3 ms·

I would love to have the time to dig into those numbers, but for now I'm going to take the sources "Plant Based News" and "The Sentience Institute" with a big g

• dashundchen 6y ago
  The numbers are there. If you're looking for a digested summary from the USDA itself, here is an old 2002 analysis of the 1997 farm census. With industrial farm consolidation continuing since then I can't imagine it's improved. Key point here is the value of sales. "Of the 1,315,051 farms with livestock, 18 percent (237,821 farms) were farms with confined livestock types (i.e., farms with 4 or more animal units of any combination of fattened cattle, milk cows, swine, chickens and turkeys, or appeared to be raising veal or heifers in confinement). These 237,821 farms accounted for $79 billion in gross livestock sales, which was 80 percent of gross livestock sales for all farms." https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/?cid=nrcs143_014121 https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/?cid=nrcs14...
  • nate_meurer 6y ago
    Nice example of a pareto distribution. Eighty percent of our meat comes from the roughly twenty percent of factory farms that confine their livestock in tiny cages.