“factory” farm in Idaho

    Consider the meals you ate in the past 24 hours. What was on your plate?  I’m willing to bet there were grains or starches. Perhaps there were some fruit and vegetables, and more than likely also meat, dairy, and eggs. You may not even be able to recall what you ate for breakfast this morning, let alone the meals you consumed the day before; if so, you aren’t alone. People aren’t often deeply considering the composition of their plate, and they aren’t thinking critically about where their food came from. When it comes to the animal products in our diets, we don’t question their place. After all, dairy is one of the five food groups recommended by the USDA, and animal meat is by far the most popular protein choice in America. According to the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois, in 2020, Americans consumed approximately 264 pounds of meat, fish, and poultry per person (Kuck and Schnitky 2021), with 99% of all farm animals in the US coming from “confined animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs (Millstein 2025). However, the ugly truth of the animal agriculture industry is that it is deeply harmful to our environment, health, and animal well-being. How did factory farms originate as a common practice in America, and what are the hidden secrets of America’s modern animal agriculture industry?

    After the Industrial Revolution, Americans innovated new methods that intensified animal production, resulting in the creation of CAFOs. Scholars Ryan Gunderson, Diana Stuart, and Brian Petersen report that the rise of industrial technology revolutionized the way animals were bred and slaughtered as a food source. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, farms were scaled up to contain large feedlots and warehouses. Operations became larger and pastures became smaller, with more and more animals crammed onto each factory farm, because it was more economically efficient (Gunderson et. al 2023). The use of antibiotics in the animal agriculture industry in the 1930s drastically reduced the spread of diseases among animals (which were increasingly crammed into confined spaces) and led to rapid growth as well. The US government coined the term “CAFO” in 1972 to describe these concentrated animal feeding operations as part of a federal effort to reduce water pollution through the Clean Water Act. This is because the more densely packed a factory farm is, the higher the amount of water pollution created from waste runoff. But how did the government determine which factory farms were considered CAFOs? It depended on the farm animal: a dairy farm is considered a CAFO if it has 700 dairy cows, while a turkey farm needs 55,000 or more turkeys to qualify as one (Millstein 2025). 

    Today, a massive number of animals are raised on CAFOs and sent to slaughterhouses or exploited for their dairy and eggs. A study posted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reveals that American CAFOs currently contain 1.7 billion animals, which is 6% more than 2017 and 47% more than 2002. Overall, during the past century, the US went from zero of these large factory farms to 24,000 (Trotter 2024). Although many argue the importance of CAFOs in order to meet the large demand that the US has for animal products, that doesn’t negate the fact that CAFOs create serious risks.

     Since these CAFOs are capital-intensive, a small number of mega corporations lead the industry, and most family operations have been out-competed. The United States government fueled the shift of animal agriculture from small enterprises to large corporations; Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz infamously told farmers in the 1970s to “get big or get out.” The USDA shows that this shift towards CAFOs has intensified since the 80s, motivated by the desire for larger yields and greater profits. Today, many family farms are forced to be subcontractors for these massive corporations in order to keep their business afloat. My family has experienced this personally, as my great-grandfather started his independent dairy farm in 1948. During my lifetime, EJ Dairies, now run by my uncle, was subcontracted to Dean Foods, once the largest dairy company in the United States. Becoming part of a billion dollar corporation was the only way to remain in business for many farms like my family’s. The issues with CAFOs only begin with the ethical issues of outcompeting small farmers.

 

    CAFOs pose significant problems to the wellbeing of the planet because of their unsustainable models. The University of Colorado Boulder reports that animal agriculture uses nearly 70% of agricultural land. Meanwhile, 82% of the world’s underfed children live in a country where food is fed to livestock that is then shipped to wealthy countries, such as the US (Conzachi 2022). To make space for feed production and CAFOs, massive amounts of forests are being cut down. Hannah Ritchie and colleagues reported on meat and dairy production with Our World in Data, showing that Brazil, home to the Amazon Rainforest, is particularly ravaged by deforestation as the country with the most cattle in the world: 238.63 million cows are being raised to meet the massive meat demand (Ritchie et. al 2017). The effects of deforestation from animal agriculture are significantly affecting biodiversity loss, accelerating extinctions, and reducing an important carbon sink. When it comes to driving global warming, greenhouse gas emissions from the animal agriculture industry are greater than all of the transportation industry combined. Cattle produce large amounts of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 28 times as potent as CO₂, trapping more heat in the atmosphere (“Importance of Methane” 2025). In fact, the United States produced 219 million tons of methane emissions from agriculture in 2022 (Ritchie et. al 2017). In addition, water pollution from factory farms causes eutrophication, where nitrogen and phosphorus from animal waste trigger algal blooms that use up oxygen and kill fish in the water. Eutrophication also contributes to coral bleaching, destroying marine ecosystems. Dairy milk also uses more land and freshwater, causes more greenhouse gas emissions, and accelerates eutrophication more than every type of plant-based milk combined (Ritchie et. al 2017). 

