A Vox reader asks: Why is factory farming still around?

Factory farming — the intensive confinement of chickens, pigs, and cows on a massive scale — developed in the second half of the 20th century to feed a growing, and increasingly prosperous, post-World War II America. It was made possible by a “set of economic, genetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical innovations” as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written.

Those innovations include technologies that enabled meat companies and farmers to breed bigger, faster-growing animals; antibiotics to keep those animals alive in overcrowded farms; chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce abundant, cheap livestock feed; higher-tech tractors to harvest that feed; and a host of federal subsidies and loan programs to help farmers finance it all. Advancements in refrigeration and shipping helped too.

It’s put an astonishing amount of meat on our plates — some 265 pounds annually per American in 2021, a 55 percent increase compared to the early 1900s.

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But as factory farming became America’s dominant form of livestock production, awareness about its problems grew. Starting in the 1990s, undercover investigations by animal rights activists exposed egg-laying hens stuffed into tiny cages and piglets crammed into dark warehouses, shocking an animal-loving public. In 2006, the United Nations identified animal agriculture as a top driver of climate change and deforestation. Public interest groups increasingly railed against factory farms’ social ills, like concentrated pollution in rural communities, meat monopolies that killed the independent farm, and the dangers of

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