By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Agriculture policy may not be the most high-profile political issue, but it’s an immensely important one that significantly shapes millions of lives — human and animal alike. During his presidency, Donald Trump’s actions on agriculture, animal welfare and factory farming were a stark departure from that of his predecessor, and could be a hint of things to come if Trump wins a second term in November. Let’s take a look at what we could expect from a second Trump presidency when it comes to these issues.

In recent weeks, Trump has begun saying that he wants to “make America healthy again.” He appears to have gotten this slogan from former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. Kennedy speaks a lot about improving Americans’ diets and health, and Trump has recently started using some of the same language, pledging to “make America healthy again” and “get toxic chemicals out of our environment [and] our food supply” at a recent rally in Pennsylvania.

As many observers have noted, however, this is more or less the opposite of what Trump actually did during his presidency. In addition to reversing a ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that can be fatal to humans, Trump’s deregulation of factory farms made it more difficult to track toxic pollutants in the air and water supply, and his USDA moved to let schools reduce the amount of fruits and vegetables served to students at lunch.

How Can a President Impact Meat and Agriculture Policies?

When it comes to implementing and changing the country’s agricultural policies, presidents have a number of tools at their disposal.

They can, of course, sign or veto bills sent to them by Congress. A president can also signal to Congress which legislation they’d like to see on their desk — and if the president’s party also controls the House of Representatives and the Senate, such signaling might actually be effective.

Perhaps more significantly, the president has significant latitude when it comes to shaping and implementing federal regulations. Much of this has to do with how they manage the various agencies under their control, says Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of the nonprofit Farm Forward.

“Federal agencies, and the way in which the agencies operate — how they interpret their own regulatory mandates, [and] how they choose to be more or less aggressive towards certain industries” all fall under the president’s purview, deCoriolis tells Sentient.

This element of the equation is particularly significant in the meat and agriculture industries, as both are subject to significant — though not necessarily comprehensive — regulations.

As we’ll see, Trump had a significant impact on U.S. agriculture policy, and he used all of the above tools to do so.

How Did Trump Impact Farm and Agriculture Policy As President?

Trump struck a pro-business, anti-regulation stance toward agriculture and meat producers during his time in the Oval Office, and took many actions to assist those industries — sometimes, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the expense of the general public.

In general, Trump’s actions as president also indicated a lack of concern for animal welfare. However, there are a couple of significant exceptions to this that are worth highlighting.

First, Trump signed a Farm Bill in 2018 that outlawed the slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption — something that, incredibly, was only illegal in six states prior to that bill’s signing. That bill also reauthorized a program that provides federal assistance not only to victims of domestic violence, but also to their companion animals, as they transition out of abusive relationships.

The next year, Trump signed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act  (PACT). This law strengthened existing laws against animal cruelty by closing a loophole that made it difficult to prosecute acts of animal cruelty that took place on federal land and in federal facilities.

To be clear, Trump didn’t vocally champion either of these policies, and the PACT Act was so uncontroversial that it passed unanimously in the Senate. Nevertheless, the former president could have plausibly killed either initiative if he’d so desired, and he didn’t.

But again, these were the exceptions. Most of what the Trump administration did in the agricultural realm did not improve the lives of animals, and instead empowered factory farmers and agribusiness interests.

Is Trump Funded by Agribusiness?

During his 2016 campaign, Trump did receive some donations from some major players in the agriculture industry. But it would be wrong to blame these donors for Trump’s pro-agribusiness stance, simply because these donations, in the grand scheme of things, were relatively small.

According to data from OpenSecrets, Trump received around $4.5 million in agribusiness money during the 2016 cycle. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not exactly eye-popping either, and amounted to a relatively small share of Trump’s total haul from donors that year. By contrast, Sen. Marco Rubio received almost $7 million in agribusiness donations during that same cycle — and he didn’t even make it out of the Republican primary.

That said, Trump has received almost $10 million in agribusiness donations this cycle, more than twice as much as in 2016. If nothing else, this does suggest that the industry was pleased — or at least not displeased — with his actions the last time he was president.

Trump Withdrew Organic Livestock Rules

Food in the U.S. must be produced in accordance with specific standards in order to be labeled “organic,” and the USDA is responsible for writing and enforcing these standards. At the very end of his second term, President Obama finalized a sweeping update to the organic standards for livestock that, while far from perfect or comprehensive, would significantly improve the welfare of farmed animals.

Under Trump, however, the USDA withdrew this rule — which was over 10 years in the making and had garnered overwhelming public support during its public comment period — before it could be implemented. This meant that the previous rules, which have been widely criticized for their vague language surrounding animal welfare standards, remained in place.

