industry are arguably getting off easy.
Factory farming isn’t just bad for the animals. It’s also terrible for human health. Most farms infuse powerful antibiotics into feed to keep their animals alive long enough to reach adulthood. The U.S. pork industry currently uses about as many antibiotics as all U.S. hospitals combined, massively contributing to the mounting antibiotic resistance crisis. Many epidemiologists also expect factory farming to be the cause of the next pandemic. The living density and poor hygiene create perfect conditions for novel pathogens–indeed, a new H5N1 outbreak is currently plaguing many U.S. farms–in part because many farms are actively ignoring biosecurity advice to test their animals, lest it affect their margins. You are what you eat. It is highly unlikely that the terrible conditions of the animals we eat do not ultimately have an impact on us, the people eating them; we most likely just haven’t yet untangled exactly what the consequences are.
There is also evidence that synthetic hormones used by major U.S. producers to bolster milk and meat production can accumulate in humans, creating endocrine disruption and potentially elevated cancer risk in consumers. While the science remains hotly contested, this concern was sufficient for the EU to ban hormonal growth promoters in the 1980s. Curiously, the FDA continues to allow them, including the controversial bovine somatotropin (rBST), which is known to create higher levels of a secondary hormone insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), which is correlated with cancer growth across species. It may even be contributing to the fertility crisis: a 2014 study found significant inverse relationships between processed red meat intake and total sperm count in young men.
Lastly, there’s the environmental damage. Factory farms concentrate the waste of many animals far beyond what natural processes can handle, and unlike human sewage, which is treated with chemical and mechanical filtration, farm waste is usually raw when it is released back to the environment. To put the scale of this waste in context: one pig factory farm in Utah creates more waste than all of Salt Lake City, and there is overwhelming evidence of detrimental health effects on communities downstream of such facilities, especially in pork-heavy states like Iowa and North Carolina.
So given all these downsides, why are U.S. food producers leaning further into this practice? It’s not like it’s popular among the public: in a 2022 survey, 84% of Democrats said they would support a law in their state to ban farm animal confinement—as did 76% of Republicans. This mirrors my own observations: every post on factory farming I’ve seen go viral on X garners outrage from across the political spectrum. So this isn’t even a partisan issue.
What’s driving it are catastrophically misaligned political and financial incentives.
America used to be a place of small, independent farms. Forty years ago, there were over 35,000 hog farms in Iowa, housing some 12 million animals across them. Today, that number lies around 25 million, but the number of farms has collapsed to just 5,000. In other words, the industry has become many orders of magnitude more concentrated. A similar pattern has occurred in the beef and chicken industries too.
This isn’t that surprising given how most competitive industries play out over time, where the most efficient and ruthless businesses gradually consume or bankrupt smaller players. Animal agriculture is no different; any farmer who tries to optimise for the welfare of their animals and customers inevitably gets steamrolled by those who care only about efficiency. And sadly for the animals, efficiency is almost always inversely correlated to welfare.
Ideally, this is where government steps in. After all, its purpose is to protect unrepresented stakeholders like consumers, the environment, or other third parties from the worst excesses of corporate behaviour. Perversely, many federal regulations are actively making the problem worse because political favor in the U.S. can easily be bought by industry lobbies who use regulatory capture to exert control over their weaker competitors.
A particularly prescient example of this is the “EATS Act” also known as the “Save Our Bacon” and Food Security and Farm Protection Act”. Backed by Congresswoman Ashley Hinson and Senators Chuck Grassley and Roger Marshall, whose hog-farming industries in their home states of Iowa and Kansas are dominated by giant conglomerates like Tyson Foods and Chinese-owned Smithfield. The EATS Act, if it successfully passes this fall, would be an enormous win for the “Big Pork” lobby. Many states, including California and Massachusetts, voted to ban caged meat from their supermarket shelves long ago, but EATS would nullify their laws at a federal level, undoing much of the progress that has been made. Even more perversely, its supporters—including Trump’s new agriculture appointee Brooke Rollins—claim EATS “protects small family farmers,” despite it clearly favoring only the giant corporations, as small farmers rarely cage their animals.
Another example are the “Ag-Gag” laws, which were passed in several U.S. states in the early 2010s under the guise of “protecting farms from competition.” These laws made it illegal for anyone to take photographs or videos at agricultural facilities without the owner’s consent, or to gain access to agricultural facilities under false pretenses to document the conditions on the farms. While some of these laws have been overturned, again, states like Iowa have found loopholes to maintain them.
So what can be done? The traditional answers usually resort to veganism or strict personal policies of only buying from locally sourced, trusted ranchers. And while these approaches carry some merit, in practice they will not be sufficient to unpick such a complex and systemic web of corruption and lobbying. To end factory farming will require all three levers of change: governments, corporations, and technology.
The good news is that governments can be sufficiently pressured under the right circumstances; for example, Germany recently joined the UK and eleven U.S. states by banning the use of gestation-crates in their farms, and Slovenia has just banned all forms of caged farming.
They can also subsidize better alternatives when sufficiently motivated: Denmark recently invested over $200 million into promoting alternative proteins and higher-welfare pig farming, where hogs are given space to roam outside. Ideally, these could be funded through taxes on the worst offending corporations. But an easier path could be simply redirecting some fraction of the $850 billion annual global farm subsidies away from those corporations and towards those who seek better alternatives.
Food corporations can reinvent themselves too. Pressure campaigns from dedicated non-profits and consumer groups have successfully gained pledges from many retailers and fast food chains to transition away from caged meat and eggs. For example, McDonald’s announced that it had reached 100% cage-free eggs in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Costco has also nearly reached a similar goal, and German supermarkets have now established a norm of labelling the welfare standards of all meat they sell.
Lasting freedom from the blight of factory farming will likely come from technology itself. A few years ago, the idea of in-ovo sexing machines that could determine male from female eggs before they hatch was a pipe dream. Today it’s now standard in France and Germany, already sparing over 100 million chicks from the grinder.
Similarly, alternative proteins like cultivated meat, which are real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of on skeletons, are slowly approaching viability. Sadly, this technology is far from a guarantee given the many regulatory capture campaigns to prevent its arrival—for example, incumbents have already successfully lobbied Florida, Texas, and Alabama to ban cultivated meat from sale despite no market for it even existing yet—but with sufficient investment and support it could offer the most omni-win path out of factory farming for meat eaters, animals, and innovators alike.
Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” A world without factory farming is possible. Getting there will demand significant political will, but therein lies my hope; because in this age of political division, few issues are as uniformly despised as this. Perhaps, in the darkest of human creations, is a common enemy so abhorrent we can’t help but be united by it.
Liv Boeree is a science communicator and professional poker player. She hosts the Win-Win podcast. You can follow her at @Liv_Boeree.