We’re All Suffering in the Heat, Thanks to Big Agriculture

The summer of 2023 was Earth’s hottest summer on record. According to NASA, temperatures were 0.41 degrees Fahrenheit higher than any other summer on record, and 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average summer between 1951 and 1980. Around the world, temperatures soared. Heatwaves swept across the planet, leaving no continent untouched—from Europe to the Middle East, from Australia to Asia to the Americas, people sweltered in the heat. Even Antarctica wasn’t left untouched.

The rapidly rising temperatures weren’t cause for cheerful beach days. They wreaked a terrible cost globally. To pick only a few examples: Texas saw an all-time high of heat deaths; France recorded more than 5000 deaths directly linked to summer 2023; researchers in India declared that they would soon be “approaching limits to survivability.”

Animals suffered too. In the UK, birds fell out of skies; Australia’s iconic platypuses were driven from their home in fear of the mega bushfires that have already killed three billion of their compatriots; heat-related deaths for dogs and cats doubled.

And of course, for the animals trapped in big agriculture’s brutal machinery—the cows, pigs, chickens, and more who live only so that people can eat them—an already cruel life gained an extra layer of trauma.

Death on the road

The extreme heat took a toll on animal life across the agricultural industry—in Iowa, for example, hundreds of cows died during the humidity and heat in late July, where the heat was sometimes as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit. But unlike the human and other animal deaths which were, to some extent, unavoidable in the heat, animals caught in the agriculture industry’s violent system also suffer additional exposure to and threat from extreme temperatures, particularly during transport. In some particularly tragic irony, many animals die on their way to the slaughterhouses.

A 2022 investigation found that tens of millions of animals in the US die during transportation. 20 million chickens, 330,000 pigs, and 166,000 cows are found dead on arrival—or soon after—at abattoirs across the country. A further 800,000 pigs couldn’t walk on arrival, due to illness and near-death from heatstroke.

The US only has one (pitifully limited and frequently ignored) law governing animal transport, first enacted in 1873. The 28-Hour Law states that if animals are transported for longer than 28 consecutive hours, they must be offloaded for at least five consecutive hours to get food, water, and rest. However, it exempts birds (like chickens and turkeys)—who apparently don’t deserve any relief. But factory farms chasing profit and cutting corners often ignore this law entirely; the Guardian investigation found that one truck carrying pigs traveled for 32 hours nonstop across the US in the deep heat of August. A director at the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) said that violations of the 28-Hour Law affect “perhaps… 10% or more of farm animals transported between states.”

According to Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinarian who works with the AWI, the main causes of death for cows were “heatstroke, trauma and respiratory disease … [and in] pigs, the main reason is hyperthermia (overheating), especially during summer.”

Despite the famous idiom ‘sweating like a pig’, pigs don’t sweat. Instead, they have a clever and complex internal thermoregulation system that relies deeply on environmental factors. For example, on hot days, pigs naturally gravitate toward bodies of water or cool mud—cooling off with a swim. But of course, in the overcrowded trucks that drive them to their early deaths, there is no comfort or cool to be found.

An artificial heat for real deaths

The agricultural industry doesn’t like it when pigs die on their way to the slaughterhouse: that’s lost profit. But a brutal and relatively unknown fact is that sometimes the industry will exploit the fact that heat kills animals to do their dirty work for them.

Because of the overcrowding, poor care, and inhumane conditions of factory farming, disease spreads quickly. On other occasions, external crises cause supply chain disruptions—like the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In both cases, the meat industry often reacts with a horrific solution called “depopulation,” which translates to “killing as many animals as quickly as possible.”

“Crisis” may make it sound extraordinary, but this happens all too often. In 2020, when COVID-19 caused unprecedented supply chain disruption in the US, factory farms killed hundreds of thousands of pigs. During the avian influenza outbreak in 2022, factory farms killed more than 57 million birds being raised for meat or eggs. In 2023, the African swine fever epidemic caused the United States Department of Agriculture to actually recommend depopulation.

The entire agriculture industry is built on animals going to an early, brutal death. But there is something particularly tragic about the sheer waste of all this death. Millions of animals live short, unhappy lives before factory farms kill them … and nobody even gets a meal out of it.

