Within the last few decades, the United States went from raising livestock on traditional farms owned by farm families, to “producing” livestock in highly mechanized, industrial operations controlled by a handful of giant corporations. Indiana is home to nearly 2,000 of these industrial-scale animal factories.
Check out our Factory Farm Finder Map!
Our current food and farming system is unsafe, unsustainable, and cruel.
Factory farms are industrialized systems where large numbers of farm animals spend their lives in intense confinement. These confined operations create hazardous pollutants that travel far and wide—impacting not only those who live close to factory farms, but anyone who interacts with air, land, water, and soil.
Factory farms generate, on average, 56 times the amount of animal waste produced by Indiana’s human population. See how many animals and how much animal waste is produced compared to humans in your county by viewing this table.
Industrial animal agriculture is the number one source of methane worldwide, and methane is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Factory farms also release harmful air pollutants like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. According to the United Nations, the livestock sector is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
Factory farming is the leading source of water contamination–in our streams, rivers, and lakes, as well as our groundwater, or drinking water–because untreated manure is sprayed onto fields or stored in open pits that often leak.
99% of farmed animals in the United States spend their lives in factory farms. Animals are often kept in small cages or pens, have limited outdoor access, and are treated with antibiotics or growing hormones. Animals on factory farms are not protected by any federal or state animal welfare laws, making it completely legal for factory farms to subject them to routine appalling treatment and living conditions.
Air pollution and water pollution from factory farms are unregulated or poorly regulated under major federal environmental statutes such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. To learn more about the regulatory challenges, read our Indiana Factory Farm Report.
Indiana is home to nearly 2,000 of these industrial animal operations, many of which are located in rural counties.
Check out our Factory Farm Finder Map!
HEC is working to promote alternatives to industrial agriculture practices like factory farming by utilizing education, building partnerships with local and sustainable farmers, and advocating for environmentally responsible farm policy. If you’d like to learn more, read our latest handout: Alternatives to Industrial Agriculture: Farm Practices That Improve Ecosystem Health.
Indiana’s factory farms generate
times the amount of animal waste produced by Indiana’s human population.
In Indiana
of assessed stream miles are not suitable for recreational use because of E.coli contamination from animal waste.
The pollution strength of raw manure is
times greater than that of raw municipal sewage and is arguably more harmful than human waste.
Simply put, Indiana law does not adequately protect public health and the environment from factory farm waste. This is why HEC places education, citizen advocacy, and testifying in defense of rural communities as one of our top priorities. To that end, we have worked with a broad coalition of stakeholders in recent years to defeat dangerous bills that would have: further weakened Indiana’s regulation of factory farms; stripped local governments of their “Home Rule” authority to regulate factory farms; and given unprecedented special legal protections to factory farm operators to shield them from liability when they cause harm.
Indiana’s laws continually fail to protect us from the harm caused by factory farms. That’s why it’s imperative that we support federal legislation that will end factory farming in the US and move our food system towards more sustainable methods. Help make a difference right now by asking your members of Congress to support the Farm System Reform Act!
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