Humans Invent Factory Farming

During the past 50 years, traditional small-scale farms have been replaced by massive, mechanized agricultural operations. Technological advances have allowed factory farmers to produce huge quantities of food and ship it anywhere in the world, and agribusiness entrepreneurs soon bought out and consolidated smaller agrarian operations. When America was founded, roughly 90 percent of Americans lived on farms.¹⁸

Today, the percentage of Americans who farm for a living has fallen to less than 2 percent.¹⁹ The "family farm" is now practically extinct.

The industrialization of animal production has led to huge factory farms that raise thousands of animals in cramped, filthy warehouses. This crowding, combined with other cost-cutting practices (like grinding up the scraps from dead animals and feeding them back to the survivors) and huge agricultural subsidies (corporate welfare) has made meat cheap and readily available. In addition, our natural aversion to killing animals for food is bypassed by the modern farming system-immigrants and poor, rural Americans do the dangerous dirty work in the slaughterhouses, and the rest of us are never confronted with the task of killing the animals ourselves (or even having to watch it happen). Read more about factory farming.

Since 1950, the per capita consumption of meat has almost doubled; now that animal flesh has become relatively cheap and easily available, deadly ailments like heart disease, strokes, cancer, and obesity have spread to people across the socio-economic spectrum.²⁰ And as the Western lifestyle spills over into less developed areas in Asia and Africa, they, too, have started to die from the diseases associated with meat-based diets.

Read more.