As of 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified 21,000 CAFOs in the United States alone. CAFOs host a series of issues for the farmed animals confined to them and environmental impacts that can lead to public health concerns.

What defines a CAFO?

CAFOs are farms that keep their animals confined for at least 45 days per year, do not grow their own feed or grazing material, and house and house a certain number of animals. Most CAFOs also use artificial manure management, such as manure lagoons, or dry manure handling systems. There are different categories of CAFOs depending on the number of animals and which type of animal is being farmed. For example, a small CAFO of dairy cows is less than 200 but a small CAFO of chickens can consist of up to 37,500 animals.

Cruelty to animals

Animals in CAFOs endure unimaginable suffering. They are seen only as profit and not individual, living beings that can feel a range of emotions from happiness to pain. One of the worst cruelties for animals on CAFOs is that they cannot express natural behaviors, which are essential to biological function and a healthy mental state. Without the ability to act naturally, animals are prone to distress. For example:

Egg-laying hens are crammed into battery cages, unable to spread their wings or engage in natural behaviors
Mother pigs, or sows, are confined to gestation crates, barely larger than their bodies, unable to turn around or express social behaviors, the equivalent of a human living their entire lives in a telephone booth.
Veal calves are kept in tiny crates and taken away from their mothers at a very young age, in addition to being fed a diet of unhealthy milk that can cause them to become anemic.
Chickens raised for meat, or broiler chickens, are crammed together and given no more room than a sheet of paper to move around, in turn creating conditions for sickness to spread easily. Broiler chickens are also bred to grow so rapidly for a high yield of meat that they falter under their own weight and cannot even stand up.
Routine practices across species, such as debeaking, tail docking, and castration, are performed without anesthesia, causing unnecessary pain and distress.

Environmental degradation

The concentration of animals in CAFOs leads to staggering amounts of waste production. A single CAFO can generate as much waste as a small city. There are 1.4 billion tons of animal waste produced annually in the U.S., with a large portion of that coming from CAFOs. Whether CAFOs follow regulations when disposing of their animal waste or discharge it illegally, this waste pollutes air, soil, and waterways, contributing to environmental degradation.