Ultimately, President Biden reversed Trump’s decision and implemented the new livestock standards; as such, Trump’s move to withdraw the rules amounted to little more than a three year delay. It’s also worth noting that, while the new rules were generally lauded by animal rights activists, they contained some significant loopholes and still allowed for certain gruesome farming practices, like the debeaking of chickens, to continue on organic farms.

One could argue, however, that this makes Trump’s decision even more damning than it otherwise would have been, as it indicated that even a modest improvement in animal welfare was unpalatable to his administration.

Trump Fought Against Regulating Factory Farm Emissions

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), more commonly known as factory farms, release massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the air. This exacerbates global warming and, in many cases, sickens people in nearby communities.

There are several federal laws that, in theory, would require CAFOs to track their greenhouse gas emissions and report them to the federal government. This would be the first step to eventually empowering the government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from factory farms.

However, thanks to a series of legal loopholes, the largest factory farms are exempt from these reporting requirements. This is largely due to several actions taken by the Trump administration.

In 2018, Trump signed a law that exempted factory farms from the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), a decades-old law that requires businesses to notify federal emergency response agencies when they spill, leak or otherwise accidentally discharge hazardous waste.

The next year, Trump’s EPA adopted a rule that exempted factory farms from the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), which is similar to CERCLA but covers state and local emergency agencies instead.

Trump Ordered Meatpacking Plants to Stay Open During COVID

In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, businesses involved in food preparation came under heightened scrutiny due to the highly contagious nature of the disease and the centrality of food in American life.

Three months into the pandemic, Trump signed an executive order compelling meatpacking plants to stay open amidst the outbreak, despite mounting public health concerns. Citing the Defense Production Act, it ordered the Secretary of Agriculture to “take all appropriate action under that [act] to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations” during the pandemic, even when some state and local governments were taking measures to close those plants.

It was later revealed that the meat industry had been vigorously lobbying the Trump administration to enact such an order in the weeks before Trump issued it. The North American Meat Institute (NAMI), a trade group, had drafted a hypothetical executive order on meatpacking plants and sent it to the administration a week before Trump issued the order. Certain parts of the final order mirrored the language in NAMI’s proposal.

Two weeks before signing the executive order, he announced the formation of an advisory committee to guide efforts on reopening the economy in the wake of the pandemic. Its members included several meat industry CEOs, such as Ronald Cameron, a wealthy Republican donor and chair of the fourth-largest poultry producer in the country.

DeCoriolis cites Cameron’s appointment as a key development in the administration’s COVID response — and the subsequent consequences of that response.

“The Trump administration elevating a meat executive to a position of influence in its COVID response had huge effects on workers, primarily in slaughterhouses, many of whom got sick and died because of their exposure at work,” deCoriolis says.

In the final tally, at least 59,000 workers at meatpacking plants contracted COVID in the first year of the pandemic, 269 of whom died. A subsequent congressional investigation later found that the president and CEO of NAMI had praised the USDA for “representing our industry’s interests” in the weeks leading to the executive order.

Miscellaneous Policies, Initiatives and Actions

The day he took office, Trump suspended all proposed regulations that hadn’t yet been finalized or published, which included withdrawing a rule that would have ended the painful procedure of horse soring. However, the courts later determined that this decision was unlawful, and the rule was eventually implemented under Biden.

In 2019, Trump’s USDA came under fire again after a damning Washington Post report about the agency’s threadbare enforcement of animal welfare laws. In one particularly controversial incident, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture reportedly blocked the agency’s own inspectors from rescuing hundreds of heat-distressed raccoons they’d discovered in a metal shed in Iowa.

In 2020, Trump’s Department of the Interior issued a rule that allows a variety of controversial hunting practices in Alaska’s national reserves, such as shooting hibernating black bears in their dens and hunting swimming caribou from motor boats.

The Bottom Line

It’s worth keeping in mind that the past actions of an elected official aren’t always a perfect indicator of what they’ll do in the future; plenty of politicians have changed, or “evolved,” their stances on various issues over time, and Trump is certainly one of them.

At the same time, Trump’s history of policies on agriculture and factory farms strongly suggests that, if elected to a second term, he would be much more of an ally to agribusiness and factory farmers than to animals, consumers or the environment.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Advocates said a lack of animal welfare laws is leading to pain and suffering on American factory farms.

Close to 99% of livestock is now raised in industrial-type facilities, where animal welfare groups said efficiency and profitability take precedence over animals' well-being.

Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said while more than a dozen states have banned what are deemed torture-like confinement for animals, there is no federal law protecting them from abuse.

