Beyond Animal Welfare: Get Involved

Large farm

Nearly 10 billion farm animals are raised each year in miserable conditions on American factory farms. In addition to harming animals, factory farms are major sources of pollution, antibiotic abuse, foodborne illness, unjust employment practices and community health crises.

We partner with other nonprofit organizations that are addressing the non-animal-related troubles caused by factory farming. Below are examples of the issues other groups are committed to solving through the creation of a more humane, just and healthy food system.

Justice for Food Workers

The Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) is a coalition of organizations committed to improving working conditions and wages for all workers along the food chain. This includes workers on factory farms and in processing plants, who are often taken advantage of and forced to work in inhumane conditions. Learn more about FCWA’s campaign to help food workers organize.

The invisibility of farmworkers and farm animals in the food system leaves them vulnerable to rampant abuse, while insulting narratives referring to farmworkers as “animals” also speak to the equal disdain with which we treat farm animals.
- Neza Xiuhtecutli, Farmworker Advocate, Farmworker Association of Florida

Protecting Rural Communities

Food and Water Watch mobilizes everyday people to help find solutions to pressing food, water and climate problems, often in their own backyards. The organization works to bring transparency and accountability to the environmentally devastating practices of factory farming. Learn more about its campaign to ban factory farms.

Factory farming is too dangerous to ignore any longer. Right now, factory farms product billions of gallons of dangerous waste each year, and that waste ends up in the air we breathe and the water we drink.
- Wenonah Hunter, Executive Director, Food and Water Action

Fighting a Public Health Crisis

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) works to ensure the rights of all people to clean air, clean water and healthy communities. It fights the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms through policy and corporate campaigns, as well as by encouraging people to eat less and more responsibly produced meat. Learn more about NRDC’s Save Antibiotics campaign.

The overuse of antibiotics on factory farms is helping to fuel a rise in deadly drug-resistant infections that kill thousands of Americans every year. To keep these precious medicines working when sick people and animals need them, this practice has to stop.
- Lena Brook, Director, Food Campaigns, NRDC

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