Why “One Health” and animal welfare is key to sustainability for people and the global ecosystem

I was taking the night train to Nanyang in China's Henan province and spent the last hour before I reached my destination looking at mile upon mile of maize, or corn as it’s often known. Most of this crop in China and worldwide is grown largely for animal feed and biofuel. The air was dampened by a gray, misty haze. I was keen to visit some of China's animal production facilities but for now I found myself looking out over what was being used to feed them. Vast prairie-like tracts of a single crop stretching as far as the eye could see. So much so, that it made it feel like the train was moving in slow motion.

Thinking back on that journey reminds me of something that happened some years later much closer to home.

It was early morning in a field near the farm hamlet where I live in England, and a tractor was pulling a plough. Back and forth it went, ploughing its lonely furrow. Behind the tractor, dust clouds spiraled and caught the sun, creating an aura. A timeless symbol of the season. Only, something was missing: there were no screeching gulls following the plough in search of worms.

I took a closer look. The tractor was ploughing across a footpath, giving me a bird's-eye view of the newly upturned soil. As I stared down, do you know what I saw?—nothing. There were no worms, beetles, or bugs desperate to get back into the newly upturned earth. The soil was lifeless. It was like sand. We could have been walking on the moon.

That field should have had millions of worms in every hectare—in every patch the size of a football pitch. There should have been 13,000 species of life with a collective weight of an elephant: five tons.

But instead, there was nothing.

That field was about to be planted again with maize (corn), a crop commonly used as animal feed. It was grown with chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers. No wonder the soil was dead and washing into the nearby river. It is a problem that exists for crops grown using industrial methods, whether for human consumption or the sizeable industry for animal feed, which accounts for about a third of cereal crops grown worldwide.

It reminded me of seeing great green swathes of monoculture maize corn in the American Midwest of Nebraska, much of which was destined for the feed troughs of industrially reared chickens, pigs, and cattle. I remember seeing feedlots. Hundreds of cows and calves standing in barren pens, not a blade of grass in sight. Despite the hot summer sun, they had no shade. I watched as they jostled in the searing heat for respite, trying to get into each other's shadow.

It was a potent example of industrial animal agriculture, a regime that now ravages the planet, to the detriment of animal welfare, the ecosystem, and the health of people.

It has not always been like this. In fact, it was but a single human lifetime ago when we started removing animals from the land to be caged, crammed, and confined. Taken off grass where the animals could make their own living, vast acreages of cropland elsewhere had to be devoted to growing their feed. The age-old practice of replenishing the soil naturally through rotating various crops and animals round the farm was replaced with fields that became sterile, prairie-like areas of a single crop.

Industrial animal agriculture has been fueled by Western companies keen to sell the latest chemicals, veterinary pharmaceuticals, farm machinery, and cages internationally, regardless of whether they are now illegal in their home country.

One such German-based company, for example, sells sow stalls. Although they are widely used in China and the United States, these stalls, also known as gestation crates, are banned on animal welfare grounds for prolonged use in the EU and will be banned completely in Germany by 2030.

I recently looked at a European-based company’s website where I found a video that showed five young chickens in a wire cage not much bigger than a microwave. Their beaks had been cut to ugly stumps. The video cut to a shot of an endless row of cages. The confinement was claustrophobic—I could have been watching investigative footage from an animal activist group, but I wasn't. The promotional video was selling “conventional” cages for laying hens or barren battery cages: a system long-since banned on animal welfare grounds by the UK and EU.

Regrettably, fueled by Western encouragement to intensify its animal agriculture, China is now taking things to a whole new level with multistory pig farms. One company involved is hoping to raise more pigs on a single site than anyone else in the world. Roughly 10 times the size of a typical American breeding facility, the idea on a single multistory mega-farm is to produce more than 2 million pigs a year.

High-rise facilities are increasingly popular in China, thanks to a scarcity of suitable land.¹ Yet the disease and animal welfare risk of keeping so many pigs in such a confined space is serious. Too many animals kept in too small a space is the genesis of many of the problems with disease. It creates the conditions for disease to spread and for viruses to mutate into deadlier forms, raising the specter of new pandemics among both animals and humans alike.

This kind of industrial animal agriculture in China and the world over has been built on the myth of it being needed to “feed the world.”

