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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 feeds a growing population, yes. But it has also polluted our water and air. It has altered entire landscapes. And 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.

We’ve both been covering the meat industry for years, and we’ve increasingly seen that although factory farming dates back about a century, today is different. Factory farms keep getting more and more extreme — so big that we need a new name for them: mega factory farms. 

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 five times that annually. The same pattern holds for cows and pigs. 

These trends are reflected in data released this month by the US Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture, a massive report published every five years on the state of farming in America. 

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day news cycle of our changing food system, but the census lets us step back. Here’s how factory farming has changed America over the last 40 years.

In 2022, the most recent year with available data that was published in the report, the number of chickens, cows, pigs, and turkeys in the US food system exceeded 10 billion for the first time in the census’s history — up from 5.2 billion animals in 1987. 

That’s largely been driven by the recent chickenization of the American diet.

More consumers are swapping beef for chicken, which is often perceived as healthier than red meat (though it has profound ethical implications, given how many more chickens have to be slaughtered to produce the same meat as one cow). 

Chickens now make up more than 90 percent of land animals farmed in the US. In 2022, we slaughtered 9.2 billion of them, about 27 for every person in the country. 

We farm so many chickens for food that they’re now the most populous bird species in the world, and scientists believe their remains may leave a permanent mark on our geological record. “We live in the Age of the Chicken,” as the New York Times put it in 2018. 

The numbers of other farmed animals are also massive, but next to meat chickens, they look like a rounding error.

With every passing year, farmed animals are increasingly concentrated on the largest factory farms.

Perhaps nowhere has the shift been more dramatic than in the pork sector. 

In 2022, more than 90 percent of pigs were raised on mega factory farms. The rapid consolidation has meant that big farms are getting bigger while the rest go out of business, a trend consistent across the country.

Mega farms aren’t a pork-only situation, though.

In the chicken meat industry, mega factory farms that each raise more than 500,000 chickens per year now overwhelmingly dominate. In the egg industry, which uses about 388.5 million hens per year, the biggest factory farms are even bigger, sometimes housing millions of animals in one place. 

Such high concentrations of animals — and their waste — smell terrible and release hazardous air pollution linked to respiratory problems in the communities in which they’re located, a growing environmental justice issue.

Between 2017 and 2022, growth in the livestock population has created manure “equivalent to two New York City metro areas — or 40 million people,” Amanda Starbuck, research director for environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch, told us.

The rapid consolidation has also meant that big farms are getting bigger while the rest go out of business, a trend consistent across the country.

Many US pig farmers who can hang on, for instance, do so by contracting with the biggest pork processors, like Smithfield Foods and JBS. In these contract arrangements, the farmer takes on much of the risk by taking out large loans to build the operations, while the company supplies the pigs and their feed.

More than two-thirds of pigs were raised on contract in 2015.

It bears mentioning that industrialized agriculture is not bad per se (at least, it doesn’t have to be). 

Researchers and corporations have devised ways to make crops and animals grow bigger and faster, allowing us to get more food from less land.

Total US farmland has declined by 24 percent since 1954 — equivalent to saving more than the combined land area of California and Texas. 

Making factory farming more land-efficient, though, has come with some of the terrible costs we mentioned.

Even if your biggest priority is just generating enough calories to feed the world on as little land as possible, factory farming is still radically inefficient compared to a food culture with far fewer animals and more plant-based foods. That would require less land and water, emit less pollution and climate-warming gasses, and allow the country to free up land for wild ecosystems that benefit the climate. 

If we’re willing to imagine a different approach to food, such a system is possible. “The factory farm system is not inevitable,” Starbuck said. 

—Future Perfect's Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella

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