The term “factory farm” has become synonymous with the horrors animals endure and the environmental destruction caused by industrialized animal agribusiness. Yet focusing solely on factory farming as cruel, rather than the root cause — the exploitation and killing of animals — can wrongly suggest that there’s a humane or environmentally sustainable way to use animals for food products.

Most people agree that factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), are inhumane, with animals crammed into industrial sheds and forced to endure torment and despair throughout their short lives. Yet the deception persists that small, local, family animal farming is benign. Animal agribusiness capitalizes on the “humane” myth to keep consumers buying, with even giant meat corporations like Tyson, Perdue, and Smithfield branding themselves as “family farms.” 

Regardless of farm size, abuse and killing are inherent in all animal farming. The standard practices involve legalized cruelty, such as mutilations without painkillers, forcible impregnation, taking babies from their mothers, unrelenting thirst and hunger caused by withholding food or water for days or weeks during transport, enduring agonizing temperatures in extreme weather, and ineffective stunning, leaving many animals conscious and terrified before and during slaughter.

Among other abominations, male calves in the dairy industry can be killed by blunt force trauma — bashing their skulls — or by gunshot. Pigs are supposedly gassed to stun them, but hidden investigations have exposed their agonizing terror and screams inside the gas chambers before being slaughtered at just six months old.

Factory farms are an unmitigated disaster for the environment, yet terms like "grass-fed" and "pasture-based" are marketed as better, even eco-friendly. In reality, these methods are no better for the climate than factory farms. About 80% of agricultural land is currently used for dairy and meat production, including grazing and feed crops. 

A switch to an entirely grass-fed system would be even worse for the environment than factory farms. A study found that grass-fed production would require 30% more cows and raise methane emissions by 43%, with methane being 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Switching to “regenerative ranching” would decimate around 2.5 times more land than standard grazing, further boosting methane emissions and exacerbating the climate crisis. In addition, the fishing industry also accelerates carbon emissions, killing over 2.7 trillion sentient marine animals annually.

Leading nutrition organizations confirm that a balanced plant-based diet promotes health and reduces disease risk, while animal products increase it. Culture, taste, habit, and profit are not justifiable reasons to continue. Many past atrocities once deemed normal are now considered abhorrent. 

Animal farming is the antithesis of animal welfare. Whether on a “small” farm or a “factory” farm, all the animals are enslaved, mutilated, and forced to die atrocious deaths in the same horrific slaughterhouses. 

Without addressing the intrinsic violence of all animal farming, making factory farms “the problem” reinforces the notion that there’s a good way to farm animals. Producers will continue to use feel-good, lying marketing tactics to make consumers feel better and continue buying their brutally abusive products. 

When conveying the cruelty animals endure for food products and the environmental destruction caused by it, we should replace the term “factory farms” with ”animal farming”—or the more accurate “animal agribusiness”—to encompass the entire industry and advocate for a slaughter-free, plant-based food system.

Know the truth behind the “humane” scam. 

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