    CAFOs also create health problems that harm American citizens. The widespread use of antibiotics in CAFOs leads to increased illnesses in humans. According to an article published by the National Library of Medicine, antibiotics add residues in foodstuffs, which promote antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans (Arsène et. al 2022). Tengfei Zhang et al. wrote that factory farms also exacerbate issues of foodborne illnesses, respiratory conditions, and zoonotic diseases like bird flu and COVID-19 that kill millions of people (Zhang et. al 2024). Furthermore, diets high in animal products are linked to an array of health issues such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States.

    There are a myriad of environmental and health implications of animal products, but the fact of the matter is most people are ignorant of these issues. People will continue to eat the widely adopted Standard American diet we know today that resulted from millions of years of evolution and was influenced by the past 100 years of technological innovation and unethical policy. CAFOs are kept secret by the corporations profiting from the exploitation of animals (and the whole biosphere), with propaganda showing cows happily grazing in green pastures under sunny skies tricking the average American into financially supporting factory farming. Eating animals is a common practice in America, but if people were made aware of the benefits of adopting a plant-based diet, perhaps the paradigm could be flipped. A plant-based diet does just that, providing health benefits, a smaller environmental footprint, and a more ethical approach to food consumption. If the curtain was pulled back from the scene of happy grazing cows to depict the real ugly truth of factory farming, people might just put more thought into what goes on their plate after all.

 

References

Arsène, M. M. J., Davares, A. K. L., Viktorovna, P. I., Andreevna, S. L., Sarra, S., Khelifi, I., & Sergueïevna, D. M. (2022). The public health issue of antibiotic residues in food and feed: Causes, consequences, and potential solutions. Veterinary world, 15(3), 662–671. https://doi.org/10.14202/vetworld.2022.662-671

Conzachi, K. (2022). It may be uncomfortable, but we need to talk about it: the animal agriculture industry and zero waste. University of Colorado Boulder. Retrieved November 21, 2025, from https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2022/03/15/it-may-be-uncomfortable-we-need-talk-about-it-animal-agriculture-industry-and-zero-waste 

Gunderson, R., Stuart, D., & Petersen, B. (2016). Factory Farming: Impacts and Potential Solutions. In G. W. Muschert, B. V. Klocke, R. Perrucci, & J. Shefner (Eds.), Agenda for Social Justice: Solutions for 2016 (pp. 27–38). Chapter, Bristol University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/agenda-for-social-justice/factory-farming-impacts-and-potential-solutions/3A4CCF0188C27C9EC113BD7EEA55A07E 

Importance of Methane | US EPA. (2025). EPA. Retrieved November 21, 2025, from https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane 

Kuck, G., & Schnitkey, G. (2021). An Overview of Meat Consumption in the United States. Farmdoc Daily. Retrieved October 26, 2025, from https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2021/05/an-overview-of-meat-consumption-in-the-united-states.html 

 

Millstein, S. (2025, June 6). What Is a CAFO, and Is It Different From a Factory Farm? Sentient Media. Retrieved November 17, 2025, from https://sentientmedia.org/cafo/ 

Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2017). Meat and Dairy Production. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production 

 

Trotter, P. (2024). New USDA Data Shows Nearly 50% Increase In U.S. Factory Farmed Animals In 20 Years. Food and Water Watch. https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2024/02/13/new-usda-data-shows-nearly-50-increase-in-u-s-factory-farmed-animals-in-20-years/ 

Zhang, T., Nickerson, R., Zhang, W., Peng, X., Shang, Y., Zhou, Y., Luo, Q., Wen, G., & Cheng, Z. (2024). The impacts of animal agriculture on One Health-Bacterial zoonosis, antimicrobial resistance, and beyond. One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 18, 100748. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.onehlt.2024.100748