Farmed Animal Numbers Rise by Half Worldwide in Two Decades

The number of mammals and poultry farmed worldwide increased by half over the last two decades, The Guardian reported, adding pressure on land, water and climate systems. Cropland devoted to livestock feed expanded by about a quarter during the same period. An area the size of Canada now shows degraded agricultural land.

About 90 percent of water withdrawn from natural systems for irrigation goes to growing animal feed. Emissions from livestock rose more than a fifth between 2001 and 2023, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO published its earlier report Livestock’s Long Shadow 20 years before these updated figures.

Researchers recorded 33 billion additional livestock mammals and poultry over the two decades. The total number of farmed animals slaughtered or used for milk or eggs reached 94.9 billion in 2023, up from 61.8 billion in 2006. Increasing fertilizer use for feed and slurry disposal have created dead zones in coastal waters, the largest covering an area the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico.

Peter Stevenson, chief policy adviser at Compassion in World Farming, said reductions in greenhouse gas output per unit of meat have often been offset by larger overall livestock numbers. “There’s been a huge increase, and it’s simply because there are so many more livestock now,” he said. Publicly funded development banks provided $1.23 billion to intensive farms in 2024.

Merel van der Mark, head of animal welfare and finance at Sinergia Animal, called for those banks to stop financing factory farming. “This means a shift away from industrial livestock production, which multilateral development banks must support by stopping financing factory farming and instead aligning their financial flows with a more sustainable world,” she said.