intensive animal farming
- Also called:
- factory farming or concentrated animal feeding operation
- Related Topics:
- origins of agriculture
intensive animal farming, system of animal agriculture intended to maximize output while minimizing space requirements and resource expenditures. Animals commonly farmed in this method include fish, poultry, pigs, and cattle. Because of the compact animal housing setup involved, with the use of cages or stalls to accommodate thousands of animals, intensive animal farms are often called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or referred to as “factory farms,” the latter usually being used by critics with animal welfare concerns.
As many as 99 percent of the animals in food production in the United States and about 70 percent of the animals in the United Kingdom are raised using intensive animal farming practices. In the 21st century a number of other countries, including China, Brazil, and India, have increasingly adopted this method of animal farming.
Practices
Intensive animal farming operations are large-scale and have lower operating costs and higher profits because of the sheer quantity of animals they are able to house. Such farms are characterized by the presence of a large number of animals of a single species that are confined in a warehouse, barn, or open-air feedlot. Most factory farms do not see the animals through from birth to death; rather, they specialize in only one stage of livestock or poultry production (e.g., breeding sows, hatching chicks, finishing hogs for slaughter, producing cows’ milk, or finishing beef cattle). Food is brought to the animals; they do not graze or forage, and many do not have access to the outdoors. Given their confinement, animals generally eat, sleep, and expel waste in the same space. The exact number of animals required for an operation to qualify as an intensive animal farming enterprise varies among countries, but it is generally considered 1,000–2,000 individual animals for larger livestock (which includes sheep, cattle, and pigs) and as many as 40,000–100,000 or more individual animals for a poultry operation. The determination is often made based on the total weight of the animals.
Intensive animal farming often relies on automation and usually employs mechanization, such as automatic waterers and feeders. Employees can use computers to control these and to monitor the animals remotely by video, making in-person visits by employees less frequent. For most animals, feeding is a highly perfected science that ensures a maximum intake of energy for growth and fat production. Indeed, extensive nutritional research and application, highly improved breeding stock, comprehensive management, and scientific disease control underlie intensive animal farming and ensure the uniform high quality of meat, eggs, and milk produced using these methods.
Intensive animal farming keeps the cost-per-animal price low, which results in more profit for the business and savings that can be passed to consumers via lower prices in stores. This also ensures an uninterrupted supply of products for the food chain, as the harvest of animals or animal rearing is not as seasonally dependent as it generally still is on small farms (in traditional animal agriculture, spring is usually targeted for reproduction because the grasses and pasture are more nutrient-dense and the temperatures are mild for young offspring).
History
Intensive animal farming is a fairly modern development, and it started in the United States. The scale of animal husbandry grew rapidly in the first decades of the 1900s in order to keep up with the exponentially increasing demands that followed technological inventions in refrigeration and transportation. The state of industrial animal slaughterhouses was famously chronicled in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). The first mechanical slaughtering of animals began in the 1930s.
The Green Revolution of the mid-1900s, which led to a marked increase in the production of food grains, was followed shortly by the rise of intensive animal farming. Many attribute its the growth to Pres. Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s. Admonishing farmers to “get big or get out,” Butz advocated for a free-market approach to farming, with surplus sold abroad. While claiming to espouse rural values found on family farms, he advocated for larger farms, higher yields, and the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. Animal agriculture became increasingly scientific and efficient, and in the following decades, corporate-owned factory farms replaced many traditional family-run operations.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, the United States had as many as 450,000 feedlots that raise chickens, cattle, hogs, and sheep, with about 24,000 of them being considered CAFOs. Given the number of animals per farm, intensive animal farming is responsible for almost all of the animals raised for food in the U.S. The factory farm model has also been exported to the world, and CAFOs are estimated to produce an increasingly large share of meat, eggs, and dairy globally.
Impacts and concerns
Although intensive animal agriculture is cost-effective and keeps the prices of meat, dairy, and eggs relatively low, the system has a number of serious and important negative externalities and disadvantages. The future of intensive animal farming may shift, in part to account for a change in consumers’ concerns about antibiotics, animal welfare, and the environment. Notably, in 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s Proposition 12 amendment, which banned the sale of certain pork products and eggs in the state from animals raised in “extreme confinement.”
