Phillip Lymbery: Those who profit from factory farming prefer us as consumers to stay in the dark

The CEO of Compassion in World Farming on why factory farming is destroying the land, sea and our health and why the solution is simpler than anyone in power wants you to know.

We are fed a line about how our food is produced to good quality standards, that animals are taken care of. We are given labels on our meat and dairy that say “fresh” or “farm fresh” or “country fresh,” often showing cows in fields. When the reality is that the majority of farmed animals in this country – and sadly across the planet – are kept in factory farms. They are caged, crammed, and confined. They rarely see daylight or feel the sun on their backs. That is the reality for most of the world’s pigs and chickens in particular, and increasingly for cows.

That is why Compassion in World Farming exists. We have been needed for nearly 60 years. We were founded by a dairy farmer called Peter Roberts, who kept cows and free-range chickens and knew how important it was for animals to be able to live their lives as nature intended.

These are sentient creatures. They have wants and needs. They feel pain, and they suffer if we don’t look after them. Peter saw the rise of factory farming – this way of keeping animals confined indoors, like a production line rather than the farm we all grew up imagining – and he started Compassion in World Farming to stand up for them. To say, this is no good. It is no good for the animals, but it is also no good for people, and no good for the planet.

We have a food system that has been the subject of government policy and subsidy direction for many decades – for the last 70 or 80 years, since the Second World War. Governments have encouraged farmers to go down the route of intensification. Farms getting bigger, animals being taken off the land and moved indoors, crops grown using chemical pesticides and fertilisers. And what people don’t realise is that this intensification has itself been the biggest driver of farmers being driven off the land. Through concentration, through upscaling, through fewer and bigger operations swallowing everything else.

At the same time, the animal welfare side of things has gotten so much worse. The environmental destruction has been marked. And now we are coming to realise that this industrial style of agriculture is not only the biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet, but is also central to the climate breakdown we are facing. It is the biggest driver of wildlife decline and ecosystem collapse.

And what should really give us pause for thought is that it is destroying the very thing we need for food in the future: our soil. The United Nations warns, quite rightly, that if we carry on with industrialised agriculture, we could have just 60 harvests left in the world’s soils. 60 years before the entire food system is finished.

This grain being fed to farmed animals represents the biggest form of food waste on the planet

One of the things that industrialised agriculture relies on is the production of vast quantities of grain to feed farmed animals – because you have taken them off the land, so they are no longer feeding on grass or woodland. You have to grow corn, wheat, and soya, much of the latter coming from South America, from rainforests and other critical habitats. And what we don’t realise is that this grain being fed to farmed animals represents the biggest form of food waste on the planet. The majority of the food value of that grain is wasted in conversion to meat, milk, and eggs. Through that process, we waste enough food to feed two billion people. That is a quarter of all the people on the planet today. Wasted.

And then there is fish. Factory farming is not confined to the land – it has been taken to the water too. The salmon produced in Scotland, for example: most of it now comes from salmon factory farms. These are wild wanderers of the ocean, creatures that would spend months, years, roaming the wide seas before returning to their home river to spawn. On these farms they are caged in their tens of thousands, crowded so closely together that they suffer from parasites, which then require chemicals to drive off. And the greatest irony is that they are fed fish – tiny fish scooped up from the ocean. Getting on for a quarter of the entire world fish catch never reaches a human mouth. Instead it is used to feed factory-farmed animals. The industry calls these “trash fish.” But those tiny fish are the foundation of the ocean ecosystem. They are what the big fish eat. They are what the dolphins eat. They are what the puffins eat. And we are scooping them up and feeding them to salmon in cages. No wonder puffins are facing rapid demise on our shores. We have taken away the foundation of their world.

The arguments for change are logical. The facts are all there. Countless UN reports say it clearly: nature-friendly farming is better for animals, better for people, better for the planet, better for farmers. So why is it not happening? Big business is stopping it. There are multiple lock-ins to this tried and failed way of farming, built on many decades of government policy and subsidy. The Common Agricultural Policy in Europe, agricultural subsidies in the UK, the Farm Bill in the US – all of them reward industrialisation, this production-first approach.

Nearly three quarters of the world’s antibiotics are fed to farmed animals to ward off the diseases of this failed system

On top of that, there are the big businesses that have grown large through selling things to farmers. The grain to feed the animals. The artificial fertilisers produced from petrochemicals. The chemical pesticides. The cages and crates. And the antibiotics – because keeping animals crowded indoors makes them sick. Nearly three quarters of the world’s antibiotics are fed to farmed animals to ward off the diseases of this failed system. The World Health Organisation tells us that if we carry on as we are, we are heading towards a post-antibiotic era, where currently treatable diseases will once again kill.

These are the lock-ins. Huge multinational companies selling things to farmers that farmers don’t actually need, but have been taught to believe they do – by decades of agricultural academia, by an army of salespeople, by government policy and subsidy. All of which brings us to this: governments have got to take a stand. Corporations have got to be enlightened. And we, as consumers and citizens, should be empowered through decent, honest labelling. At the moment there is nothing on the label for meat and milk that tells you whether it has come from a factory farm.

We know that labelling works, because we forced it through for eggs. Eggs now legally have to be labelled – eggs from caged hens. That has been the case since the turn of the century. And as a result, supermarkets and restaurant chains have generally moved away from selling eggs from battery hens, to the point where it is now hard to buy caged eggs on the high street. If you go to McDonald’s, they will not give you caged eggs, even on a pound saver menu. That is the power of honest labelling. Those who profit from the bad way would prefer us as consumers to stay in the dark. That is a choice. It is a political choice.

There are beautiful, compassionate, life-affirming solutions.

The good news is that despite the outlook being bad with industrial agriculture, there are beautiful, compassionate, life-affirming solutions. The answer is nature-friendly farming: organic farming, regenerative, agroecological farming. Getting animals back on the land as part of mixed rotational farming systems, moving around the farm in harmony with crops, leaving the artificial fertilisers and pesticides in the barn rather than scattering them on the land. And the great thing about that is it is also the best way to feed the world. The UN is clear that moving to nature-friendly farming will actually increase yields – somewhere between 60% or more. This is not a choice between animal welfare and feeding people. It is essential for both.

Letting animals back outside, where they can enjoy fresh air and sunshine, is not only good for the animals. It brings wildlife flooding back to our otherwise nature-impoverished countryside. It creates better food. It creates the environment for us to be in the countryside – and we know that even short periods in nature lift people’s mood. It stabilises the planet. It ensures that the ecosystem which creates the necessities of life – air, water, food – will continue to serve our children into the future. The soil will be there.

I very much believe that the future for food, for people, for the environment, is to put kindness at the centre of our society. What are we waiting for?

This conversation took place in May 2026 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Phillip’s new book, Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future, is available now.