The vivid red and green shapes in these pictures are not abstract paintings. They are satellite views of American cattle feedlots and the manure lagoons beside them, assembled by the British-French artist Mishka Henner. His Feedlots series, begun in 2012, became one of the best-known visual records of industrial meat production, because it shows from above what is almost never seen from the road: thousands of animals packed into pens, and pools of waste large enough to stain the landscape.
This article explains what the photos show, what a feedlot is, what livestock farming really contributes to climate change and pollution, and which widely shared statistics hold up and which do not.
What Mishka Henner's feedlot images show
Henner, who is based in Manchester, found the sites by browsing Google Earth and then stitched together high-resolution satellite imagery into large prints. The grid of small squares in each picture is a set of pens, each holding cattle being fattened on grain before slaughter. The coloured pools are waste lagoons, where liquid manure and runoff collect. Their striking colours come from the mix of waste, bacteria, algae and chemicals in the water.
The series appeared as a cover story in Vice magazine in December 2012, and Henner's feedlot and oil field images were shortlisted for the Prix Pictet photography prize in 2014. He had already been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and won an ICP Infinity Award in 2013. The power of the work is that it needs no slogan: the scale is the message.
What a feedlot, or CAFO, actually is
In the United States, large livestock operations are known officially as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. The USDA describes them as operations where animals are confined and fed for more than 45 days a year, instead of grazing on pasture. The Environmental Protection Agency sorts them by size; for cattle, a "large" CAFO holds 1,000 animals or more.
Of roughly 212,000 animal feeding operations in the US, about 19,500 met the narrower CAFO definition in 2016. Yet these operations produce most of the country's meat, milk and eggs. The advocacy group Farm Forward, working from US Department of Agriculture census data, has estimated that around 99 percent of farmed animals in the US live on factory farms. That figure is an advocacy estimate rather than an official statistic, and it is driven mainly by chickens, which vastly outnumber cattle and pigs, but it reflects how concentrated the industry has become.
The aim of the system is efficiency: producing as much meat as possible at the lowest cost per kilo. Henner has reportedly described feedlots as a symbol of how abstract and distant our food system has become, built to extract maximum yield from animals.
Manure lagoons, water and neighbours
Concentrating tens of thousands of animals in one place also concentrates their waste. The most common way to store it is in open anaerobic lagoons like the ones in Henner's pictures. When they leak, overflow or are spread too heavily on fields, nitrogen and phosphorus reach rivers and groundwater, feeding algal blooms and dead zones. Nitrates and pathogens can also contaminate drinking water.
North Carolina, home to a very large hog industry, is a well-known example. The aerial video below was filmed over the state's pig farms. In 1995, a lagoon there ruptured and released about 25.8 million gallons of waste into the New River, killing around 10 million fish. People living near large operations have long complained of odours, and studies link ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from these farms to asthma and other respiratory problems among workers and neighbours.
There is also a medical concern. Many operations have routinely added low doses of antibiotics to feed, which helps resistant bacteria develop and spread. The World Health Organization has urged countries to rethink that practice. If you are worried about health effects from living near a farm, talk to a doctor and your local environmental health office.
How much does livestock add to climate change?
This is where the numbers are most often confused. In 2006 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization published Livestock's Long Shadow, which estimated that livestock caused 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and compared that with transport. That comparison was later challenged: the meat figure counted the whole life cycle, from feed crops to deforestation, while the transport figure counted mainly exhaust emissions. One of the report's authors publicly accepted that the criticism had a point.
In 2013 the FAO produced an updated estimate of 14.5 percent of all human-caused emissions. That is still a very large share, roughly comparable to all the world's cars, trucks, ships and planes. Most of it comes from methane produced in cattle digestion, from land cleared for pasture and feed crops, and from manure and fertiliser. Methane is a far stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term, though it breaks down within about a decade or so, which means cutting it can slow warming relatively quickly.
A much bigger figure, that 51 percent of global emissions come from animal agriculture, circulates widely online. It comes from a 2009 Worldwatch Institute paper by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, which was not peer-reviewed and used different accounting methods. Most scientists, including reviewers at the Union of Concerned Scientists, put the real share at around 15 percent.
Land, forests and wildlife
Livestock's largest environmental footprint is land. Pasture and feed crops occupy a large share of the world's farmland, and the FAO identified clearing forest for grazing and feed, especially in Latin America, as the single biggest source of livestock-related emissions. Cattle ranching is widely recognised as the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Habitat loss on this scale is one of the main pressures on wildlife worldwide.
Numbers such as "a football field of forest every second" or "100 species lost every day" are often quoted with these images. They are rough campaign estimates that are hard to verify and should be treated with caution; the underlying trend they describe, however, is real.
Impact clips from First Spark Media on Vimeo.
The Cowspiracy clips
The video clips in this article come from Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, a 2014 documentary by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn. An updated version, with Leonardo DiCaprio as executive producer, was released on Netflix in September 2015. The film argues that big environmental groups avoid talking about animal agriculture, and it covers rainforest loss, water use and ocean pollution.
Water clip from First Spark Media on Vimeo.
The documentary was influential, and it helped push meat's environmental cost into public debate. But it also repeats the disputed 51 percent emissions claim, so it is best watched as an advocacy film rather than a neutral summary of the science.
Myths and questions to keep in mind
"Animal farming is the leading cause of climate change." Not on current evidence. Burning fossil fuels for energy, industry and transport remains the main cause. Livestock is a major contributor, roughly one-seventh of emissions, and the largest in food.
"Environmental groups never talk about it." This was a fair criticism in the early 2010s, but many groups and the UN now discuss diet and livestock openly.
"GM crops are proven to be dangerous." The original version of this story linked feedlots to fears about genetically modified food. A 2016 review by the US National Academies found no substantiated evidence that the main commercial GM crops pose greater health risks than conventional ones. Concerns about pesticides, monocultures and corporate control are separate and still debated.
What you can do with this information
The research points to a few practical steps. Eating less red meat, especially beef, cuts more emissions than most other single diet changes. Choosing meat from well-managed systems, wasting less food, and supporting rules on manure handling and antibiotic use all help. None of this requires everyone to give up meat; what the feedlot images show is mostly a problem of scale and concentration.
Henner's pictures are still worth looking at closely. They turn statistics into something you can see: the geometry of a food system designed for output, and the colours of what it leaves behind.
Sources: Mishka Henner (Wikipedia); Mishka Henner, Feedlots (artist's site); Concentrated animal feeding operation (Wikipedia); Livestock's Long Shadow (Wikipedia); Cowspiracy (Wikipedia). Video clips: First Spark Media. Story originally shared by Collective Evolution (2015).
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Is there a solution? Is it time to make soylent green a reality? People gotta eat, and people can't seem to control our reproduction. Humanity is a parasite and we have a long way to go if we want to live in symbiosis with our planet.
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