Today on World Food Day, we’re releasing a groundbreaking report which exposes the biggest cause of food waste and isn’t from households or supermarkets – it's factory farming.

Our report, Food not Feed: How to stop the world’s biggest form of food waste, reveals that if we stopped feeding grain to factory farmed animals, we could feed an extra two billion people every year. That’s almost a quarter of the world’s population. In addition, land almost the size of Mexico would be freed up to grow food for people.

The huge inefficiencies of using grain for factory farmed animals are explored in the report, which highlights that for very 100 calories of human-edible grain fed to animals, just 3-25 calories of meat or dairy are produced.

If we switched to regenerative farming, with animals fed on products people cannot eat, such as on pastures, by-products and properly treated unavoidable food waste and scraps, global food security would be hugely improved.

The report findings: a colossal waste

The report finds that globally, a colossal 766 million tons of grain are wasted every year from being fed to farmed animals, most of which are in factory farms.

This is much more than is thrown away by households (631m tons), food service (290m tons) or retail (131m tons).

In the United States, taxpayers are funding this inefficient system, wasting 160 million tons of food annually.

One-third of U.S. corn and 97% of soybeans are used for animal feed, not human food
$3.2 billion on corn subsidies and $1.9 billion on soy subsidies spent in recent years—most benefiting concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)
90% of Americans fall short on vegetable intake and 80% on fruit—yet policy prioritizes feed over food

And it’s getting worse. If nothing changes, by 2040 factory farms could need double the grain we currently use.

We’ve released a powerful interactive tool which shows the scale of the problem in key countries.

Factory farming: the world’s biggest cause of food waste