The face of European farming

Intensive farms are proliferating across Europe, with thousands of industrial scale livestock units now in operation. Should we be worried?

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Outside the giant factory-like sheds you have to hold your breath. The smell of ammonia, spread in the air by the fans, is unbearable, even with two masks on. Inside, once past the door, the stench becomes suffocating. The ground is covered with a thick layer of excrement. "The chickens come here when they are chicks,” our guide says. “This accumulates over the course of days because it can never come out."

On the floor, helpless bodies can be seen here and there, collapsed under the weight of their disproportionate chests. "The workers have just left, it is difficult not to have seen them," he says, showing us the chickens with their abnormal legs, a stripped torso that is reddened from contact with excrement, and white streaks on the skin. "These signs, called white striping, indicate that there has been overgrowth in a short time."

On the farm at night, he tells us, the lights remain on to prevent rest and facilitate fattening. Among the birds there is one too small to be able to reach the water dispenser. "Who knows how he survived," he sighs as he takes it in his hands, caresses its head and brings it closer to the dispenser.

Our guide is Francesco Ceccarelli, an investigator with the Italian campaign group Essere Animali. Over the past decade, the group has entered almost 300 farms throughout Italy - and elsewhere in Europe - to document animal welfare conditions. This Italian farm is just the latest to be inspected by Ceccarelli and his team, this time accompanied by an undercover reporter.

Before entering the farm, which houses 100,000 birds, we watched as four “catchers” took away more than 30,000 chickens from the sheds. Every time a new crate was filled with birds and stacked onto a nearby forklift, you could hear an orchestra of excited squeaks. The sound came in waves and stopped only once all of the required chickens were loaded onto a waiting truck that would transport them to a slaughterhouse.

Within days, these birds will be on someone’s dinner plate, transformed beyond recognition into nuggets, drumsticks or burgers, or an eye-popping variety of other processed foods or ready meals. Chicken is everywhere in Italy - and just about everywhere else in Europe too.

Caged Chickens looking out of their cages

The ground is covered with a thick layer of excrement. "The chickens come here when they are chicks,” our guide says. “This accumulates over the course of days because it can never come out."

On the floor, helpless bodies can be seen here and there, collapsed under the weight of their disproportionate chests. "The workers have just left, it is difficult not to have seen them."

Within days, these birds will be on someone’s dinner plate, transformed beyond recognition into nuggets, drumsticks or burgers, or an eye-popping variety of other processed foods or ready meals.

Megafarm Europe

This clandestine visit was made as part of a major new Europe-wide investigation into industrial farming, which found that intensive livestock production is sweeping across the continent. The findings have raised fresh concerns about animal welfare, pollution, disease spread and the economic impacts on conventional farmers, and prompted fresh accusations that the EU’s agricultural subsidy programme favours larger, industrial farms.

The investigation, carried out by a consortium of journalists in six countries, identified and mapped - for the first time - more than 24,000 large-scale pig and poultry units across Europe, and revealed how thousands of intensive farms were greenlighted over the past decade.

Whilst the issue is continent wide, the proliferation of industrial farms has been most acute in a number of hotspots, including Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and the UK.

Reporters used public and industry records, responses to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and satellite mapping to identify individual permit-holding farms. Records were sourced from EU registries of industrial sites, national databases on permitted facilities, and farm inspection bodies.

The true number of permit holding farms is likely to be even higher, due to under-reporting by some member states, for commercial or confidentiality reasons, and gaps in some official EU records.

Many of the farms identified were far larger than the permit requiring thresholds: some poultry units were found to house more than 1.4 million chickens at any one time; the biggest pig farms identified confine more than 30,000 animals.

Such huge facilities are known as megafarms, which put them on the scale of US-style Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and hold upwards of 125,000 broiler chickens, 82,000 laying hens or 2500 pigs. Investigators identified, for the first time, these units in many European countries.

Supporters of intensive farming argue that such farms are necessary to feed growing populations and ensure food security. Larger farms, they maintain, are typically tightly controlled with high standards and ongoing investments to mitigate welfare problems. Big does not always mean bad, they say.

However, according to critics, this model of industrial farming is too often accompanied by a "cascade" of harms.

Sirpa Peitikainen, an MEP from the European People's Party (EPP) told us the trends identified in the investigation amounted to a race to the bottom. “We are drastically increasing the size of production units as a response to international competition and lower costs in other countries. There are multiple negative consequences – economic as well as environmental – to this model."

Tilly Metz, a Green Party MEP, said the findings showed that much more transparency was needed about the true cost of industrial livestock. “We need to acknowledge the hidden external costs including environmental impacts like soil degradation, water scarcity, methane emissions, and human health impacts like antimicrobial resistance [due to antibiotics used in livestock], as well as the increasing number of animals suffering in large industrial units," she said.

