Factory farming describes the rearing of animals for food using methods borrowed from industrial production: large numbers of creatures kept in confined spaces, fed and processed on a schedule designed for output and cost rather than for their comfort or natural behaviour. The phrase is almost always used critically, contrasting this kind of production with older, smaller-scale farming, and it turns up in debates about animal welfare, food quality and the environmental cost of intensive agriculture. Calling a farm a “factory farm” is rarely neutral; it is a way of pointing out that the animals inside it are being treated as units on a production line rather than as living creatures.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘factory farming’?
The term was not coined by any one writer, but it was popularised, though not originally coined, by the British writer Ruth Harrison in her 1964 book. That book’s full title made the pairing explicit: Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming System. Harrison used it to describe the intensive systems then spreading through British agriculture, in which animals were kept indoors in large numbers and managed with the same logic as an assembly line.
Harrison’s own description of what she was attacking makes the sense of the phrase clear. She wrote of “production line methods applied to the rearing of animals, of animals living out their lives in darkness and immobility without a sight of the sun.” That image, animals treated as components in a manufacturing process rather than as living things with needs of their own, is exactly what the phrase has carried ever since.
Because Harrison’s book gave the term its wide public currency, “factory farming” quickly became the standard shorthand for the practice in press coverage and campaigning literature. It has kept that critical edge in the decades since, still used to describe poultry sheds and pig units run for maximum yield at minimum cost, with the animals’ welfare treated as secondary to efficiency.