Factory Farm Nation: 2024 Edition

America has become a factory farm nation. And a new resource from Food & Water Watch illustrates the problem — and empowers communities with information to fight back.

Our maps show the density of factory farmed animals at the county level, covering 20 years of factory farm growth. You can use the maps to learn how many factory farms are in your county, see the change in growth over time, and gather data on livestock density and yearly manure production. (For methods, see the Methodology section in our report.)

You can explore the screenshots below by dragging the map view, zooming in, and clicking on individual counties. You can find our full interactive maps  here .

As the legend shows, the deeper the color, the greater the density of factory farmed animals in a county. The white dots add one more layer by pinpointing the “Extreme Outliers” with the greatest densities across all U.S. counties.

At first glance, you can see that many of counties with the highest densities of animals on factory farms are in the middle of the country. Midwestern states like Iowa are ground zero for hog production, and the Great Plains is home to over three-quarters of all factory feedlot beef cattle.

However, the map makes clear that factory farms have taken root from sea to shining sea. North Carolina has three Extreme Outlier counties, thanks to its unfathomable concentration of factory hog and chicken operations. Oregon’s Severe-ranking counties are home to some of the largest mega-dairies in the world, including Threemile Canyon Farms and its roughly 70,000 cows. And several New York counties earned Severe or High rankings thanks to the onslaught of mega-dairies that are squeezing out the state’s family-scale dairies.

Factory farms are becoming as American as apple pie. Counties ranking “None” or “Few” today could become tomorrow’s factory-farm hot spots.

The factory hog industry waged an assault on rural America over the past few decades, with factory farms taking root and displacing family-scale farms. This is especially visible in the Midwest and South. Today, the top 10 counties with the highest densities of factory-farmed hogs are all in Iowa and North Carolina.

These counties are completely overwhelmed with hog waste, as recent flooding events illustrate. Clicking on the counties will reveal how much factory farm waste they produce in a year — figures that can be incomprehensible. Washington County, Iowa, produces over 4.7 billion pounds each year. To put this into perspective, that is 156 times as much as the county’s human population. But unlike human waste, hog manure isn’t typically treated, and is often sprayed on fields, where it can contribute to runoff and water pollution.

Today, Americans eat more chicken than beef,  ¹   yet most U.S. chicken production is crammed into a scattering of Southern counties. Ten of Georgia’s counties are Extreme Outliers (confining over 18,600 birds per square mile). Counties across Texas, North Carolina, and Maryland also earned the Extreme Outlier ranking.

The poultry industry brands chicken as more environmentally-friendly than beef  ²  — but the sheer magnitude of American poultry production tells a different story. For example, counties on Maryland’s Eastern Shore collectively confine 36 million chickens on factory farms at any given time. Clicking on Somerset County shows that it confines over 22,000 chickens per square mile. Nearby residents would hardly call factory chicken production environmental-friendly; they breathe foul-smelling air and toxic pollutants that make them sick and make spending time outdoors miserable.  ³  

America’s factory egg operations are another example of extreme consolidation. There were fewer factory egg farms in 2022 compared to 2002, but more birds were raised on factory farms, meaning that individual facilities are getting larger. Today, only around 200 of the U.S.’s 3,100+ counties have factory egg farms. Those that do have massive facilities that confine an average of 800,000 birds each.

When exploring our map, you may be surprised to see that the majority of Severe-ranking counties have just one or two egg farms. For example, Tipton County, Indiana has one factory egg farm confining roughly 1.4 million birds. Relying on such massive facilities for America’s egg supply is risky. A May 2024 bird flu outbreak in a single Iowa factory farm led to the killing of the facility’s 4.2 million hens.  ⁴   This hyper-consolidated food chain is more vulnerable to shocks  ⁵   — while giving powerful corporations greater leverage to profit from supply disruptions.

Nowhere is the shift from family-scale to factory operations more apparent than in America’s dairy industry. Wisconsin saw the number of cows living on mega-dairies more than quadruple from 2002 to 2022. Yet as you can see on our map, most of the Extreme Outlier counties are in Western states, which experienced significant mega-dairy expansion in recent decades. Clicking on Merced County, California shows that it confines 286,662 milk cows on mega-dairies — more than the entire state of Michigan, itself a leading dairy state.

Meanwhile, family-scale dairies are collapsing in alarming numbers. New York — a state with a long history of dairy production — lost 1,900 family-scale dairies from 2017 to 2022 alone. Now over half of New York counties rank Severe or High for factory milk cow density. Michigan also has a significant share of Severe- and High-ranking counties, but had fewer than half as many family-scale dairies in 2022 compared to 2002.

Feedlots are where beef cattle are “finished” on grain diets before heading to slaughter. As you can see, counties with the highest densities of beef cattle on factory feedlots are scattered across the Great Plains. You can click on individual counties to see how many feedlot cattle they confine. Deaf Smith County, Texas comes out on top with over 360,000 head.

Clicking on counties shows annual manure production. For example, factory feedlots in Deaf Smith County produce 8.3 billion pounds per year. That is equivalent to the human waste produced by 6.1 million people (or the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area). Manure is not just a concern for those living near feedlots; it contains pathogens that can spread by wind or water to nearby cropland. The Food & Drug Administration linked a 2019-2020 outbreak of E. coli in leafy greens that spanned 19 states to nearby cattle feedlots.  ⁶  

Our maps show the counties bearing the brunt of America’s factory farm experiment. But factory farms affect us all: through polluted waters, climate-warming emissions, disrupted food supplies, and tainted produce. We can push back and give family-scale farms a fighting chance. This starts with a federal ban on new and expanding factory farms. You can read about the solutions and dig even deeper into our maps and methods in our national report and state fact sheets, found here.

1 Food & Water Watch analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Service. Food Availability (Per Capita) Data System. Available at https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per-capita-data-system. Accessed July 2024.

2 Mishler, Jennifer. “Big chicken is going after climavores.” Sentient Media. May 9, 2023.

3 Kirychuk, S. P. et al. “Total dust and endotoxin in poultry operations: Comparison between cage and floor housing and respiratory effects in workers.” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Vol. 48, No. 7. July 2006 at 741 and 745; Trabue, Steven et al. “Speciation of volatile organic compounds from poultry production.” Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering. Vol. 44, Iss. 29. September 2010 at 3545 to 3546; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Office of Inspector General. “Eleven Years After Agreement, EPA Has Not Developed Reliable Emission Estimation Methods to Determine Whether Animal Feeding Operations Comply With Clean Air Act and Other Statutes.” Report No. 17-P-0396. September 2017 at 2.

4 “Farmers must kill 4.2 million chickens after bird flu hits Iowa egg farm.” Associated Press. Updated May 28, 2024.

5 Kelloway, Claire. “As bird flu hits dairy cows, consolidation amplifies risk.” Food & Power. April 18, 2024; U.S. Federal Trade Commission. “Feeding America in a Time of Crisis: The United States Grocery Supply Chain and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” March 2024 at 2.

6 Beach, Coral. “FDA tests show cattle lot implicated in leafy greens E. coli outbreak.” Food Safety News. January 21, 2021.