Have you ever wondered where your local grocery store gets its meat? Chances are at least some of it comes from a factory farm.

Factory farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), are facilities that raise and harvest large numbers of livestock within small spaces. An estimated 99% of US livestock lived on factory farms in 2024.

Factory farming began in the 1930s and has been producing billions of pounds of meat ever since. This industry focuses on maximum profits at minimal cost, leading to CAFOs increasing in number and replacing many rural farms.

Unfortunately, this harms local economies because small farms cannot compete with factory farms. This leads to emigration, reducing the amount of money circulating in communities near factory farms.

This is but one problem with factory farms. They also pollute the land, water and air of the surrounding area due to the immense amounts of manure being produced by livestock. Worse, factory farms are exempt from the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, meaning the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not monitor them to prevent polluting practices.

Notably, fertilizer and animal waste from factory farms is contributing to environmental issues such as the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. Closer to home, 670 miles of streams and 25,000 acres of lakes in Illinois were negatively affected by factory farming in 2022.

The meat from factory farms is not healthy either and is contributing to antibiotic resistance in people – predicted to kill 10 million people a year by 2050. This is due to livestock in CAFOs being given antibiotics as a preventive measure, which is causing bacteria to become antibiotic resistant.

Moreover, livestock are crammed together within factory farms, causing disease to spread easily between animals and increasing the fat content of their meat because they can barely move all day. The conditions they live in are also filthy, increasing the chances of meat being contaminated by salmonella and E. coli.

Confinement and filth are not the only problems livestock in factory farms suffer. Factory farmed chickens suffer psychological issues due to their confinement, leading them to peck fellow chickens to death or engage in cannibalism. To solve this problem, factory farms employ the painful process of cutting off parts of their chicken’s beaks using a heated blade, rather than allowing their chickens more space to roam.

Harmful genetic manipulation, tail docking, castration, preventing animals from ever seeing the outdoors and separating mother cows from their calves are just some additional ethical issues that occur on factory farms. Anesthesia is rarely used for the more physically painful processes, likely because it is too expensive for the number of animals it would have to be applied to.

Denying livestock basic amenities helps maximize the profits gained from increasing demand for meat. Moreover, federal policy not only allows factory farming, it encourages it. These factors have allowed factory farms, and all their problems, to expand throughout the U.S.

This cannot continue. Factory farms are economically, environmentally and ethically unsustainable, and their cheap meat can easily become poison for American consumers.