What's a Factory Farm, Anyway?


	©USDA
	Factory farms pack caged animals into warehouses by the tens of thousands.

Most Americans don't think about where our food comes from, much less our meat, dairy and eggs. When we prepare these products at home, they're prepackaged and offer little clue as to how the animals who produced these items were treated.

But when we do consider where our food comes from, we often imagine the Old MacDonald's Farm story from our childhood.

Since Americans overwhelmingly care about animals, many harbor the illusion that this type of small farm still provides us with our food. And we think that animals on these farms probably at least have lives worth living.

But sadly, Old MacDonald's is just a story.

Massive in Size and Suffering

The vast majority of our meat, dairy and eggs comes not from animals on small farms but from factory farms—massive operations that treat animals like profit-making machines, routinely subjecting them to terrible abuses before forcing them to endure often-agonizing slaughter.


©The HSUS
Factory farms cause endless misery, and destroy the environment, too.

The late British author Ruth Harrison wrote her groundbreaking exposé of factory farming, Animal Machines, in 1964. It was the first time the general public got a glimpse of the still-new phenomena of industrialized animal agribusiness.

Harrison described factory farming as a system in which animals cease to be treated as sentient beings and rather are treated like widgets on an assembly line.

Animals are crammed into cages barely larger than their own bodies. They are genetically manipulated to boost production even at the cost of their own welfare. And at slaughter plants they're placed on faster and faster lines that increase the risk of conscious animals being butchered alive.

There are more than 18,000 factory farms across the country, and they can confine hundreds of thousands of animals in sickening conditions.

Think that's a lot of animals? Each year in the United States, nearly 10 billion animals—chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows, and more—are raised and killed for our food. Not only do they routinely endure terrible abuses on factory farms, but raising animals for food is a major cause of environmental destruction.

What You Can Do

Follow the Three Rs in your diet:

Reduce the amount of animal products you consume
Refine your diet by moving away from factory farm animal products
Replace animal products in your diet with delicious, easy-to-find vegetarian options

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PRINTER FRIENDLY

See the Video

Factory Farms Slideshow

Help Farm Animals...Follow the Three Rs

The Dirty Six: The Worst Practices in Agribusiness

The HSUS and Farm Animal Advocacy

A Brief Guide to Egg Carton Labels and Their Relevance to Animal Welfare

A Brief Guide to Meat and Dairy Labels and Their Relevance to Animal Welfare

The HSUS Guide to Vegetarian Eating