Antibiotic resistance
Given the density of the animals, the bacterial growth associated with grain-based feed, and the constant accumulation of urine and feces, intensive animal farms are ideal breeding grounds for a number of pathogenic bacteria. Antibiotic drugs, such as macrolides, are often given prophylactically to prevent animals from contracting and spreading common bacterial diseases and to support the growth of the animals. This practice started in the 1930s, and by the mid-1950s farmers were routinely adding low doses of antibiotics to feed or buying medicated feed. The growing use of such antibiotics in animal agriculture introduced low levels of antibiotics into the human food supply. By 1960 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially started monitoring the levels of penicillin in milk, and Britain began monitoring the same just three years later. By 1970 scientists were warning of increasing cases of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in humans.
Indeed, there are serious concerns that such casual and widespread antibacterial use in intensive animal farms is an important driver of antibiotic resistance, which threatens the continued efficacy of antibiotics used in human and veterinary medicine. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the animal sector consumes about 80 percent of the medically important antibiotics in some countries, much of which is used for growth promotion in healthy animals. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria can spread beyond intensive animal farms in manure, which is widely used to augment soil fertility. Farms that utilize feedlot manures have significantly higher levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the soil compared with those that use untreated farm soils. Recognizing the threat of antibiotic resistance to modern medicine, the WHO recommends heavily restricting the use of medically important antibiotics in food animals and avoiding the use of antibiotics to promote animal weight gain or to treat animals that have not been clinically diagnosed with a bacterial disease. Although the WHO called antimicrobial resistance “a serious threat to global public health” in 2014, reforms in this area have been slow, partially because of the scale and political power of the corporations behind intensive animal farming operations.
Animal welfare
Critics allege that intensive animal farming is built on animal cruelty. Animals are crowded into unsanitary conditions, deprived of adequate space, repeatedly impregnated, and stressed to the point of self-mutilation. Egg-laying hens are often housed in extremely cramped conditions and cannot perform normal activities such as flapping their wings or scratching in the earth. Some common practices made for space constraints involve, for example, cutting off chickens’ beaks so that they do not peck each other to death when packed into a room with thousands of other chickens. Beak trimming is painful and can lead to starvation.
Breeding animals for optimal production has often been at odds with the actual health of the animals. For example, the rapid growth of meat chickens can result in heart failure and lameness. Hens have been bred to produce greater numbers of eggs per hen per year, skyrocketing from 100 in 1910 to more than 300 in the early 2000s. Although their lifespan is six to eight years, intensively farmed hens are typically slaughtered at two or three years of age once they pass their peak production. Male turkeys have become too large to mate successfully, and the industry thus relies entirely on artificial insemination. In addition, the grain provided in feedlots is not an optimal diet for ruminant cattle and can cause ulcers and lethal liver abscesses.
Environmental impacts
Intensive animal farms can generate numerous environmental issues, including air and water pollution and excess dust, because of the large numbers of animals they contain. A single steer, for example, can produce 30 kg (65 pounds) of manure per day (roughly a ton per year), and about 90 percent of that is water weight. Water contaminated with feces and urine must be managed to prevent runoff into local water sources, and the pollution of local waterways is not uncommon. In dry areas, manure dries out quickly and produces dust that blows freely, which can be exacerbated by the lack of vegetation caused by the continual presence of animals. The smell of animals and their waste can become noxious and pervasive, and the associated air pollution has been linked to respiratory problems in nearby human communities—an environmental justice issue in many places. Intensive animal farms, particular those that handle beef and dairy cattle, also produce millions of tons of methane and nitrous oxide each year and are thus major sources of the greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis.
Beyond the direct environmental impacts of intensive animal farms, the animals raised on these farms also require huge amounts of corn and soy for feed. The production of these crops accounts for at least half the total crops grown in the United States, with additional environmental costs associated with this production. For example, the process of growing corn to produce animal feed consumes fossil fuels because of the use of farming equipment, fertilizer manufacturing, corn transportation, and feed formulation (depending on the animal). In contrast, grazing animals require fewer of these inputs. Globally, the destruction of wild land for farming is a major driver of biodiversity loss, and meat production requires significantly more water and land resources than the production of an equivalent amount of fresh produce.