Factory Farming gets another lifeline…
August 14, 2026
Aotearoa had a chance to improve hens’ lives. Instead, we’re preserving factory farming.
And why SAFE is working to end it.
Factory farming is the industrial-scale farming of animals, where their lives are shaped around production, efficiency, and scale. This can look like…
Around 800,000 hens in Aotearoa are trapped in colony cages. A hen will spend her entire life unable to walk freely, dust-bathe in the soil, or fully stretch her wings.
A mother pig may be confined in a crate when she gives birth, unable to turn around or nurture her piglets.
Around 125 million chickens are farmed for meat, and 1.6 million hens farmed for their eggs in barn systems.
Thousands of cattle can be crammed into filthy feedlots.
Image Credit: Grassroots Campaigns
A chicken bred for meat can grow so quickly that her legs and heart struggle to keep up with her body.
Beaks are cut off to reduce feather pecking. Tails are docked to prevent biting. Teeth may be clipped. Animals can be subjected to painful mutilations because the environment they’re living in makes these problems more likely.
The details look different across species, but the underlying idea is the same:
Animals are treated as units in a production line, valued for what they can produce rather than for the lives they could experience.
We’re investigating and challenging factory farming across Aotearoa so people can understand what’s happening to animals, and communities can have a say in the systems operating around them.
We can’t end factory farming one farm at a time – we need to change what makes it possible.
The future isn’t fixed
We don’t have to accept cages, crates, and crowded sheds as part of our food system.
We can end factory farming.
We can build a future where animals are no longer treated as commodities to be produced, confined and controlled.
Join us.
Challenge the rules and structures that keep it in place.
Build a resilient, plant-based food system that doesn’t depend on animal exploitation.
Aotearoa had a chance to improve hens’ lives. Instead, we’re preserving factory farming.
New footage from a Taranaki pig farm has revealed the grim reality of life inside a farrowing crate for mother pigs – the same cages the Government is rushing to legalise through the Animal Welfare (Regulations for Management of Pigs) Amendment Bill.
Sadly, Kiwis may not be aware that one third of hens farmed for egg production in Aotearoa are farmed in these cruel cage systems. Why? Because the cage egg industry is doing its best to hide the truth.