Far from making food, industrial animal agriculture wastes it. This is because animals are hugely inefficient at converting crops into meat, milk, and eggs. In the process, they waste most of the food value in terms of calories and protein.

Up to two-thirds of arable land globally is used to feed factory-farmed animals, such as pigs, chickens, and cattle, as well as to run biofuel-powered vehicles.²

If the crops grown worldwide for industrial animal feedstuffs were placed in one field, it would cover the entire land surface of the UK and EU put together.

Every year, in this way we waste enough food to feed 4 billion people—half of all humanity on the planet today. Without industrial agriculture and the associated animal cruelty, we could feed everyone on less farmland, not more.

Consequently, the industrial rearing of animals is now the biggest single cause of food loss on the planet. It is also the biggest cause of animal cruelty and the major driver of wildlife declines worldwide.

And, as I saw while watching that wormless field being ploughed back home in England, it also undermines the very thing we need for food in the future: soil. Which is why the UN has rightly warned that, if we carry on as we are doing now, then we will have just 60 harvests left in the world's soil. No soil, no food. Game over.

It is the elephant in the room.

Addressing the elephant in the room means moving away from this failed industrial model of animal agriculture. Instead, embracing farming based not on cruelty, extraction, and decline, but on putting back into nature's bank account. Working in harmony with Mother Nature. Respecting the welfare of animals: their wants, needs, and feelings.

In this way, we can bring back the elephant's weight of biodiversity that should be under each football-pitch-sized patch of healthy soil. And therein save the future of food for our children. This is essential if we are to take seriously the concept of One Health: that the health and well-being of people rely on the welfare of animals and a thriving ecosystem. A triple-win scenario for animals, people, and the planet.

Having studied this triple-win scenario around the world, what I learned is that genuine animal welfare and sustainability are best served by a systemic change away from industrial animal agriculture toward regenerative farming in harmony with nature.

Animal welfare is about ensuring the well-being of the individual animal. This involves the physical and mental well-being of the animal, as well as allowing for the expression of normal behaviors.

Therefore, the welfare of an animal can be described as good or high if the individual is fit, healthy, and happy.

Truly, high animal welfare is more than the absence of suffering: it should allow animals to enjoy positive experiences summed up in the phrase, the joy of life.

The good news is that truly high animal welfare and genuine sustainability go hand-in-hand; one helps bring about the other.

Achieving sustainability in food production requires a move away from simply reducing animal suffering within inherently unsustainable industrial systems. We need to go beyond the approach of only making small changes within fundamentally inadequate systems. A classic example is in adding a perch to a cage. It might help alleviate suffering in a small way. But it will never deliver high standards of animal welfare. Far from it. It also fails to overcome the fundamental problem of an unsustainable system, therefore undermining ecological and human health.

Transforming food systems for genuine sustainability on a One Health basis means approaching farm animal welfare differently. Putting animals back into the environment as part of mixed, rotational, and regenerative farming in ways that provide the conditions for genuinely high animal welfare naturally. The aim of animal agriculture here then is not only to accomplish freedom from suffering for the animals but also to deliver freedom to enjoy life.

This positive approach to One Health, One Welfare can help China's animal agriculture achieve much more healthy, humane, and sustainable food systems. They offer the possibility of replacing industrial animal agriculture with rearing methods that protect nature while genuinely providing for high health and welfare.

Getting animals back out into fields as part of mixed, rotational farms is paramount. Examples of nature-friendly farming include rotational forms of pasture-fed, free range, or organic farming. Agro-ecological or regenerative farming is where a diversity of crops and animals are moved around the farm, restoring soil health and farmland wildlife naturally.

All of which is vitally important because an essential requirement for humanity in the future is under threat: the ecosystem.

As it stands, our world is disastrously out of balance with nature. A seminal report by Chatham House entitled, Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss,³ clearly showed that the industrialization of agriculture has both decimated wildlife and has undermined our ability to grow food in the future.

Essential to achieving planetary balance to protect the future for humanity and all species is to produce fewer animal products. Many fewer. Diets high in meat and dairy are placing huge strain on the Earth's resources and endangering human health, with industrial animal agriculture acting as the driver of yet more consumption.