Morgan Ody, General Co-ordinator of La Via Campesina, an organisation which represents smaller scale farmers, said the investigation reinforced “huge concerns” about the future of agriculture in Europe: “There are increasing inequalities in the farming sector. While some very rich farmers are increasing their incomes, the majority of small and medium scale farmers are facing increasingly difficult situations linked to rising production costs, low prices and unequal [subsidy] payments [which are] linked to the farm size, so small farms receive no or little public support.”

In response to the findings, the European Commission said "Animal welfare is a key priority for this Commission, and we are committed to a comprehensive approach that ensures that the EU maintains high standards in this area."

A spokesperson also highlighted the positive economics tied to European livestock production, stating that “the capacity to export demonstrates the competitiveness of the EU agrifood sector. Exporters operate in a free market environment and their performance is not the result of an EU planned strategy.”

Industry bodies in some countries hit back at the findings. In Spain, Tomás Recio, a representative of the Asociación Regional de Ganaderos de Porcino de Castilla-La Mancha (a pork industry lobby group), said that livestock had been unfairly blamed for the pollution which has affected parts of the country. “In 2010-2011, vulnerable zones (for nitrate contamination) were designated, and in 2021 they were expanded. And none of the new zones is related to industrial livestock farming.”

Recio also accused some campaigners of being completely anti-livestock farming. “It is not that the citizen platforms don't want megafarms, as they call them, it's that they don't want any kind of farms. So, what they're doing is putting up as many obstacles as possible to authorizing farms.” He said in some cases there hadn’t been any new farms approved for three years now. “The regulations are now highly protectionist, to the point that the sector considers them practically impossible to comply with.”

"While some very rich farmers are increasing their incomes, the majority of small and medium scale farmers are facing increasingly difficult situations linked to rising production costs, low prices and unequal [subsidy] payments [which are] linked to the farm size, so small farms receive no or little public support.”

Morgan Ody, General Co-ordinator of La Via Campesina

“We are drastically increasing the size of production units as a response to international competition and lower costs in other countries. There are multiple negative consequences – economic as well as environmental – to this model."

Sirpa Peitikainen, European People's Party MEP

“We need to acknowledge the hidden external costs including environmental impacts like soil degradation, water scarcity, methane emissions, and human health impacts like antimicrobial resistance [due to antibiotics used in livestock], as well as the increasing number of animals suffering in large industrial units."

Tilly Metz, Green Party MEP

Rapid expansion

In order to identify and map the extent of large industrial farms across Europe, reporters analysed returns supplied by 23 individual member states to the European Commission in 2023 and 2024, detailing numbers and locations of permit holding poultry and pig farms in each country. In most cases the records are related to farms known to be operating in 2023.

Where key countries were absent from the data - in the cases of Spain, the Czech Republic, and the UK, amongst others - separate regulatory records were obtained via Freedom of Information requests or other public sources.

An analysis of the assembled data revealed a total of 24,087 industrial poultry and pig farms operating across Europe as a whole: 11,672 pig units and 12,415 poultry farms. Overall, Spain was found to be home to the largest number of industrial farms (3963), followed by France (3075), Germany (2930), the Netherlands (2667) and Italy (2146).

Leading countries for industrial poultry farms were identified as France (with 2342 permitted farms), followed by the UK (1553), Germany (1521), Italy (1242) and Poland (1207). Amongst the top countries for industrial pig farms were Spain (3401), Denmark (1532), the Netherlands (1486), Germany (1409) and Italy (904).

Records show that over a decade-long period, (2014 to 2023), at least 2949 new industrial-scale farms began operating. This is likely to be a significant underestimate as many member states do not capture, or disclose, this information.

More comprehensive data was found to exist relating to the issuing of permits for industrial farms: across Europe - and the UK - 551 permits a year, on average, were issued between 2014 and 2023, records suggest, part of more than 5000 permits granted overall during the period. Not all of these may have been for new farms however, with some units likely to have grown incrementally and subsequently crossed the size threshold for requiring a permit. In other cases permits may have been added to databases retrospectively.

Despite the vast number of farms identified in the investigation, campaigners say the true scale of intensification is likely to be even greater, as in some countries official reporting is patchy, and many smaller intensive farms are known to be in operation that do not require a permit to operate.

In some cases, including Poland and the UK, there have been reports that some farms deliberately choose to keep numbers below size thresholds that trigger a need for permits, in an apparent attempt to avoid burdensome red tape.