And the method for this murder? More often than not, heat. The industry calls it “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+). It usually involves turning off the airflow in a barn, ratcheting up the temperature (sometimes as high as 170 degrees Fahrenheit), and leaving the trapped and helpless animals to die from heat stroke. Often steam generators are turned on to increase humidity to a minimum of 90%.

Heat stroke is a miserable, painful, and prolonged death. Along the way, heat stroke includes distributive shock, gastrointestinal bleeding, vomiting, diarrhea, acute respiratory distress, multiorgan dysfunction, brain injury, and more. It takes nursery piglets—babies—about 90 minutes on average to die, and adult pigs 110 minutes. And even the way factory farms measure this death is suspect, because they count the point of death as when the pigs fall silent, which fails to detect subtle behaviors like gasping or fainting. There are always documented survivors.

Big agriculture is directly culpable for our rising temperatures

The soaring heat, and its disastrous effects, are proof that climate change isn’t a hypothesis or even a future warning anymore—it’s a fact of life, and it’s happening now. And one of the biggest, if not the biggest, culprits for this crisis is big agriculture itself.

Agriculture is the world’s largest industry: it occupies around 50% of the planet’s habitable land and uses about 70% of fresh water supplies. The global production of food is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases, and farming animals for meat causes twice the pollution of producing plant-based foods. Agriculture drove 90 to 99% of deforestation across the tropics between 2011 and 2015, mostly for more pasture to farm cows. And a huge portion of the world’s most popular crops, like corn and soy, don’t even feed people: 40% of corn goes to animal feed, used mainly on factory farms. That means that big agriculture is a horrific, self-perpetuating machine, destroying our planet in order to have more resources to… destroy our planet. Oh, and make some money along the way.

It’s gotten to the point where even the industry itself knows it’s at fault. In 2022, a group of the world’s biggest agricultural companies, including Bayer, Mars, McCain Foods, McDonald’s, Mondēlez, Olam, PepsiCo, Waitrose, and more, released a report announcing the need for urgent change in the world’s agricultural practices before they “destroy[ed] the planet.” But from a cynical perspective, this report was likely an attempt to shield themselves while they continue their destructive practices. Devlin Kuyek, a researcher at Grain, said: “Small, local food systems still feed most of the people on the planet and the real threat is that the industrial system is expanding at the expense of the truly sustainable system. Corporations are creating a bit of smoke and mirrors here, suggesting they are part of the solution when inevitably they are part of the problem.”

It’s a common pattern for big agriculture, an industry which—now that it can no longer pretend it’s doing good—frequently hijacks actual attempts to tackle climate change. For example, corporations put huge pressure on the Farm Bill, which designates hundreds of billions of dollars to food and agriculture programs every five years. Corporations have worked out how to claim this money for their own pseudo-“green” solutions, like $100 million to factory farm infrastructure. The latest negotiations over this year’s upcoming Farm Bill show that pattern is set to continue.

In the meantime, our planet, our people, and our animals continue to suffer.

Guess what else is in trouble?

The truly ironic part of all of this is, of course, that big agriculture is destroying itself. Continuing down this path isn’t sustainable, and rising temperatures will destroy big agriculture, along with everything else.

According to the German government, the climate crisis is the “greatest threat” to agriculture. Research shows that by 2045, heat stress will threaten over 70% of global agriculture. Food production will struggle in most countries, including China, India, Brazil, and the US. Labor productivity could drop as much as 40% in key production regions like Pakistan and India as it simply becomes too hot to work. NASA has warned that across the US, rising temperatures will increasingly compromise infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems.

So the good news is that big agriculture can’t possibly continue—sooner or later, the climate crisis will destroy it. The bad news is that it will probably be too late for the rest of us by that point, too.

It’s difficult to fight big agriculture. The sheer size of the industry makes it a behemoth in every country. The profit-hungry processes that lead to such cruelty and brutality for animals means that big agriculture has a lot of money to influence lawmakers and fight court battles when they flagrantly break laws like the 28-Hour Law … if they even get fined.

But individual effort can do great things. Making conscious choices about the foods we eat, the brands we buy from, and the legislation we fight for offers a way out of the crisis big agriculture has created. Agriculture is big. People are bigger.