Taken together, the weight of humans and the animals we rear for food accounts for 96% of all mammals on Earth. Everything else, from elephants to badgers and mice, make up just 4%. In the avian world, domestic poultry accounts for 70% of the weight of all the world's birds.

The reason for this is that so much of the world's land surface is now being used to grow food in a way that does not make room for nature. Agriculture covers nearly half the useable land surface of the planet; four-fifths of it is devoted to producing animal products. Yet meat, dairy, and other animal-sourced foods contribute little more than a third of humanity's protein needs and less than a fifth of our calories.⁴ Whichever way you look at it, the return on investment is pitiful.

As globally renowned naturalist and presenter, Sir David Attenborough puts it, “This is now our planet, run by humankind for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world.”⁵

In a world that is producing 80 billion land animals for food a year, most of them in industrial animal agricultural systems, resetting the balance will require switching to welfare-positive and nature-friendly production with fewer animals.

What has become increasingly clear is that we are all in this together: farm animals, the natural world, and humanity.

Without major reform, food alone, which is responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions,⁶ could put achieving globally agreed climate targets out of reach. Industrial meat and dairy do the most damage to climate, nature, and human health.

As a global society, we are waking up to the fact that our economy must work within planetary boundaries; the illusion of infinite growth in a world of finite resources is starting to wear thin.

If humanity is to survive, then the way we feed ourselves will have to change.

In the battle for the planet, the key to our success will be ending industrial animal agriculture and moving to more regenerative forms of farming.

I see a portfolio of beautiful, life-affirming, and compassionate solutions being available that can save the future for our children. I sum them up in three “R”s: Regeneration, Rethinking Protein, and Rewilding, not least of the soil. Regeneration of the countryside through high-welfare and nature-friendly farming. Rethinking protein by reducing our consumption of meat and milk from animals. In addition, Rewilding the soil by returning animals to the land regeneratively as part of mixed rotational farms. Let's go through them in more detail.

Nature-friendly or regenerative farming involves restoring animals to the land as rotational grazers or foragers where they can express their natural behaviors—running, flapping, and grazing—making for happier animals with better health and welfare. Regenerative farming also cuts reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, reducing costs to farmers and creating a varied landscape bursting with wildflowers that lure back pollinating insects, such as bumblebees, as well as providing seeds and insects for birds and other wildlife.

This, combined with a serious reduction in the number of farmed animals can create food systems that are genuinely sustainable. Based on scientific assessments within the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet, we can see that saving the planet will require drastic reductions in consumption of animal-sourced foods.

Evidence shows that by the middle of the century, our consumption of animal products worldwide must be reduced by more than half. In high-consuming regions, such as the West, deeper cuts will be needed.

Consumption of animal-sourced foods would be reduced through replacement with plant-based and other alternative proteins, including cell-based or “cultivated” meat produced by growing stem cells in a bioreactor and precision fermentation, together with eating more fruit, vegetables, and legumes.

With farmed animals kept regeneratively, soil fertility can be turbo-boosted by the rotational symphony of plants and animals working in harmony with underground ecosystems involving worms, bugs, and bacteria, thereby rewilding the soil. Huge amounts of carbon could be locked up in healthy soil. Much more water would be conserved for crops and a vast array of biodiversity would be restored to thriving farmland.

In this growing age of planetary crisis, there is a pressing need for bigger, bolder, and more urgent solutions, ones that join the dots between the challenges facing humanity, making for game-changing solutions that bring triple-win scenarios for people, animals, and the planet.

When considering how best to improve the well-being of sentient creatures both farmed and wild, there is great strength in a fusion between animal welfare and environmentalism.

Delivering high animal welfare is essential both ethically and in securing a sustainable future for people through a thriving ecosystem. Embracing both together opens a richness of beautiful and visionary solutions: landscapes bursting with life, providing healthy and nutritious food in ways that allow animals to experience the joy of life.

Ending industrial animal agriculture is the transition so urgently needed to safeguard the future for all. It is the cornerstone of One Health: that protecting people means protecting animals too.

Philip Lymbery: Conceptualization (lead); data curation (lead); formal analysis (lead); funding acquisition (lead); investigation (lead); methodology (lead); project administration (lead); resources (lead); software (lead); supervision (lead); validation (lead); visualization (lead); writing – original draft (lead); writing – review & editing (lead).

No conflict of interest to declare.