In addition, a controversial regulatory loophole means that intensive cattle farms for dairy and beef production are currently excluded from requiring permits, even though large numbers of cattle are known to be housed in factory-like conditions in some European countries.

The UK government was previously forced to admit it had no idea on the number, or whereabouts, of intensive cattle units, following an investigation by a British newspaper into the rise of “feedlot” style farming, sparking controversy and raising questions about a lack of appropriate regulation of such farms. The situation is understood to be similar in other European countries.

Hidden costs

The investigation’s findings come as Europe faces escalating environmental challenges – water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. According to the European Environmental Bureau, the EU’s livestock sector overall - including both intensive and conventional production - is a major source of air, soil, and water pollution, responsible for 12-17% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a key driver of biodiversity loss.

The rise of industrial farms has also coincided with a decline in smaller and family-owned farms, exacerbating rural economic challenges and undermining, say critics, the EU's goal of supporting diverse, resilient farming systems and ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers.

As part of the investigation, reporters uncovered particular impacts of factory farming in some hotspot countries: in the UK, the spread of industrial farming has led to heightened animal welfare concerns, pollution of iconic rivers like the Wye which straddles the English/Welsh border and community backlash against megafarm developments. Major international corporations based in Brazil or the US are ultimately behind many of the industrial farms, which supply well known supermarkets and fast food chains.

Spain, the EU's largest pork producer, is dealing with nitrate-contaminated drinking water in some areas as a result of intensive pig rearing, and increasingly bitter rural resistance to farm expansions, both in well established livestock regions and new frontiers. The country is now the EU’s largest pork producer. Globally, it is the world's second-largest fresh pork exporter after the United States, shipping 2.7 million tons – 57% of total production – in 2023.

The country continues to expand pork production, aiming to fill a potential supply gap in China sparked by the US-originating trade war. In Aragón—already one of the regions with the highest concentration of pork farms—a recent law eliminated the cap on the number of animals allowed per farm. Meanwhile, in Castilla-La Mancha, a moratorium on new pork farms has been lifted, paving the way for 61 new projects that could add over 360,000 animals, increasing the regional herd by 19%.

Italy's explosion in poultry production in recent years has been driven by economics, the investigation found. It takes much fewer kilos of feed to obtain a kilo of chicken meat, compared to those needed for a calf or a pig, according to experts. But the expansion of chicken rearing has been marred by poor animal welfare standards uncovered on some farms. Undercover reporters witnessed substandard conditions on both broiler (meat chicken) and egg laying farms.

Italian animal welfare organisations have condemned current standards for chicken welfare as inadequate compared to those for cattle or other species. Environmental groups, veterinary associations and researchers have proposed "Beyond Intensive Livestock Farming" legislation to strengthen sector oversight and encourage reforms in an industry that some say prioritises production efficiency over animal welfare and environmental sustainability.

France - which is amongst the European countries with the most industrial farms - faces increasing methane pollution and deadly algal blooms from nitrate runoff, mainly in Brittany, where data suggests as much as half of the country’s factory farms are located.

According to some research, much of the meat produced in France is exported - with 39% of pork and 25% poultry sold abroad. This growth has had real economic and environmental impacts on local communities and small farmers – between 2010 and 2020, 100,000 farms and 80,000 agricultural jobs disappeared, according to Greenpeace.

In Poland, farms have been found to exploit loopholes to avoid stricter regulations, resulting in concentrated pollution areas, according to environmental groups. The country’s vast poultry sector has also been implicated in the spread of potentially dangerous foodborne disease, including antibiotic-resistant salmonella, with major outbreaks affecting consumers in multiple European countries in recent years.

Romania’s intensive poultry industry, meanwhile, is apparently booming. But according to the advocacy group ARC2020, increasing intensification is impacting the country’s wider farming industry.

"Three family farms disappear every hour," the group claims, totalling over 26,000 annually. Young farmers face insurmountable barriers to land access due to corporate consolidation and skyrocketing costs, they say, effectively transferring the burden of rural decline to communities that once sustained themselves through diverse agricultural practices.

Economic pressure

A number of interconnected factors are driving intensification across Europe as a whole, reporters found. Firstly, economic pressure for cheap animal protein fuels scaled-up production to compete internationally, particularly with markets like China.

Secondly, trade policies have locked in cheap feed imports while the EU's eastward expansion opened access to cheaper land and labour. Meanwhile, industry lobbying has sort to weaken environmental regulations and stall animal welfare reforms, according to experts and campaigners, despite some polling suggesting that many EU citizens support better farm animal treatment.

