How factory farming built America

I edit stories on factory farming for a living. Yet it took me a while to disenfranchise myself from the cultural pull beef held in my life — as a Texan, as a daughter of a cattle rancher, as a Latina. I had a fear, for years, that if I let go of beef, I would be forsaking my own identity. I couldn’t be more wrong.

This illustrated comic below — which tackles the romanticization of cowboys and vaqueros, and my redefinition of connecting with Indigenous foods — is the sixth in a series of stories on how factory farming has shaped the US.

Find the rest of the series and future installments here, and visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

This is the final story in a series of articles on how factory farming has shaped the US. Find the rest of the series and future installments here, and visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

For years, Jeff Simmons — the president and CEO of the large US pharmaceutical company Elanco — ridiculed a seemingly unlikely target on social media: the plant-based meat industry.

BLOOMING PRAIRIE, Minnesota — In 2014, Lowell Trom hit a breaking point.

For two decades, he had watched as his small farming community in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, was taken over by hog factory farms. The first one was built in 1993. Five years later, another one went up. By 2014, there were 10, housing around 24,000 pigs within a three-mile radius of the 760-acre property where he grew corn and soybeans.

MALCOM, Iowa — When Carolyn Bittner moved to Malcom, Iowa, in 2008 to serve as a pastor at two churches, she had no idea the town was also home to millions of egg-laying chickens. Three miles from her home, those chickens — which now total around 7.5 million — are raised in massive warehouses on a sprawling complex run by Fremont Farms, which from the outside looks more like a maximum security prison than an egg farm.

“Fremont is an egg factory,” Bittner told me when I visited her late last year. “It’s not a farm.” The US Environmental Protection Agency categorizes egg farms with 82,000 or more hens as “large”; Fremont has over 90 times as many birds, all packed into about 100 acres.

The hundreds of billions of pounds of waste produced by America’s dairy cows every year has long been a headache for farmers.

Manure is expensive to manage and, to state the obvious, it smells terrible, which can lead to complaints, protests, and lawsuits from neighbors — even the occasional fine or misdemeanor charge. And when dairies store their manure in giant open-air lagoons, the most common and cheapest method, it becomes a climate problem: As the manure decomposes, it produces methane, a climate “super pollutant” that accelerates climate change at a much faster rate than carbon dioxide.

Americans are eating more meat than ever, but livestock giants still see plenty of room to grow. As pressure mounts for meat producers to improve their treatment of animals and environmental footprints, they’re turning to a tried-and-true strategy — used in the past by the tobacco and oil industries — to expand their markets and shore up the public’s trust in their products: funding favorable research from university scientists.

Last year, the National Pork Board, a pork marketing group sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), funded a nearly $8.5 million program in partnership with researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Georgia, the University of Minnesota, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to research popular perceptions of the pork industry and improve its reputation, according to federal records obtained by Crystal Heath, a veterinarian and founder of animal advocacy nonprofit Our Honor.

This is the first in a series of stories on how factory farming shapes America. You can visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for future installments and more coverage of Big Ag. This series is supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

In early 2023, Marielle Williamson emailed her Los Angeles high school principal requesting permission to protest milk.