Industrial Animal Agriculture in the United States: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)

Abstract

In the United States, industrial animal factories called “CAFOs” (concentrated animal feeding operations) raise most land-based food animals, reducing their own production costs by intensively confining farm animals. However, they do so at the expense of the animals, who suffer horrific institutionalized abuses through intensive confinement, as well as the public, which endures public health endangerment and environmental degradation from CAFOs’ air and water pollution. Federal environmental laws potentially govern the industry’s pollution, but these laws have been largely ineffective at reining in CAFO environmental harms. State and federal laws have also failed to address CAFO animal abuses. Further, the CAFO industry has successfully promoted state laws that limit the public’s ability to document and communicate CAFO threats to public health, the environment, and animal welfare. However, some hope remains: citizen groups diligently and creatively use legal challenges and legislative advocacy to address the worst CAFO practices, and the American public is increasingly alarmed by CAFOs’ lax oversight and supportive of reforms in regulating this industry.