"If most people were aware that the animal they're sitting down to eat couldn't move throughout their entire life, just to give one example, I don't think they would want to support that," Winders contended.

Winders pointed out the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires animals be knocked unconscious before they are killed but corporations running factory farms are lobbying for the law to be weakened in order to speed up meat production.

So-called "ag-gag" laws in several states criminally penalize those who seek to expose animal suffering on farms, in slaughterhouses and at animal auctions. Winders added she is concerned a second Trump Administration could allow factory farm owners to further erode any remaining health and safety standards.

"They've been able to carve themselves out from complying with the laws that everybody else has to comply with," Winders asserted. "That certainly includes cruelty-to-animals laws. It also includes pollution laws, worker-safety laws, the whole gamut."

Winders advised people concerned with animal welfare to try more plant-based alternatives to meat and learn more about how their food is raised. She stressed as consumers increasingly turn to "organic" and "free-range" meat options, corporations are working to lower the standards for what those labels mean and the conditions under which those animals can be raised.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every year, humans around the world eat 360 million metric tons of meat. That’s a lot of animals — or more precisely, a lot of dead animals. At any given point, there are 23 billion animals in factory farms, and countless more being farmed or caught in the sea. As a result, the number of animals killed for food every day is almost too large of a number to comprehend.

Animal Agriculture, by the Numbers

Before getting into the death toll, it’s worth remembering that animals suffer immensely in factory farms, and on the way to slaughterhouses, and in slaughterhouses. Around 99 percent of livestock are raised in factory farms, and factory farms prioritize efficiency and profitability over animal welfare. There are few laws protecting livestock from abuse and mistreatment on farms, and violators of those laws are rarely prosecuted.

The result is a significant amount of pain and misery for farmed animals, and that suffering is an important thing to keep in mind as we dive into the numbers behind these animals’ deaths.

How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?

Quantifying animal slaughter is relatively straightforward — except when it comes to fish and other aquatic life. There are two reasons for this.

First, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which tracks global livestock statistics, measures fish production in weight, not number of animals. Second, the FAO’s numbers only include farmed fish, not those caught in the wild.

To overcome the first challenge, researchers attempt to convert the total pounds of fish caught into the total number of fish themselves. Obviously, this is an inexact science that requires quite a bit of guesswork, and as such, estimates of fish slaughter tend to vary significantly, and are generally expressed in relatively wide ranges.

As for the second challenge, researchers Alison Mood and Phil Brooke have attempted to quantify the number of wild fish caught every year, first by pulling data from multiple sources and then by converting the total weight of wild fish to an estimated number of animals.

The following numbers are based on 2022 data from the FAO, except for the fish tallies: for farmed fish, the low end of the range draws on research by the Sentience Institute, while the high end is based on an analysis by Mood and Brooke. For wild-caught fish, the low end and high ends of the estimate are both based on a range provided by Mood and Brooke.

With that being said, here are the best estimates of how many animals are killed every day on a per-species basis.

• Chickens: 206 million/day


• Farmed Fish: Between 211 million and 339 million


• Wild Fish: Between 3 billion and 6 billion


• Ducks: 9 million


• Pigs: 4 million


• Geese: 2 million


• Sheep: 1.7 million


• Rabbits: 1.5 million


• Turkeys: 1.4 million


• Goats: 1.4 million


• Cows: 846,000


• Pigeons & other birds: 134,000


• Buffalo: 77,000


• Horses: 13,000


• Other animals: 13,000

In total, this means that every 24 hours, between 3.4 and 6.5 billion animals are killed for food. That comes to a lower-end estimate of 1.2 trillion animals killed every year. That’s a positively staggering number. For contrast, anthropologists estimate that the total number of human beings who’ve ever existed is just 117 billion.


A couple of things stand out about this data.


For one, if we exclude fish, the overwhelming majority of animals slaughtered for food are chickens. This isn’t a surprise, given that poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg — an increase of almost 600 percent.


The consumption of other meats didn’t rise nearly as much over that period. There was a modest increase in per-capita pork consumption, from 7.97 kg to 13.89 kg; for every other meat, consumption has remained relatively stagnant over the last 60 years.


Also notable is the relatively high death tolls of animals that many Americans might not think of as meat sources for humans. Slaughtering horses for meat is illegal in the U.S., but that doesn’t stop people around the world from killing 13,000 of them every day. Rabbit meat isn’t a common dish in America, but it’s wildly popular in China and the European Union.


Animals Slaughtered Who Are Never Eaten


One thing that’s particularly frustrating about all of this, from both an efficiency standpoint and an animal welfare standpoint, is that a sizable share of the animals killed for food are never even eaten.


