‘I am always tired’: life in the long shadow of factory farming in Europe [2024]
Photojournalist Selene Magnolia Gatti has been documenting the effects on human health and wellbeing of living alongside intensive agriculture
This is horrible, but unfortunately Europe is not alone here. The world’s biggest single-building pig farm has opened in China in 2022, but critics say it will increase the risk of larger animal disease outbreaks.
At 26 storeys it is by far the biggest single-building pig farm in the world, with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs a year.
"Intensive facilities can reduce interactions between domesticated and wild animals and their diseases, but if a disease does get inside they can break out between animals like wildfire,” said Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University.
"I have heard multiple reports of ‘biosecurity’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘sustainability’. We hear the same storytelling for US indoor facilities. However, there is very little evidence that these intensive facilities have any of those benefits in reality,” he said.
Dirk Pfeiffer, chair professor at One Health at City University of Hong Kong, agreed, and said: “The higher the density of animals, the higher the risk of infectious pathogen spread and amplification, as well as potential for mutation.
"The probably even more important question will be whether this type of production is consistent with the need to move towards reduced meat consumption, considering the apparently unstoppable threat of devastating climate change,” he said.
Indeed, factory farming is quite dominant globally. From one group's estimate:
We estimate that over 90% of farmed animals globally are living in factory farms at present. This includes an estimated 74% of farmed land animals (vertebrates only) and virtually all farmed fish.[1] However, there is substantial uncertainty in these figures given the land animal estimates’ heavy reliance on information from Worldwatch Institute with unclear methodology[2] and limited data on fish farming.
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-estimates
At 26 storeys it is by far the biggest single-building pig farm in the world, with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs a year.
What The actual fuck?
Yes, this is exactly what I think, too.