Owen Walsh
Farmers are looking to transition from raising animals to raising crops.
For hundreds of years, raising animals for their meat, milk, and eggs has been a dominant form of agriculture around the world.
While meat, eggs, and dairy remain major components of today’s food industry, a growing number of farmers are leaving behind the highly industrialized, consolidated world of animal agriculture to grow produce instead. Let’s talk about why farmers want to make this transition, and the perhaps unlikely partnerships arising as a result.
What does animal agriculture cost us?
The economic importance of crops and animal products is split pretty evenly in the US. What these two agricultural approaches cost us in the form of resources and harmful emissions, however, is far more lopsided. If farmers are concerned with pursuing the more sustainable of the two, the answer is a bit of a no-brainer.
For years now, the effects of climate change have been rippling throughout the planet in the forms of devastating natural disasters, disease outbreaks, extinctions, and more. Meanwhile, researchers have been uncovering the important role that factory farming plays. According to a Nature Food article in 2021, the worldwide production of food is responsible for one-third of all greenhouse gases humans emit. Of that, emissions from animal agriculture (about 60%) were twice as high as emissions from growing crops (about 30%).
There’s also a wide disparity in the sheer volume of water it takes to raise animal meat versus produce. Accounting for the total water used throughout the entire production process, one six-ounce steak leaves behind a water footprint of 674 gallons! A hamburger is not far behind with a water footprint of 660 gallons. In contrast, one salad made of tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers has a water footprint of 21 gallons. Animal agriculture overall is responsible for around 20% of global freshwater use.
More sustainable forms of animal agriculture are possible. For example, farmers can provide livestock and poultry the space to engage in their normal eating behaviors of grazing and foraging for food. This method is actually 43 times less water intensive than producing the animal feed given to animals on densely packed concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), AKA factory farms. Unfortunately, Big Ag has no problem with minimizing sustainability in the pursuit of the high output of cheap meat that factory farms churn out.
Factory farms exploit more than just animals
Much of the articles posted on The Humane League’s and similar organizations’ websites detail the abuses and exploitation that innocent animals are subjected to on factory farms—with good reason. From the beginning to the end of their short lives, factory-farmed animals endure painful procedures, stressful squalid quarters, and are denied the basic behaviors their species naturally long to engage in.
As we discuss these conditions and demand better ones for animals, we can’t lose sight of the fact that they aren’t the only ones exploited by the factory farming system. Laborers on farms work long hours in dangerous conditions. Immigrant workers, who make up a significant portion of agricultural workforce, face these lengthy and precarious hours with next to no protections or government oversight.
This oppressive system can weigh on those who manage CAFOs too. Even though they own the land and buildings, farmers might also be treated as cogs in the much larger factory farming machine. This was the case for chicken farmer-turned-mushroom farmer Tom Lim, whose story was featured on NBC News in late 2024.
“You have no control over what you do in the poultry house,” Lim told NBC. “You work under [the corporations’] control.”
After many stressful years operating a CAFO that confined 100,000 chickens at a time, the company Lim was working for abruptly terminated his contract, and he was left in serious debt with nothing to produce on his massive farm. That’s when he turned to the group Transfarmation, an organization that helps farmers “who have been chewed up and spit out” by industrial farming transition to sustainable agriculture focused on “raising crops for human-consumption.”
Helping farmers transition, not shutting down farms
Transfarmation is just one group that’s providing former factory farmers with financial resources and additional support to help transition into sustainable agriculture. Similar groups and projects around the country, even internationally, are working with farmers to facilitate the switch from livestock to crops, while also making sure it stays financially viable.
The partnerships arising between farmers and sustainability advocates will hopefully help reshape a longstanding narrative that opponents of factory farms are “anti-farmer.” This misconception can be beneficial to industrialized CAFOs, which are often characterized by their corporate owners as typical American farms with a bright red barn house, a few animals milling about peacefully, and happy farmers making a good, easy living.
The much colder reality is that factory farms are behemoth, yet cramped, confinement facilities where animal welfare is ignored, human workers suffer stressful, dangerous conditions, neighboring communities suffer health problems from the air and water pollution, climate change accelerates, and the true small, family farms are run out of business.
There are so many reasons to oppose factory farms in favor of a more sustainable system. If farmers continue getting the support needed to transition from livestock to sustainable crops, a better future for animals, humans, and the planet is possible.
