Factory farming
Industrial animal agriculture — the system that raises most land animals eaten today, at enormous ethical, environmental, and public-health cost.
Factory farming — technically concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — is the industrial system in which the majority of land animals consumed today are raised. It is defined by high stocking densities, routine confinement, standardized genetics, and operational optimization for throughput and cost.
Scale
Globally, roughly 80+ billion land animals are slaughtered each year, the overwhelming majority in factory systems. Fish and other aquatic animals add an estimated 1–3 trillion more — a number so large it is easier to measure by weight than by individual.
The ethical question
Even under the most generous assumptions about animal welfare laws, the baseline conditions of factory farming — confinement preventing natural behavior, painful mutilations without anaesthesia, truncated lifespans, industrial slaughter — constitute suffering at a scale unprecedented in history. This is the concrete practice that speciesism permits and veganism refuses.
Beyond ethics
- Climate: see Livestock and climate.
- Public health: CAFOs are reservoirs for antibiotic resistance and zoonotic disease.
- Rural economies: consolidation has hollowed out small farming communities worldwide.
The system is not inevitable. It is a specific technology, adopted in the 20th century, and can be replaced — as many transitions before it have been.