By Nina Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Brent Hershey entered the hog business, he was told that every pork producer in America uses gestation crates on their farm. Gestation crates are metal enclosures, typically seven feet long and two feet wide, where a pregnant female pig, a sow, is kept during her pregnancy. The stalls are so small that sows typically cannot sit or lie down for four months — the entirety of their pregnancy while in the stall. And these gestation crates, long a fixture in industrial pork production, are at the center of a fierce debate between industry groups and the hog farmers who say they don’t want to go back to using them.

Florida was the first state to ban gestation crates in 2002. At the time, Hershey thought Floridians had no idea what they were doing — that they didn’t “understand good production.” Twenty years and a California ballot initiative later, Hershey would be tearing all the gestation crates out of his 1,000-head Pennsylvania sow farm and his 2,000 head Delaware sow operation.

The new laws got Hershey rethinking the crates. “We thought, look at the life that we are asking the animal to live,” he says. “They’re going to be safe, but they can’t walk, they can’t turn around. At the same time, we started going to see some barns that animals were free in. We looked at that and thought, wow, that really looks more natural.”

California’s Proposition 12 and Question 3 in Massachusetts are state ballot measures that banned the sale of pork born to gestation crate-sows. These laws also offer protections to egg-laying hens and veal calves. Organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) have long called for Prop 12 to be overturned, and in 2023, their case against the California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary traveled from the Ninth Circuit to the Supreme Court of the United States. The highest court eventually upheld the constitutionality of Prop 12, but the two industry groups did not drop their opposition. Instead, they shifted focus to Congress.

The public position of the Farm Bureau and the National Pork Producers Council on gestation crates has never wavered — both groups insist pork farmers do not want the ban — yet Hershey and other farmers say differently. “As soon as the Supreme Court announced this decision, within weeks, we tore all our gestation crates out,” Hershey said at a briefing for the U.S. House of Representatives. “Now we’re on [the California] standard, and we’re doing better. It’s very ironic.”

Not long after the decision, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall introduced the “Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act” to the Senate, which would prohibit “against interference by state and local governments with production of items in other states.” In effect, this bill would overturn Prop 12. And in the May 2024 version of the Farm Bill, House lawmakers included language similar to the EATS Act that would “ensure that producers of covered livestock are not subject to a patchwork of State laws restricting access to a national market.”

Farmers like Hershey are concerned that the language, if passed, could destroy the more humane pork market that has been created, nationwide and internationally, for farmers looking to serve the California market. California is the 5^th largest economy in the world, and the state gobbles up close to 15 percent of the country’s entire pork consumption.

Yet the Farm Bureau and the Pork Council continue to deliver a national campaign that all pork farmers are in favor of the EATS Act and that Prop 12 is killing their farms. “It’s not true at all,” Hershey tells Sentient. “They’re saying that they represent us all, but they do not represent us at all.”

Calling “Baloney” on the Farm Bureau

In a statement released after the Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall wrote, “This law has the potential to devastate small family farms across the nation through unnecessary and expensive renovations, and every family will ultimately pay for the law through higher food prices.”

“I call baloney on that,” says Iowa hog farmer Ron Mardesen, who has been raising hogs in Iowa since the 1980s. Mardesen is a farmer with Niman Ranch, a network of farmers who produce meat that is hormone-free, cage-free and compliant with Prop 12.

Mardesen sees a lack of representation for independent farmers. “We’ve lost 90 percent of independent hog farmers in the last 35, 40 years. The National Pork Producers just sit and bobble their head every time everybody wants to get bigger and wants to get more consolidated.”

In a recent advertisement campaign backing the EATS Act, the Pork Producers Council highlights “Cindy,” a fictional character who runs a barbeque food truck that sources from Perkins Family Pig Farm. Cindy’s operation shutters due to rising pork prices, and the farm does too.

A note with the video reads: “This scenario could soon become a reality across America.” The video stresses that Prop 12 especially hurts smaller farmers: “A farm that would have been transferred to future generations deteriorates into ruin or is sold to a big company,” the narrator says. “Proposition 12 has burdened every link in the food supply chain, from the farmer to the business owner.”

Yet Missouri sow farmer Hank Wurtz says he has no idea where this is coming from. All of the farms he knows are converting to Prop 12. If a sow farm is closing, it is not because of Prop 12, Wurtz adds.

 “I know for a fact that there are many [gestational] crate farms in this country right now that are considering shutting down,” he says. “They’re not able to be viable anymore, but that’s not caused by California. That’s caused by 20,000 sow operations going up all over the Midwest. It is the rest of the industry’s large-scale operations that are making the small family farms irrelevant.”

