The Dark Truth About Factory Farming

When most people picture farms, they probably imagine a red barn, a field with cows grazing and chickens running around, and a farmer in a straw hat riding on a tractor. This idyllic image is not an accident — it is promoted by brands in ads, logos, and packaging to make their products seem palatable, wholesome, and appetizing. In modern America, the places that food comes from do not resemble those old-fashioned farms at all. In reality, 99% of all animals raised for meat in the United States come from factory farms.

The term factory farm refers to an industrial facility that is run like a factory. The product they make on their assembly line is meat. The raw materials are living beings, human and animal. They are officially called CAFOs or concentrated/confined animal feeding operations. In these facilities, animals are packed into overcrowded cages with little ventilation. They are generally understaffed by underpaid workers to get the most meat at the cheapest prices onto supermarket shelves. They pass the savings along to the consumer at a price. Animals are abused, workers are exploited, and too often, diseases bred in these unsanitary facilities spill out into the general population.

Working on a factory farm is grueling and dangerous work, and the corporations that run them demand that their workers produce a massive amount of meat fast, whatever the consequences.

Although working in a slaughterhouse is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, workers are paid meager wages, often making less than $25,000 a year while working 10-hour days watching animals being slaughtered. Injuries are common, and around eight slaughterhouse workers are killed every year. Employees at meatpacking facilities have reported being regularly shouted at and insulted by supervisors for falling behind schedule. Expectations for the workers are often impossible to achieve while maintaining safety standards, both for the employees and the customers. In 2013, an investigative reporter for VegNews went undercover at a Tyson chicken processing plant and described the horrendous conditions, stating, "The workers were actually urinating right on the equipment — on the poles and beneath the live-hanging conveyor belt that brought the birds in from outside." Work couldn't stop — even for a bathroom break.

Many of these exploited workers have little choice in their careers. Some prisons contract with factory forms, forcing people in prison to accept dangerous jobs there. Others are refugees or undocumented immigrants. According to a 2023 report from The New York Times, some meat processing plants including Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms are even under investigation for using child labor after an eighth grader's arm was mutilated by the machines while working for Perdue.

As described in a 2015 article in Public Health Ethics, the vast majority of strains of influenza began as bird and pig diseases before adapting to infect humans. The Spanish Flu, a devastating pandemic that spread around the world killing tens of millions of people in 1918, began in farm animals. Now, factory farms make it even easier for livestock to become a deadly petri dish for new epidemics. Factory farms pack hundreds and hundreds of stressed animals into confined spaces often with substandard hygiene practices. These conditions are the ideal breeding grounds for diseases of all kinds.

The idea that massive farms breed disease is nothing new. Factory farms were only able to become a booming business when antibiotics were discovered. Since 1938, dosing animals with antibiotics slowed the spread of these diseases -– but it can't keep up with modern factory farms. The level of stress factory farm animals are under weakens their immune systems. The lack of ventilation and sunlight lets viruses flourish while they find new hosts –- not that it will take long to find one. Keeping animals so close together makes it very easy for diseases and parasites to spread from animal to animal.

Pigs are social animals that are as smart as dogs and can live between 15-20 years. When a pig is born in a factory farm, however, it is destined for slaughter, and its life leading up to that death is short, lonely, and grim.

Piglets are born to breeding sows, female pigs who are held in crates so small that they cannot turn around. When the piglets are born, the sow's cage becomes even smaller, forcing her to lie on her side so that the piglets have access to her nipples while being kept in the crate beside her. She is unable to interact with her babies.

The baby pigs have their ears notched, which is a process of cutting slices out of their ears on both sides so they can be easily identified by workers. The conditions in factory farms are stressful and unnatural for pigs, which leads to aggression. To keep them from biting off each other's tails, many factory farms simply cut off the tails of the pigs shortly after birth. When the piglets are considered large enough, several weeks later, the mother returns to her gestation crate to create another litter. This cycle will continue for about four years, after which she will be slaughtered. The babies are slaughtered at 6-10 months old.

Instead of owning their own independent farms, many who seem to run their own farms today are actually contractors working for major corporations. For chicken farmers, or contract poultry growers, that means working for companies like Perdue and Tyson, whose policies are designed to lower their own costs at the expense of both their contractors and the animals.

In an interview in the PBS documentary "Dirty Bird," Perdue contractor Craig Watts explained that the company controls how the animals are raised and mandates that he keep them in an unventilated overcrowded silo. In "Food, Inc."one Tyson contractor stated that his 300,000 chickens never see daylight, while another Perdue grower described the facilities she was required to provide as covered in feces and dust, stocked with genetically disabled chickens that can barely walk.

One of the requirements is that the chickens who are unhealthy be euthanized by manual cervical dislocation, or grabbing the bird's head and twisting so the skull is separated from the spinal column. In the interview Watts demonstrated this method, and, while looking at the desperately flapping chicken, expressed doubts about whether it could really be as painless as he had been told. Multiple contracted farmers have expressed frustration at the number of chickens, provided by the companies, that die or need to be euthanized, costing them money and forcing them to deal with the bodies of dead animals daily.

In 2009, the world grappled with the H1N1 pandemic that killed between 150,000 and 575,000 people. Although it only became a problem for humans in 2009, it had been detected in pigs as long ago as 1920. Factory farming is believed to have allowed it to boom.

According to Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, in a 2009 article about H1N1 in Environmental Health Perspectives, respiratory viruses in factory farms are regularly introduced to new animals that haven't been exposed before, allowing them to replicate and mutate. When farm workers and veterinarians interact with animals with these new viruses, there is a potential for it to pass to humans for the first time. Then, when those workers go out into the world and interact with other people, the disease spreads in the human population.

It's unknown exactly when the "swine flu" as it came to be known made the leap from pigs to humans, but once it did, it was there to stay. As stated by the Mayo Clinic, although the pandemic officially ended in 2010, the disease never went away, and now is one of the strains of seasonal flu that can return to infect people every year.