What is Factory Farming?
To understand factory farming, we need to understand what farming is and how it impacts our
daily lives, from meeting our basic needs to ensuring sustainable living. In simple terms, farming
is the domestication of animals and plants to help ensure food security.
However, the conversation changes when we are talking about factory farming, which primarily
focuses on animals. It’s an industrial method of raising farm animals, for example pigs, chickens,
fish, and cows in small, controlled indoor spaces. One of the primary arguments for this practice
is to ensure more yields with reduced input.
Food sustainability promoters have often hailed these practices as a futuristic way to ensure food
security while encouraging farmers with limited spaces to adopt this method as the most
affordable approach to maximising yield with limited input.
While this may seem like a sensible approach, animal welfare advocates may argue differently.
Below, we are going to look at the impact of factory farming.
Impact on Animal Welfare
A closer audit of factory farming would reveal a serious breach in animal rights, with billions of
animals all over the world being restricted to crowded and tight spaces. These living conditions
have also forced animals to endure constant pain, unnatural breeding, and a stressful lifestyle that
makes it difficult for them to develop naturally.
Some of the main problems associated with this include:
No Natural Life: Animals are natural foragers and often go out to look for their food based
on their needs. However, through factory farming, animals such as pigs, chickens, fish, and cattle
are unable to look for food and over-rely on what they are fed.
Accelerated Growth: One of the things that stands out in factory farming is the ability to
ensure mass production within short periods. This means farmers rely on growth enhancers and
other breeding techniques to ensure fast growth to meet market demands. This, in return, has
adverse effects on the overall development of the animals.
Painful Changes: Some of the animals in these settings, for example, cattle, are often
subjected to painful changes such as cutting of tails and horns, or even castration of bulls to
enhance growth. However, most of these are carried out without any pain medication, making it
a form of torture.
Crowded Spaces: The main idea behind factory farming is to maximise space, meaning
keeping more animals in tight and crowded spaces. Animals need space to move around just like
humans need to do activities to move around. However, in these settings, most animals have
limited space to move or stretch and are often close to each other, increasing the chances of the
spread of disease.
Impact on the Environment
Recent studies have associated factory farming with the increase in climate change as well as
severe changes to the environment through destruction of natural habitats and pollution of air and
water supplies.
Research is also showing that increased factory farming around the globe has significantly
increased carbon emissions, with up to 15%- 19% of all emissions being attributed to
greenhouses. Aside from the emissions, this type of farming is also related to the massive
amounts of untreated waste that the ecosystem cannot absorb.
Some of the environmental impacts of factory farming may include;
Deforestation and Habitat Loss: To sustain factory farming, large tracts of land are often
cleared to make room for feed crops. This has led to the loss of high-biodiversity ecosystems.
Heavy use of pesticides and herbicides in these farms has also contributed to biodiversity
extinction as these chemicals destroy wild animal populations and interfere with essential
pollination.
Increased Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A recent study has shown that ruminant
livestock, e.g, cows, release huge amounts of methane gas, which is arguably one of the highest
contributors to global warming over increased Carbon dioxide emissions. It’s also worth noting
that this form of farming relies on supply chain energy, which is contributed to by overreliance
on fossil fuels to process and manufacture synthetic feeds and fertilizers, not to mention the
global transport network.
Air pollution and Toxins: As discussed earlier, animals are often held in crowded indoor
spaces, making ventilation a nightmare. However, the ventilation systems put in place, coupled
with the Concentrated Animal Feed Operations, push high concentrations of toxic gases such as
hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and particulate matter into the atmosphere.
These toxins can lead to severe respiratory illness among people living in these areas, with cases
of asthma and chronic Bronchitis being reported.
Water and Soil Degradation: This method of farming, like every other form of industrial
agriculture, is water-intensive, with meat-based diets requiring the use of twice the amount of
water used in plant-based diets. This is mainly because of the large irrigation schemes needed to
maintain feeder crops.
Promoting factory farming has also led to the adoption of monoculture farming for animal feeds,
which over time leads to depletion of natural soil nutrients and erosion of the topsoil
Impact on Human Health.
Factory farming has been linked to increased antimicrobial resistance due to overuse of
antibiotics, and to pollution of water, soil, and air, as well as increased breeding of zoonotic
diseases such as Salmonella. It’s also worth noting that the cheap processed meat from these
farms has also been linked to chronic conditions such as heart disease and obesity.
Water and air pollution from manure runoff and endotoxins emitted into the air pose
to surrounding communities, leading to chronic disease outbreaks. The working environment in
these farms also poses risks, including both physical injuries and mental stress.
While factory farming was aimed at addressing food security, the cheap output from these farms
has led to overconsumption, which in turn has caused diet-related and chronic diseases such as
diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers linked to processed meat.
Zoonotic diseases have been on the rise, with experts warning that this could become a global
health emergency if not addressed. This is mainly because most farms have become the perfect
breeding ground for viruses to mutate, as seen with the case of Avian Influenza.
While factory farming promises food security to meet the growing demand, it’s worth noting that
this has also caused and continues to cause more harm than good. Animal welfare rights
organisations such as ASPCA, World Animals Protection Africa and Effective Animal
Advocacy Kenya have been at the forefront of championing animal rights as well as coming up
with alternatives to factory farming.
Promoting plant-based diets is one of the key projects run by these organizations as they work
towards realising the goals of providing animals with an environment where they can grow and
thrive as nature dictates.
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