According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since 1990, “the number of farms with hogs has declined by more than 70 percent as individual enterprises have grown larger.” Meanwhile, the number of hogs continues to grow in the U.S., primarily in concentrated animal feeding operations that typically house anywhere from 750 to tens of thousands of hogs per building.

Rising input costs and stagnant pig prices are causing smaller, independent farmers to turn to alternative strategies to stay afloat.

A New Type of Sow Farm

When Prop 12 was passed in 2019, Wurtz saw an opportunity in a niche market. According to Wurtz’s research, sow farmers have been getting approximately the same price — around $42 — for piglets throughout the past ten years. With Prop 12, Wurtz saw an opportunity to make his farm more economically viable.

“We love farming, but we need to be able to make money and support our families,” he says. “When Prop 12 came along and they’re offering around $50 a pig, that’s a game changer.”

Wurtz says he has invested $12 million into building a brand-new Prop 12 sow barn to replace his gestation crate operation in Northwest Missouri.

“It wouldn’t have been feasible in 2019 to go build a $12 million farm based on just the animal humane aspect of it. We wouldn’t have been able to bankroll it. It had to pay around 30 percent more because it cost 30 percent more to make it Prop 12,” he says.

When the law was challenged by the Supreme Court, Wurtz felt abandoned by the NPPC, and envisioned a future where small, family farms like his would no longer be able to exist.

“We were actually shaking in our boots at that time,” he says. “We’d be no longer financially viable.”

Wurtz did not get into the Prop 12 business for animal welfare — he’s sure to clarify that. But the increased quality of life for his sows has been an unanticipated benefit.

“We didn’t feel like we were abusing our animals all those years. But in hindsight, now looking at the farm that we have in Missouri here, I get the point,” he tells Sentient. “If you grow up a certain way, you just think crates are normal.”

Wurtz says he knows a lot of farmers who do not want to speak out in support of Prop 12 because they do not want to be associated with animal rights activists.

“But the fact of the matter is, Prop 12 is one of the best things, economically, that’s happened to us in a very long time,” he says. “That’s good for American farmers. We need to make a living somehow. If Californians want to pay more for it, we welcome that.”

The Farm Bill as a Legislative Vehicle

The last farm bill to pass through the U.S. Congress was in December 2018. It expired in Sept. 2023, got a one-year extension, and then expired again at the end of September 2024. The EATS Act is included in the House Republicans’ version of the 2024 farm bill draft.

“[The EATS Act] was introduced with the strategy of them trying to attach it to the farm bill,” says Farm Action Fund Senior Director of Programs Christian Lovell at an EATS Act event held at George Washington Law School. “I don’t think anybody thinks that a bill like that would be considered as a standalone item.”

The EATS Act is unprecedented in that the broad language of the bill could have larger ramifications to states’ rights than just what kind of food can be sold. According to a report by the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, certain terms in the bill, like “agricultural products” are “defined so broadly as to potentially include vaccines, vitamins, and even narcotics.” The Act could even threaten the labeling of meat, including where it comes from.

At the G.W. Law event, Lovell emphasized that consumers care about where their food comes from and how it was raised, and the EATS Act could obstruct that information.

“The corporations that control our food system, it’s almost like they want to hang a veil over that,” he says. “They don’t want the consumer to see anything until it gets to the grocery store shelves, and that’s because those corporations have rigged a food system that is extractive to rural communities like the ones I grew up in and now live in.”

For Mardesen, the fact that the EATS Act was just slipped into the farm bill makes the prospect of its passage more likely.

“I have not seen this as a hill that many people are willing to die on. The thing that scares me, and it really worries me, is that, look, if we get into this 11th hour wheeling and dealing, and you’ve got somebody who says, ‘Okay, I’ll do this. If you do this,’ I don’t know how pivotal this is [for legislators] at this point,” he says.

The saddest part for Mardesen is the impact this could have on farmers like Wurtz, who have shifted their entire operation for Prop 12.

“So many guys have already made the commitment, already made the investment, already made the transition to gestation-crate-free systems in order to reap the benefits from the higher markets, and that stool is going to be kicked right out from underneath them,” he says. “And that’s a lot of good, hard working pork producers that we need.”

That includes hog farmers like Hershey, who came to question what he once believed to be a necessary part of his work: “If, hypothetically, that model was the cheapest way to produce pork, putting pigs in cages that can’t turn around and can’t walk for four months at a time, if that’s legitimate, then you gotta ask the question, ‘yes, but is that okay?’”


Nina Elkadi 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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