Are we wrong to stop factory farms?

Why the Effective Altruist critique of anti–factory farm campaigns gets it wrong.

When we started our Communities Against Factory Farming campaign to stop every new factory farm from being built, we thought it would be a crowd-pleaser! Who in the animal movement could argue that this could actually be a bad thing? However, we’ve heard it repeatedly over the past year, particularly coming from some in the Effective Altruist community: “The production will just move to other countries, where conditions are even worse.”

This argument reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how social movements work and what we’re actually trying to achieve. Let me explain why.

The Lives We’re Saving Right Now

First, let’s talk about what actually happens when we stop a factory farm application in the UK.

When a planning application gets delayed or rejected, we potentially prevent hundreds of thousands of animals from entering the food system. We are blocking factory farms that raise an average of 1 million birds per year. If that farm would have operated for 30 years, that’s millions of individual lives spared from industrial confinement. That’s not marginal. That’s not theoretical. That’s real animals, right now, not suffering in a specific place.

Photo by VFC

Yes, demand might eventually be met elsewhere. This could be somewhere else in the UK where welfare standards are the same, or it could mean another part of the world. But the timeline matters enormously. It takes years to identify land, secure planning permission, secure financing, and build a new facility. In the meantime, large numbers of animals will be spared a lifetime of suffering.

The effective altruist argument assumes a static world where production will just magically transfer elsewhere instantly, with no friction, no time, and no change in the landscape of what people think is possible. The reality is messier and more dynamic.

‘But what about imports?’

Critics say: “You need to tackle imports too.”

Yes. We agree. And we are working closely with others on the issue of imports. We can target both factory farms in the UK and import standards at the same time!

Here’s what’s crucial: farmers themselves already support matching import standards to UK welfare levels. They understand that if we’re restricting production here, we can’t undercut ourselves by importing from countries with zero regulation. This isn’t some fringe position - it’s aligned with UK farming interests. And it’s exactly how the political dynamics have played out in other contexts. For example, when intensive confinement practices have been banned in the United States, bans on imports quickly come next.

When we’ve blocked farms, we can turn farmer agreement into political leverage for import restrictions next. Politicians can no longer hide behind economic arguments. Import restrictions become politically inevitable because they’re supported by the movement we’ve built and aligned with farming interests.

The Movement We’re Building

The focus on short-term impacts, moreover, misses this crucial point: we are building a movement.

Every time we stop a farm, the people involved are transformed. Local residents who fought alongside us have been transformed by what they learned about factory farming. They’ve seen the reality - not just the abstract statistics, but the ammonia, the pollution, the industrial system. They’re not just voters; they’re now advocates for change.

We’re also generating media attention at every stage. When a campaign starts to stop a factory farm from being built, it makes the local press. When a farm is rejected, it’s national news. That shapes culture. That shifts what people think is possible. This is how change happens. It happens through movements, media, and the transformation of public consciousness.

We’re building a movement. We’re transforming culture. We’re generating the political will and public consciousness necessary for systemic change. We’re proving, in one of the world’s most influential countries, that factory farming can be stopped.

Yes, we need to work on imports. Yes, we need to build international standards. Yes, we need to shift demand and consumption patterns.

Next year, we’ll also be releasing damning investigations on factory farming, when we call for a phase-out of factory farming, when we’ve built a movement of thousands of people who’ve experienced victory - that’s when we’ll have the leverage to demand import restrictions and international standards.

You don’t get there by doing nothing locally and hoping for the best globally.

Scaling Our Strategy

Here’s the part that really gets me about this argument: it assumes the UK exists in isolation, and it ignores what’s already working.

Ending new factory farms in the UK need not stay in one country. Indeed, a similar campaign has been implemented in Poland where dozens of factory farms have been stopped by local communities. Now we just need to scale it. The UK is a leader in social change. When countries see the UK standing up and winning against factory farming, it creates a ripple effect. That ripple then extends from Poland and the UK, to other European countries, to places where the same playbook can be deployed.

You don’t build international standards by ceding your own territory. You build them by proving, in your own jurisdiction, that another way is possible. And then you scale that proof to the next country. And the next. The ban on fur farming in the UK is one real-life example. It didn’t lead to an increase in imports for fur; it led to a cascade of bans across the continent.

That’s not just theory. We’re already doing it.

The Fur Farming Test

Effective Altruists argue that blocking UK factory farms is counterproductive because production shifts to countries with worse welfare standards. But the UK’s fur farming ban tests this logic: production did move to other countries with horrific conditions, yet the ban still succeeded. It reflected and reinforced a moral shift in British culture, established the principle that we don’t farm animals for frivolous purposes, and contributed to declining global demand through fashion industry changes and growing public concern.

If the fur ban was justified, the same logic applies to factory farming. Both refuse to allow certain animal agriculture in the UK, both risk production shifting elsewhere, and both make cultural statements. The only difference is that fur farming was already unpopular while factory farming challenges current norms and economic interests - but that’s an argument for doing the work, not against it.

Critics ignore movement-building and cultural change, seeing only direct impact: “Farm exists here, now exists there.” But systemic change doesn’t happen through perfect global optimisation. It happens through movements that say “no” locally, shift culture, and build constituencies demanding change. The fur ban worked not by solving fur farming globally, but by establishing a principle and building political will. If that was justified, so is opposing factory farms.

We believe we can win

Here’s the deepest difference between our approach and the critics’: we actually believe factory farming can end.

The Effective Altruist argument against stopping new factory farms is pessimistic. It assumes demand for animal products is essentially fixed, that the political will for a phase-out will never materialise, and that we’ll be forever optimising suffering within a system we’ll never dismantle.

The effective altruist critique sounds like careful analysis. But it misses the actual mechanics of how social change happens. It misses the lives we save today. It misses the movement we’re building. It misses the culture we’re shifting. It misses the ripple effect we’re creating.

And perhaps most importantly, it offers no coherent alternative except surrender.

We’re not doing that.

We need to believe it will happen, or it won’t. And history is on our side. We can aim higher, and we can win.

Join us!

-Rose Patterson, Animal Rising

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Right now, CAFF (Communities Against Factory Farming) is fighting 13 factory farm proposals across the UK, and we’ve already stopped 1 intensive poultry unit as well as a puppy farm, sparing millions of animals from suffering.
Every one of these intensive units must be approved by local councils. We’re challenging every single application and forcing the industry to attempt to defend the indefensible.

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