Lewis Bollard, who leads farm animal welfare strategy at Open Philanthropy, posted a thread on X in June 2025 that cut through the usual noise around industrial agriculture with a blunt claim: the U.S. government is spending billions to prop up a factory farming system that generates enormous hidden costs — environmental, public health, and economic — while telling consumers they’re getting a good deal.
He’s right. And the numbers back him up.
The Subsidy Machine Behind Your $5 Chicken
The United States spends roughly $38 billion annually in agricultural subsidies, with a disproportionate share flowing to feed crops like corn and soybeans that sustain industrial animal agriculture. According to USDA data, corn alone received $116.6 billion in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2021. Most of that corn doesn’t end up on dinner plates. It feeds livestock.
This isn’t a secret. But it’s systematically underappreciated by policymakers and consumers alike. The retail price of chicken, pork, and beef in the U.S. reflects only a fraction of the true production cost. Taxpayers cover the rest — through crop insurance payouts, conservation program payments to mitigate damage caused by industrial operations, and direct commodity support. The result is artificially cheap animal protein that undercuts alternatives and locks in a system with cascading externalities.
Bollard’s X post highlighted how this subsidy structure creates a vicious cycle. Cheap feed enables concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to scale. Scale drives consolidation. Consolidation gives a handful of corporations — Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef — outsized market power and political influence to preserve the status quo.
Four companies now control over 80% of U.S. beef processing, according to the White House. Similar concentration exists in pork and poultry. That’s not a free market. That’s an oligopoly sustained by public money.
The Externalities Nobody Prices In
The environmental toll is staggering and well-documented. Animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. In the U.S., CAFOs generate an estimated 500 million tons of manure annually — more than three times the sewage produced by the entire human population of the country, according to the Government Accountability Office. Much of it ends up contaminating waterways, contributing to dead zones like the 6,300-square-mile hypoxic area in the Gulf of Mexico documented by NOAA.
Then there’s the pandemic risk. Not theoretical. Concrete.
The H5N1 avian influenza outbreak that tore through U.S. dairy and poultry operations in 2024 and into 2025 infected dozens of farmworkers, led to the culling of over 100 million birds since 2022, and exposed the biosecurity failures inherent in packing thousands of animals into confined spaces. Reuters has tracked the spread extensively, noting that the virus’s jump to dairy cattle was unprecedented and alarmed virologists worldwide. The CDC confirmed human cases linked to direct contact with infected livestock.
Bollard pointed to this convergence of risks — zoonotic disease, antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation — as evidence that the current system is not just ethically questionable but economically irrational. He’s making a market-failure argument, not a sentimental one.
And it’s persuasive. A 2023 study published in Nature Food estimated that the true cost of food in the U.S., accounting for health and environmental externalities, is roughly three times the retail price. Animal products carry the largest hidden surcharge.
So who pays? Taxpayers. Rural communities living near CAFOs who suffer elevated rates of asthma, waterborne illness, and property devaluation. Healthcare systems absorbing the downstream effects of antibiotic-resistant infections — the WHO calls antimicrobial resistance one of the top ten global public health threats, and roughly 70% of medically important antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to livestock, per FDA reporting.
The industry’s standard response is that factory farming feeds the world affordably. But affordable for whom? Not for the contract poultry farmers carrying $500,000 in debt to companies that dictate every aspect of their operations while classifying them as independent contractors. Not for the meatpacking workers — predominantly immigrant and low-income — who suffered some of the highest COVID-19 infection rates of any occupation, as ProPublica documented.
The efficiency argument also ignores conversion ratios. It takes roughly 7 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of beef. For chicken, it’s about 2 to 1. In a world where grain prices are volatile and climate change threatens crop yields, funneling the majority of corn and soy through animals before it reaches humans is a resource allocation problem that gets worse over time, not better.
Alternative proteins — plant-based and cultivated meat — face their own challenges. Taste gaps. Cost curves that haven’t bent fast enough. Consumer skepticism. But the playing field is tilted from the start. When your competitor’s inputs are subsidized and its externalities are socialized, competing on price is nearly impossible.
Bollard and Open Philanthropy have directed significant funding toward both welfare reforms and alternative protein development. Critics from the agriculture industry dismiss this as ideological. But the data doesn’t care about ideology. The externalities are real. The subsidies are documented. The market distortion is measurable.
What would rational policy look like? Redirecting even a fraction of commodity subsidies toward regenerative agriculture, pricing carbon and methane emissions from livestock operations, enforcing existing environmental regulations that the EPA has largely declined to apply to CAFOs, and investing in protein diversification. None of this requires eliminating animal agriculture. It requires making it pay its actual costs.
That’s not radical. It’s basic economics.
The U.S. farm bill, up for reauthorization, is where these fights play out. And every time, the industrial agriculture lobby — which spent over $140 million on federal lobbying in 2024 alone, according to OpenSecrets — ensures the subsidy structure remains largely intact. The political economy of cheap meat is self-reinforcing. Breaking it requires the kind of sustained public attention that the industry has successfully avoided for decades.
Bollard’s post was a signal flare. Whether anyone in a position to act actually looks up remains the open question.
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