From Vox (26/2/24), this article about factory farming is from the USA, but I guess has some relevance to Australia…
Today’s farms are not your grandma’s backyard barn
In a few generations, factory farming — the set of economic, genetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical innovations that enabled humanity to raise tens of billions of animals for food every year — has transformed America.
It feeds a growing population, yes. But it has also polluted our water and air. It has altered entire landscapes. And it contributes an outsized share of planet-warming emissions, heightens the risk of another zoonotic pandemic, and causes unfathomable, normalized suffering for the animals themselves.
We’ve both been covering the meat industry for years, and we’ve increasingly seen that although factory farming dates back about a century, today is different. Factory farms keep getting more and more extreme — so big that we need a new name for them: mega factory farms.
