MALCOM, IOWA — When Carolyn Bittner moved to Malcom, Iowa, in 2008 to serve as a pastor at two churches, she had no idea the town was also home to millions of egg-laying chickens. Three miles from her home, those chickens — which now total around 7.5 million — are raised in massive warehouses on a sprawling complex run by Fremont Farms, which from the outside looks more like a maximum security prison than an egg farm.

“Fremont is an egg factory,” Bittner told me when I visited her late last year. “It’s not a farm.” The US Environmental Protection Agency categorizes egg farms with 82,000 or more hens as “large”; Fremont has over 90 times as many birds, all packed into about 100 acres.

Despite living three miles from the egg operation, Bittner is regularly reminded of its presence: “When they move manure, the stench is sickening. They will be moving manure now for the next few days, and it will be bad.” An egg farm that houses 7.5 million hens generates hundreds of millions of pounds of manure each year.

The stench affects her in seemingly mundane ways that accumulate to degrade her overall quality of life. She can’t hang her clothes out to dry for fear the wind will shift and make them smell terrible. She often can’t open the windows, lest the smell invades her home. And the staggering amount of manure attracts tons of flies to the town, which spread their own manure around.

“I had a new garage built while I was here, and it looked new for three days, and then there were so many fly specks [excrement] on the white edging and around the windows that it looked like it had been here for a decade,” she said.

The same week I visited Bittner, I also visited other factory farm towns in the region and quickly grew sick of the odor; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live with it every day.

Bittner told me that years ago, during a permit hearing at the local county board of supervisors meeting, the Fremont Farms CEO at the time asserted that the operation doesn’t smell and that no one ever complains. “From that day on, I have complained every time it smells,” she said. “This morning, before you came, I was on the phone.” Both the former and current CEOs have met with Bittner at her home, and while the meetings were cordial, she told me, neither seemed particularly sympathetic to the problems their company had wrought.

Bittner also worries about what’s in the air she breathes. Hog and poultry barns are equipped with giant exhaust fans that push pollutants, such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter, out into the atmosphere.

Air pollution from animal farms is linked to almost eight times more premature deaths than coal-fired power plants, a 2021 study from Johns Hopkins University found. Other research has found that living near a factory farm is positively associated with risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and leukemia, and people who live near them report higher rates of headaches, depression, anger, and respiratory symptoms, such as asthma.

“Owned by a group of family farms with a long legacy in egg production, our team makes environmentally conscious decisions each day to protect the land, air and water around our farm,” reads part of a statement provided to Vox by Fremont Farms, which declined an interview request for this story. “We are committed to responsible farming and we will continue to support the Malcom community as we have for decades.”

Over the last 65 years, the US has nearly tripled annual meat production, and the number of animals raised for food each year surpassed 10 billion in 2022. At the same time, the number of farms has plummeted, as small- and mid-sized operations have given way to large factory farms — and increasingly, “mega” factory farms, like Fremont Farms — that now produce the vast majority of America’s meat, milk, and eggs.

These massive facilities can far exceed the threshold for what the EPA considers a large animal farm by orders of magnitude. Their enormous........

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