A Food & Water Watch analysis of USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture data, released yesterday, shows that America’s industrial animal agriculture industry is raising more animals on factory farms than ever before, producing unprecedented amounts of waste.

Nowhere is this industry and its waste more tightly concentrated than Iowa, home to far more factory farms (4,300) and animal waste (109 billion pounds annually) than any other state, with a water pollution crisis to match. Half the state’s waterways are impaired, with over a thousand miles contaminated by agricultural pollution.

Key findings include:

• More waste: Iowa’s factory farm industry produces far more animal waste than any other state — 109 billion pounds of manure annually, a 78% increase since 2002 and more than 25 times the state’s human population.
• Larger operations: The average factory hog farm in Iowa doubled in size from 2002-2022, averaging 6,868 swine per farm today, each producing an average of 22 million pounds of manure annually. The state’s dairy sector also consolidated; there are three times as many mega dairies and five times as many factory farmed dairy cows in Iowa today than twenty years ago.
• Fewer farms: As factory farms take over, the number of family-scale hog farms and dairies plummeted, with fewer than one-third as many today compared to twenty years ago.

Food & Water Watch Iowa Organizer Jennifer Breon issued the following statement:

“America today is truly a factory farming nation, and Iowa is the very center of the scheme. Our communities and our precious water cannot sustain the skyrocketing amount of waste this corporate system drives. As our waterways choke on algae and cancer rates continue to rise, it is clearer than ever that Iowa must pass the Clean Water for Iowa Act to rein in factory farms’ worsening pollution.”

Food & Water Watch research into Iowa’s hog industry details how rapid agricultural industrialization, underpinned by federal and state policy incentives and the failure to regulate pollution, comes at the direct expense of small family farms, rural communities, public health, and the environment.