Karen Nilsen
Cages fall silent. A major egg producer shuts down a cruel facility. Is this the end of factory farming?
The infrastructure of cruelty wasn't built overnight. And it won't disappear overnight. But make no mistake: Together we’re dismantling the factory farming machine, cage by cage, shed by shed, farm by farm.
Imagine a shed. Not just any shed—a battery cage facility that has, until now, been an instrument of relentless confinement. Thousands of hens, stacked in wire cages so tight they couldn’t spread their wings or experience anything close to what we’d call living. Cries of pain and frustration having echoed from every direction—a literal cacophony of distress.
But today, this shed is silent.
Hillandale Farms—the fourth largest egg producer in the US—recently chose to shut down this particular cage egg facility in Maine. Not because of a natural disaster, not because of any single intervention, but because the very infrastructure of cruelty is becoming obsolete. The company named the increasing shift away from battery cages—and its inability to turn a profit without depending on those cruel cages—as the primary reason for the closure.
Just think about what that means for a second. A facility designed entirely around the most extreme form of animal confinement can no longer justify its own existence. The very business model that once seemed inevitable—cramming living beings into spaces smaller than a sheet of paper—is now, at least in this case, economically unviable.
Could this be a sign of things to come?
Factory farming has made itself so widespread that today 99% of farm animals in the US are trapped within its grasp. The industry would like us to believe we're powerless to change that. But the numbers tell a different story.
In 2010, less than 5% of commercial laying hens were spared a life in a cage. Today that figure has soared to 40%. These aren’t just statistics. They're lives reclaimed. Each percentage point is millions of living beings who will never know the crushing physical and psychological torment of a battery cage.
But this isn’t changing without a fight. Activists like you are showing up, day after day. Caring donors are funding the work of relentless campaigners and corporate negotiators who refuse to accept “no” for an answer. Voters are demanding change. And consumers are refusing to accept cruelty as the default business model. Together, we’re making it unsustainable for companies to continue treating animals as disposable units of production. Together, we’re changing the egg industry’s definition of conventional into controversial.
Factory farming was built on this brutal but flawed premise: that businesses would always have the freedom to abuse animals with impunity; that cruelty was not just acceptable, but necessary. We're proving that's a lie. Cage by cage, farm by farm, we're dismantling an entire system designed to maximize profit at the expense of animals.
This Hillandale facility? It’s a monument to that dismantling. A shed that will never again echo with the sounds of distressed, confined beings. A space that now stands as a testament to the possibility of a different future.
Having spent time inside one of these “farms” and witnessing the suffering of battery hens up close, I know this silence is the sound of victory.
Sometimes, progress is quiet. These are the moments that crack the foundation of a system built on suffering. And every time this happens, we change the course of history. That’s only possible because of people like you who refuse to look away, who keep pushing, who believe we can build something better.
Want to keep building this future? Let’s go.
