9 Charts That Show US Factory Farming is Even Bigger Than You Realize

Factory farms are now so big that we need a new word for them.

In a few generations, factory farming — the set of economic, genetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical innovations that enabled humanity to raise tens of billions of animals for food every year — has transformed America.

It has polluted our water and air, ruining quality of life for people who live near animal confinements. It has altered entire landscapes, helping drive the conversion of much of the Midwest’s biodiverse prairie grasslands to soy and cornfields growing feed for billions of animals warehoused in industrial sheds. It contributes an outsized share of planet-warming emissions, heightens the risk of another zoonotic pandemic, and causes unfathomable, normalized suffering for the animals themselves.

The factory farmification of the American food system dates back about a century and accelerated post-World War II. But today’s factory farms have taken on an even more extreme dimension. Forty years ago, a facility raising 100,000 chickens per year would have passed for a large factory farm; now more than three-quarters of chickens live on massive complexes that sell more than 500,000 animals annually. These mega factory farms, as some observers have called them, look more like chicken megalopolises. The same pattern holds for other animals raised for food, like cows and pigs.