Intensive animal farming

Intensive animal farming, industrial livestock production, and macro-farms, also known as factory farming, is a type of intensive agriculture used by the meat and dairy industry to maximize animal production while minimizing costs. To achieve this, agribusinesses keep livestock such as cattle, poultry, and fish at high stocking densities, at large scale, and using modern machinery, biotechnology, and pharmaceutics. The main products are meat, milk and eggs for human consumption.

While intensive animal farming can produce large amounts of animal products at a low cost with reduced human labor, it is controversial as it raises several ethical concerns, including animal exploitation, animal welfare issues (confinement, mutilations, stress-induced aggression, breeding complications), public health risks (zoonotic diseases, pandemic risks, antibiotic resistance), and worker exploitation, particularly of undocumented workers. Both intensive and extensive animal farming require significant land to feed the livestock and cause harm to the environment and wildlife through greenhouse gases, deforestation and eutrophication. The animal agriculture industry has been accused of actively supporting disinformation campaigns and preventing policies to address climate change.

Industrial livestock production is important in most of the large meat-producing regions, such as Brazil, the United States, China, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union, with expansion of megafarms or concentrated animal feeding operations.

History

Intensive animal farming is a relatively recent development in the history of agriculture, utilizing scientific discoveries and technological advances to enable changes in agricultural methods that increase production. Innovations from the late 19th century generally parallel developments in mass production in other industries in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. The discovery of vitamins and their role in animal nutrition, in the first two decades of the 20th century, led to vitamin supplements, which allowed chickens to be raised indoors.