A 2023 study published in Sustainable Production and Consumption found that 24 percent of livestock animals die prematurely at some point in the supply chain: they either die on the farm before they’re slaughtered, die in transit on their way to the slaughterhouse, die at a slaughterhouse but aren’t processed for food, or are thrown away by grocers, restaurants and consumers.


This wasted food adds up to about 18 billion animals a year. The meat from these animals never reaches the lips of any human, making their deaths — which, it should be stressed, are often excruciatingly painful and bloody — essentially pointless. What’s more, this tally doesn’t even include seafood; if it did, the amount of wasted meat would be many orders of magnitude higher.


In the U.S., around a quarter of animals in this category die on the farm from disease, injury or other causes. Another seven percent die in transit, and 13 percent are thrown away by grocers after being processed into meat.


Some of these “wasted deaths” are part and parcel of factory farm operations. Every year, around six billion male chicks are intentionally killed, or “culled,” on factory farms due to the fact that they can’t lay eggs. In the seafood industry, billions of aquatic animals are caught by accident every year — a phenomenon called bycatch — and are either killed or injured as a result.


It’s worth noting that these numbers vary significantly from country to country. The global average for wasted meat is around 2.4 animals per person per year, but in the U.S., it’s 7.1 animals per person — almost three times higher. On the other end of the spectrum is India, where only 0.4 animals per person are wasted every year.


The Hidden Death Tolls of the Environmental Destruction of the Meat Industry


The above death tolls only count animals who are farmed or caught with the goal of being eaten by humans. But the meat industry claims many other animal lives in more indirect ways.


For instance, cattle farming is the number one driver of deforestation around the world, and deforestation inadvertently kills a whole lot of animals that were never intended to be food in the first place. In the Amazon alone, 2,300 animals are at risk of extinction due to deforestation, as the clearing of trees wipes out their natural habitats and deprives them of the resources they need to survive. 


Another example is water pollution. The manure from livestock farms often leaks into nearby waterways, and this can have a ripple effect that results in many more animal deaths: Manure contains phosphorus and nitrogen, both of which promote the growth of algae; this eventually leads to harmful algal blooms, which deplete the oxygen in the water and clog the gills of fish, killing them.


All of this is a long way of saying that killing one animal for food often results in many other animals dying.


The Bottom Line


The astonishing number of animals killed for food every day, both directly and indirectly, is a sobering reminder of the impact our appetite for meat has on the world around us. From the animals slaughtered on farms to the creatures killed by agriculture-driven deforestation and farm pollution, the death toll that a meat-based diet demands is much higher and more far-reaching than many people realize.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the largest health threats to humanity, according to the World Health Organization. It's been over 40 years since the discovery of a new antibiotic class; an ominous gap in modern medicine given the rise of superbugs and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The spread and severity of antibiotic resistance is exacerbated by antibiotic overuse and lax prescribing standards, but also by animal agriculture. Depending on the country, roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics produced are used in agriculture to prevent disease, or enhance animal growth. This overuse not only fosters the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals, but in humans who consume that meat.

At a critical meeting last month, the United Nations made a global pledge to reduce deaths from antibiotic resistance, which includes clamping down on antibiotic use in animal farming. Sentient's recent investigation in collaboration with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Cargill routinely uses critically important antibiotics in livestock, despite rules from the FDA and warnings from the WHO.

It's clear that farmers need to reduce their dependence on antibiotics. But a complete ban would be a naive solution, says Jennifer Ronholm, Canada's research chair in agricultural microbiology and professor at McGill University. Ronholm argues a ban could result in food shortages and an uptick in livestock diseases. That's why her lab aims to uncover whether they can design and optimize animal microbiomes to lessen the need for antibiotic use in agriculture.

How Farming Practices Lead to Antibiotic Resistance

A lot of the pathogens we're seeing with high drug resistance originate from animals. Since the 1940s, roughly 50 percent of zoonotic diseases have been traced back to agriculture. "They're circulating in agriculture environments, picking up the [antibiotic resistance] genes and then circulating back to humans. So, figuring out a way to cut that zoonotic transfer feels like a really effective way to deal with the problem," Ronholm tells Sentient.

To prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases, a 2022 paper called for reducing meat consumption to alleviate animal confinement on farms, and also to avoid clearing more land for agriculture. The paper's author, Matthew Hayek, described animal agriculture as a "trap of rising infectious diseases," and urged that escaping this trap means "limiting meat consumption."