Some critics say the growth of industrial farms has been propelled, at least in part, by the current agricultural subsidy system. Subsidies paid under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) favour larger operations over smaller farms, creating a "scale up or get out" dynamic, it is claimed. Whilst being originally intended to ensure a fair standard of living for farmers, according to John Hyland of Greenpeace EU, "The current set-up of the CAP shapes a food system where farmers are forced to either increase their production or get out of business.”

The Commission said in response that the current subsidies system “encourages the diversity of production systems across the EU that ensure food security and affordability to citizens, and combine, among others, productivity, competitiveness and environmental performance.”

Campaigners say that other EU policies are assisting those operating factory farms: programmes like the new €370m Targeted Agriculture Modernisation Scheme, for example, offer intensive pig and poultry units investment, potentially reaching €500,000 per application, further incentivising industrial expansion.

Hyland pointed to a recent revision of the Industrial Emissions Directive - a mechanism designed to control and reduce the impact of emissions from industrial facilities - which he says loosens rules for the largest pig and poultry factory farms, and completely exclude cattle farms from controls.

The Commission responded that the revision will cover "the largest and most polluting intensive pig and poultry farms in the EU, which amounts to 30% of pig and poultry farms." This was key in helping to reduce nitrogen pollution in the air, water and soil, it said.

A spokesperson continued: "The new obligations do not apply to small and medium-sized pig and poultry farms, which represent 70% of pig and poultry farms in the EU." They said the new system would "reduce burdens on farmers" by introducing a more simple registration of farms, instead of having them subject to individual permits.

But what about consumer demand? Anna Carbone, professor of Economics of International Agri-Food Markets at the Universitas Mercatorum in Italy, said that increased chicken production is "undoubtedly a response to the increase in demand, not only nationally but also abroad."

White meats are considered a healthier source of animal protein than red meats, she said. Being less expensive than the others, even if the price gap is narrowing, "they are within the reach of consumers and households affected by the generalized increase in prices that erodes purchasing power".

In addition, "chicken-based foods, both industrially produced and by artisanal butchers, are quick to prepare – an important aspect for families who have less and less time to cook – and have a rather neutral and delicate flavour that makes them appreciated by most".

There is evidence that some EU policies are assisting factory farms, such as the new €370m Targeted Agriculture Modernisation Scheme, which offers intensive pig and poultry units investment, further incentivising industrial expansion.

Being less expensive than the others, even if the price gap is narrowing, white meats "are within the reach of consumers and households affected by the generalised increase in prices that erodes purchasing power."

Campaigners say a recent revision of the Industrial Emissions Directive - a mechanism designed to control and reduce the impact of emissions from industrial facilities - loosened rules for the largest pig and poultry factory farms, and excluded cattle farms from controls.

Political failure

Traditionally, animal welfare has been the rallying point for opponents of intensive animal farming. During the investigation, reporters were shown footage captured on factory farms in numerous European countries, highlighting what activists say is systemic cruelty and suffering, not one-off instances of bad practice.

And despite ambitious EU animal welfare reform promises in recent years, progress has been slow, messy and deeply political, say campaigners.

By 2024, the European Commission had dropped three out of four long-planned animal welfare reforms from its work program, including a much anticipated ban on caged farming. This reversal resulted from systematic industry pressure, according to some commentators, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine shifting political priorities as member states increasingly portrayed animal welfare as a luxury.

The Commission did not respond to this view.

Maintaining that billions of livestock continue to be forced to live in conditions "that science has long deemed inadequate"- confined in cages, in overcrowded factory farms, or transported under stressful conditions - Inês Grenho Ajuda, Farm Animals Programme Leader at Eurogroup for Animals says her organisation is “deeply concerned about the current political stagnation of the reforms of animal welfare legislation. Every year of inaction means more suffering that could have been prevented with existing knowledge and better legislation.”

Back in Italy, in one apparently typical poultry shed in Lombardy, our reporter is undercover once again. This time it’s an egg laying unit, rather than a meat producing farm.

Inside, the hens are crammed into seven-story cages, in narrow corridors that seem to have no end. The animals have virtually no space, they trample on each other, pecking one another. The eggs the birds lay behind pieces of red plastic - which act as a nest - end up in a narrow metal support under the cages. The hens stick their necks out to eat on the conveyor belt, rubbing against the metal bars.

Francesco Ceccarelli of Essere Animali points to the pale combs and wattles (which adorn bird’s heads and enable them to regulate body temperature): "The faded colour is due to the lack of sunlight. They remain closed here for a year and a half. In this period they can lay up to 600 eggs." Then, when they stop being productive, they are eliminated and the cycle begins again.

Looking inside some cages, you can see exhausted and helpless hens. One is in an evident state of decomposition, with other birds jumping on the carcass. "From the colour it looks like it has been dead for three weeks," says Ceccarelli.