2 days Ago By Philip Lymbery
Imagine a world where enough food is produced to feed twice the global population, yet half of it is wasted. This is the reality driven by factory farming – a system that squanders precious resources and exacerbates hunger and environmental degradation. Factory farming, or industrial animal agriculture, is often seen as a necessary evil to meet the world's growing demand for meat.
Chickens, pigs, and cows are confined in cages, crates, or feedlots and fed grain. However, what isn’t widely known is how it devours vast amounts of food that could otherwise nourish billions. You see, factory farming wastes way more than it produces.
How much is wasted? Enough to feed two billion people – more than the expected growth in world population by 2050. We could feed all these extra people by simply halting factory farming. Let me explain.
45% of grain used as animal feed When we think of food waste, we rightly recall food binned in our homes or in supermarket supply chains or crops left to rot in fields. Yet, the single biggest cause of food loss on the planet goes largely unrecognised: the ‘ghost’ food waste caused by feeding perfectly good food to factory-farmed animals. About 45 per cent of the global grain harvest is used as animal feed , with much of the food value lost in the process.
By doing so, the rise of industrial animal rearing has put farmed animals in direct competition with people for food. And people are losing out. Gone is the natural symbiosis of cows grazing grassy pastures or chickens pecking for insects.
Converting things we can’t eat into things we can. Instead, they are fed grain that could be making bread, pie crusts, or pizza. Food factories in reverse By grain-feeding animals, factory farms are food factories in reverse – they waste more than they produce.
It takes several times the amount of wheat, corn, or soya to provide an equivalent in meat; for every hundred calories of cereals we feed to farmed animals, we receive just 7 to 27 per cent of those calories back in the form of meat. Protein loss is just as wasteful. For every hundred grams of plant protein fed to animals, we get back between 13 and 37 per cent as factory-farmed meat.
Now, if you were to invest £100 and got back £37 or worse, near a tenner, would you see that as a good deal? No. So why do we do it with food? The loss of food is, therefore, colossal. Factory farming is a big reason why we’re managing to turn a world of plenty into one of growing scarcity and hunger.
But the harm doesn’t end there. No soil? Game over Scientists warn that we have just years left to solve climate change, yet planet-damaging animal farming is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the direct emissions of all the world’s planes, trains, and cars put together. The use of chemical sprays for growing feed crops intensively has led to a decline in the pollinating insects vital for the very existence of a third of all our food.
Antibiotics, more than two-thirds of which are fed to farmed animals, could soon stop working. And then there’s the effect of industrial agriculture on our soil, with the UN warning that carry on as we are, and soils could be depleted within 60 years. No soil, no food.
Game over. So, with the future of our children at stake, the big question is, how can we turn this around and fast? The solution is simple The answer lies firmly in restoring farmed animals to nature-friendly farms using regenerative, agroecological, and organic practices. With animals kept on pasture, turning grass into food for people.
With pigs and chickens also eating spoilt food or leftovers, effectively recycling them. Thereby adding to our food basket. Ending that factory farm-induced competition between animals and people for food.
Keeping animals regeneratively would transform animal welfare, boost farmland wildlife, take carbon out of the atmosphere and turbo-boost soil fertility, creating ideal conditions for bumper harvests tomorrow. Switching to these soil-enhancing farming methods holds out the possibility of giving a big boost to food production. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization , with sustainable soil management, we could produce up to 58 per cent more food.
Ending the ‘grain drain’ Scientific analysis shows that organic farming increases yields in developing countries, where they are needed most. Compared with industrial farming, yields were on average 80 per cent higher. Scientists concluded that “developing countries could increase their food security with organic agriculture”.
And in developed countries, average yields were down by just 8 per cent – hardly a wholesale collapse. And such a decline would be far from a problem if we substantially reduced the volume of human-edible crops we feed to animals. By ending the grain-drain and moving to more nature-friendly, regenerative farming, we could better feed the world.
Half the croplands of the EU, US, and UK would be freed from simply feeding incarcerated animals. Farmed animals could live better lives, producing better, more nutritious food from farmland thriving with wildlife. This, coupled with reducing the number of farmed animals overall, would bring our food back within planetary boundaries and help avoid runaway climate change.
The countryside could be inherited by those visionary farmers who have shown that there are better, kinder, more nature-friendly ways of producing food. Moving to regenerative farming would not only meet today's food needs but is essential for feeding future generations. By embracing truly sustainable practices, we can ensure that everyone has access to nutritious food today while preserving our ability to produce harvests essential for everyone tomorrow.
Philip Lymbery is chief executive of Compassion in World Farming , president of EuroGroup for Animals, and a UN Food Systems Advisory Board member. His latest book is Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future. Philip is on X/Twitter @philip_ciwf.