Poor conditions on farms - such as cramped facilities and poor ventilation - can exacerbate the spread of antibiotic resistance. Recent estimates found 1.7 billion animals in the U.S. live on factory farms, up nearly 50 percent since 20 years ago, in response to growing demand for animal products. Further, factory farms produce twice as much sewage as the country's population. These confined conditions can create physical and mental stress for the animals, which may lead to weakened immune systems, making them more susceptible to infection. This, in tandem with the farm's high amounts of waste, creates an optimal environment for disease spread.

A study looking at the effects of various pig farming conditions found lower levels of antibiotic resistance in organic and alternative farms than in conventional farms. The authors suggest the lower levels were from tighter regulation of antibiotic use, straw bedding and open ventilation.

Optimizing Animal Microbiomes to Prevent Disease

The premise of Ronholm's research ties into a key microbial concept of competitive exclusion, or simply, that particular healthy gut bacteria will outcompete harmful bacteria. By maintaining a balanced microbiome, this competition can prevent infection and disease from taking place.

At a recent presentation for World Antimicrobial Resistance Congress Week, Ronholm explained how her lab isolates these bacteria that competitively exclude infectious bacteria from healthy animals. The goal is then to create a tailored probiotic solution that optimizes animal's microbiome to lessen reliance on antibiotics for treatment.

Ronholm is particularly interested in mastitis infection, which is the most common disease in dairy cattle. Cows can get mastitis when bacteria infect their udder from the process of milking, dirty milking equipment or from their environment. Mastitis infection causes udder pain, swelling, and may leave the cow disorientated and feeble. The probiotic, when developed, could be applied to the cow's udder daily after milking. This probiotic could then strengthen their udder microbiome to fend off infection.

In a 2022 study, her team looked at Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria known for causing mastitis, and identified microbial differences in the cows who were susceptible to infection or not. The results showed three bacteria, most notably Aerococcus urinaeequi, as being protective against infection. In a further study published last month, the researchers also looked at mastitis caused by Escherichia coli infection and found that A. urinaeequi again prevented microbial colonization. Both papers were funded, in part, by a Canadian initiative called The Mastitis Network that aims to prevent mastitis and reduce antibiotic use on farms.

Erika Ganda, an assistant professor of food animal microbiomes at Penn State University, attended Ronholm's presentation and says the prospects of her research are "fantastic." Ganda's lab researches animal microbiomes to tackle antimicrobial resistance, while also bolstering health and food production.

For example, although antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock and poultry were banned in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration, probiotics can act as a growth promotion alternative. Disease prevention and growth promotion aren't mutually exclusive, Ganda says. "It costs energy to fight disease, so if that energy doesn't go into the immune system but goes instead into making milk or putting on muscle mass, that is a way of growth promotion." In Ganda's 2024 paper, probiotic supplementation improved growth in broiler chickens compared to other natural sources like essential oils. However, it's important to note that various fast growth methods in chickens come with animal welfare concerns.

From Research Lab to Farm Use

While Ronholm's team has yet to put one of these synthetic microbiomes in an animal, they are hopeful to get to this stage soon. "We have one product that we tried in a pre-clinical trial this year that worked well. I think in less than 10 years these types of products will be on the market," Ronholm says, but notes that her lab is purely focused on the research, not the business end of things.

An important next step is to understand the exact mechanisms of these gut bacterial battles that prevent infection."It's possible that they won't be as effective as antibiotics and people will not want to switch. But I don't foresee large limitations, efficacy issues or scaling factors," Ronholm says.

Research suggests that probiotics, among other gut-enhancing products, may also ward off avian flu - a serious disease that affects both animals and humans. Probiotics appear to clear harmful microbes and repair inflammatory damage in later stages of the infection. However, an exact probiotic cocktail to protect against avian flu in all of its infectious stages requires further work, the researchers concluded.

Managing this issue of antibiotic resistance on farms, at its core, boils down to proper management practices and vaccination strategies on farms, Ganda says. "The cleaner [and] the healthier animals are, the less antibiotics we're going to need, the less antimicrobial resistance you're going to find," she says. For now, researchers like Ronholm and Ganda endeavor to create tailored and effective solutions that can be added into farm systems easily to protect animals from infection and mitigate the larger issue of antibiotic resistance. Other researchers are looking into viruses that kill harmful bacteria in animals and selective breeding to produce animals that are more resistant to infection.

However, the onus is ultimately on the industry to address their role in this growing global public health challenge, which is predicted to kill 10 million people annually by 2050. Whether new strategies such as targeted probiotics are incorporated on a large scale into farming practices is also up to the agricultural industry. Antibiotic resistance is becoming increasingly widespread in both humans and animals, and the cramped and unsanitary conditions on factory farms are clearly a systemic root of the problem.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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