Will factory farming fix itself?
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Features<br>Will factory farming fix itself?<br>What smog, deforestation, and child labor tell us about the future of animal suffering
Works in Progress<br>Aug 14, 2026
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This piece was featured in Issue 25 of Works in Progress. Subscribe today to get Issue 25, and an issue every two months after, delivered straight to your door.<br>Martin Gould and Koji Flynn-Do explain why animals’ lives might, finally, be about to get better.
In September 2022, a new kind of pig farm opened in China: a twenty-six storey high-rise in Ezhou, near the Yangtze River. Months later, a second tower went up. Inside, pigs are kept by the tens of thousands on each floor, monitored by cameras and fed, watered, and moved with mechanical precision. More than a million pigs are born, raised, and slaughtered each year without ever setting foot outside.
These high-rise factory farms are only one example of a common pattern. As countries get wealthier, farming consolidates into fewer, larger, more brutal farms. Once average incomes reach around $1,000, chicken farming starts to industrialize. By the time a country reaches $10,000, the vast majority of chickens are raised in battery cages. In countries with average incomes above $30,000, almost all pigs are raised in warehouses.
Factory farming exists to meet rising demand for meat. Meat is tasty, nutritious, and much more expensive than rice or bread. As people get richer, they want more of it. When Park Chung Hee took power in 1961, South Korea’s meat supply was around four kilograms per person per year, less than the weight of two chickens. When his rule ended in 1979, that figure had quintupled. By 2000, it had increased tenfold. Today, the average South Korean eats more than 120 kilograms of meat and seafood combined per year.
Share<br>In poor countries, where inadequate nutrition is the norm, rising meat consumption is good for people’s physical development and health. Diet is only part of the story, but the pattern is unmistakable. In South Korea, average male height has increased from around 160 centimeters in 1961 (five feet three inches) to around 175 centimeters (five feet nine inches) today. Chinese men have seen a similar height gain: from around 165 centimeters before the country industrialized to around 175 centimeters today.<br>But industrially farmed animals suffer immensely for it. Chickens’ beaks are frequently sheared off and their legs are too weak to support their bloated bodies. Pigs have their tails docked and teeth clipped without anesthesia, and mother pigs live much of their lives in gestation crates too small to turn around in. These lives are not worth living. The question is whether such brutal treatment is inevitable.<br>For many of modernity’s worst problems, a combination of affluence, maturity, and political pressure has created self-correcting mechanisms over time. As countries got richer, things that initially worsened due to industrialization eventually improved. Will industrial meat production follow the same path?<br>The Kuznets curve
In his 1853 masterpiece Bleak House, Charles Dickens memorably described the air pollution of industrializing London: ‘flakes of soot … as big as full-grown snowflakes’. When Dickens was writing, London’s air pollution had been steadily worsening for decades as Britain industrialized, and it would continue to worsen for nearly half a century longer. But had he returned a century later, he would have found the dirtiness of London’s air to have halved, and by 2000, it would be less than a tenth as dirty.<br>Growing economies and populations have historically driven deforestation. But improvements in crop yields have halved agricultural land per person since the Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The rate of global forest loss peaked in 1980, and forest loss typically reverses when average incomes enter the range between $5,000 and $15,000, as farming becomes more efficient and marginal farmland reverts to nature.<br>These trajectories are called Kuznets curves, after the economist Simon Kuznets, who suggested that economic inequality rose as countries first industrialized but then fell as they became even richer. His curves appear in many places. Wealthy areas clean up their local air, forests, and factories. Their inhabitants are less obese than those of industrializing countries, and have more leisure time and better working conditions.<br>But Kuznets curves don’t appear in all places, especially not when the industrial activity has no direct costs for the rich country. Emissions have fallen substantially in Germany and Britain, but much less in America and Australia, which remain some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters. The total amount of material people consume, and the amount of waste they generate, do not seem to decline but rather keep growing. The question is whether animal suffering is closer to child labor, and will decrease as...