The New “Factory Farm”: What Could Sustainable and Ethical Farming Look Like?

Think of the climate: The global production of food is responsible for about one-third of all planet-warming gases. Think of the rainforests: Agriculture drove 90 to 99% of deforestation between 2011 and 2015 in its search for more grazing and crop land for farmed animals. Think of the oceans: 78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication—the polluting process which leads to “ocean dead zones”, where there is not enough dissolved oxygen for animals and plants to survive, is caused by Big Agriculture. Think of the workers: Despite being amongst the lowest-paid laborers in the US, food chain workers face disproportionately high risks for injury, illness, and exploitation. Think of the communities: factory farms threaten community access to clean water and air, leading to increased risk of death and illness, particularly amongst poorer or majority people of color communities. (For example, in rural North Carolina, factory farms are four times closer to majority-Black communities than majority-white ones.)

And think, of course, of the animals who suffer and die in the grip of the meat industry’s factory farming machine: The chickens, cows, pigs, and more who are marched to traumatic and early deaths in slaughterhouses. The birds and animals who die fully conscious and aware of their oncoming deaths. The fish suffocating to death—sometimes for several hours. The more than 20 million animals every year who die on their way to slaughterhouses in the US, dying from existing injuries, new injuries which come from being loaded or crushed in with other animals, dehydration, heat exhaustion, or an excruciation combination of all of the above. The newborn calves torn away from their mothers. The painful gestation crates imprisoning pigs—forced to give birth and feed their piglets for just three short weeks before they’re separated. The chickens who live in filthy, tiny battery cages and go through forced molting to maximize the industry’s egg production. The dairy cows shot at birth for the crime of being male.

This list could go on and on. The moral and ethical impact of factory farming is as grievous and tragic as its environmental and health impacts. Around the globe, we are all suffering—people and animals alike—in the name of factory farming.

But of course we need to eat. And because humans number in our billions, we need to eat at scale. So what are our options?

Can ethical farming replace factory farming?

Agriculture has existed for over 12,000 years. The scale of destruction that factory farms wreak, however, is relatively recent, with the industrialization of agriculture in the early 1900s. Surely there must be a more humane option?

Well, yes! Scientists, farmers, and advocates have been working for decades on alternatives that can feed our planet without destroying it. Some of these ideas—like regenerative ranching—are essentially a game of smoke and mirrors that replicate the destruction of factory farming without any real positive for the lives of humans, animals, or our planet. But others offer exciting new vistas, improvements from what our food industry and eating habits currently offer.

What is agroecology?

Agroecology, one of these alternatives, is a form of sustainable farming that attempts to work with—not “on"—our planet. It applies ecological concepts and principles to farming, with farming practices that mitigate climate change (by reducing emissions, recycling resources, and prioritizing local supply chains), and work with wildlife (to manage the impact of farming on local ecosystems). A report by the IDDRI think tank called ‘Ten Years for Agroecology in Europe’ modeled an agroecological future in Europe, and found that a wholesale transition could feed the European population healthily, maintain the export capacity, reduce Europe’s global food footprint, result in a 40% reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and help to restore biodiversity.

The advocates for agroecology emphasize the need for dietary change on a wide scale. In particular, people will need to shift toward ‘less and better meat’, with more plant-based diets.

Of course, this means that some animals will still be farmed for food, even if it is less of them. Thousands—if not millions—of animals will still meet early deaths. And ecoagriculture’s focus is more on looking after the native wildlife than the “grass-fed livestock” they highlight as part of the system. An admirable goal, but still not the ultimate quality of life animal advocates hope for.

Journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot highlights the idea that part of the problem might be our inability to let go of familiar images of farming—the idyllic barnyard from picture books, and nostalgia that has no real basis in reality for how we get our food anymore.

“Much of the discussion of food and farming in public life looks like an effort to recreate that happy place. As a result, many of the proposed solutions to the global food crisis seek, in effect, to revive medieval production systems—to feed a 21st-century population. It cannot end well,” says Monbiot.

As an example, he points to free-range chicken farming; undoubtedly an improvement for the chickens previously confined to filthy and miserable cages. “But the chicken is a non-native, omnivorous bird of the pheasant family. Just as we begin to recognise the damage caused by the release of pheasants into the countryside—they work through baby snakes, frogs, caterpillars, spiders, seedlings—the nostalgists seek to do the same with chickens. To the extent that chickens feed themselves in such systems, they mop up wildlife. In reality, they can’t survive this way, so they continue to be fed on soy, often produced on former rainforest and Cerrado savanna in Brazil.”

So the question of whether ethical farming can replace factory farming means we have to ask what does ethical farming look like?

For Monbiot and other activists, it might actually look like a factory.

The real solution to factory farming: a factory?

It’s not an inspiring, romantic image. But Monbiot argues that the solution for our food crisis is not “more fields, which means destroying even more wild ecosystems. It is partly better, more compact, cruelty-free and pollution-free factories.”

The solution Monbiot advances is called precision fermentation. It takes place in a laboratory; to take place at scale, it would necessarily take place in a factory. And it relies not on the pain of animals and destruction of the planet, but on the ingenuity of science.

What is precision fermentation?

Precision fermentation uses microorganisms like bacteria or yeast, and adapts their DNA to produce specific functional ingredients. Because bacteria replicate fast, the process of breeding them is easy: many can double in 20-30 minutes. And scientists now know how to steer that evolution to make sure they help to produce an ingredient… like milk, or cheese, or meat.

We already use precision fermentation. Rennet is a complex series of enzymes crucial in cheesemaking. It’s found naturally in the stomach of calves, so the industry used to kill baby cows in devastating numbers. Now, 80% of rennet worldwide is made from precision fermentation.

Insulin, the hormone used to treat diabetes, is another example. The vast majority of insulin worldwide is produced by precision fermentation. Before the technology broke through in the 1970s, insulin was harvested from the pancreases of cows and pigs. We killed 50,000 pigs for just one kilogram of insulin.

So already, precision fermentation is working to save millions of animals. And if the process continued, precision fermentation could also make a massive impact on the environment, climate, and people’s livelihoods. Precision fermentation uses microbes feeding on methanol (which can be made with renewable energy) and needs almost 1700 times less land than growing soy in the US—up until now the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein. Monbiot extends the calculation to point out that it might use 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than farming cows and lambs. Along with that, it would also enable “radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions… [and because] the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming.”

The farms of the future

The complex, scientific process of precision fermentation is not the idyllic picture of a barnyard in which animals and humans live in peaceful coexistence. But that barnyard was never completely real; it took animals out of their natural habitats to build a hierarchy in which we still saw animals as food. Precision fermentation swipes the whole hierarchy to the side. Its reduction of the massive amounts of land factory farms need for their gruesome industry would allow space for rewilding. Its microorganisms would allow us to recreate favorite ingredients with no animal suffering as part of the price tag. It’s a factory, sure. But a factory for the future, with all the hope that our best futures deserve.