By JONATHAN SAFRAN-FOER

Everyone has a mental image of a farm, and to most it probably includes fields, barns, tractors and animals, or at least one of the above. I doubt there’s anyone on earth not involved in farming whose mind would conjure what I’m now looking at. And yet before me is the kind of farm that produces roughly 99% of the animals consumed in America.

This Californian turkey farm is ¬surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and set up in a series of seven sheds, each about 50ft wide by 500ft long, each holding in the neighborhood of 25,000 birds. Adjacent to the sheds is a massive granary, which looks more like something out of Blade Runner than Little House on the Prairie. Metal pipes spiderweb the outsides of the ¬buildings, massive fans protrude and clang, and floodlights project weirdly discrete pockets of day.

I am accompanied tonight by an animal activist, “C”. She is short and wispy. She wears aviator glasses, ¬flip-flops and braces.

With her astronaut’s gloves, C spreads the harp of barbed wire far enough apart for me to squeeze through. My trousers snag and rip, but they are disposable, purchased for this occasion.

The surface is lunarlike. With each step, my feet sink into a compost of ¬animal waste, dirt, and I-don’t-yet-know-what-else that has been poured around the sheds. I have to curl my toes to keep my shoes from being left behind in the glutinous muck. We ¬approach the first shed. Light spills from under its door. I wonder: Why would a shed full of animals be brightly lit in the middle of the night?

I can hear movement from inside: the hum of machines blends with what sounds a bit like a whispering audience or a chandelier shop in a mild earthquake. C wrestles with the door and then signals that we should move to the next shed.

We spend several minutes like this, looking for an unlocked door. Another why: Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?

It can’t be because he’s afraid someone will steal his equipment or animals. There’s no equipment to steal, and the animals aren’t worth the ¬herculean effort it would take to ¬illicitly transport a significant number. A farmer doesn’t lock his doors ¬because he’s afraid his animals will ¬escape. Turkeys can’t turn doorknobs. It isn’t because of biosecurity, either. Barbed wire is enough to keep out the merely curious. So why? In the three years I will spend ¬immersed in animal ¬agriculture, ¬nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors.

As it turns out, locked doors are the least of it. I never heard back from any of the companies I wrote to. Even research organisations with paid staff find themselves consistently thwarted by industry secrecy.

The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.

This is a farm

It’s hard to get one’s head around the magnitude of 25,000 or 30,000 birds in one room. You don’t have to see it for yourself to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal ¬Welfare Guidelines, the US National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. Try to ¬picture it. Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 25,000 of these rectangles in a grid. Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation ¬systems. This is a farm.

Now to the farming. First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly ¬engineered broiler birds – chickens that ¬become meat, as opposed to ¬layers, chickens that lay eggs – grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1% and 4% of the birds will die writhing in ¬convulsions from sudden-death ¬syndrome, a condition ¬virtually ¬unknown outside of factory farms. Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain.

For broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks’ lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day – just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course, chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long. At least broiler birds are ¬typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or increasingly the 39th), so they haven’t yet established social hierarchies to fight over.

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Eye damage, blindness, ¬bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal ¬bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory ¬diseases and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and US government records suggest that virtually all chickens become ¬infected with E coli (an indicator of faecal ¬contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8% of birds become infected with salmonella. Seventy to 90% are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter.

How good could a drug-stuffed, ¬disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? In practice, the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell and taste.

The farming done, it’s now time for “processing”. First, you’ll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and “hold the line” that will turn the living birds into plastic-wrapped parts. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable ¬employees. Pay your workers ¬minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds – five in each hand – and jam them into transport crates.

If your operation is running at the proper speed – 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the ¬expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed – the workers will regularly feel the birds’ bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly ¬broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.)

Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don’t feed or water the birds, even if the processing plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, on to a ¬moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won’t be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.

The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyses them but doesn’t render them insensible. Other countries, including the UK, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, the voltage is kept low – about one-tenth of the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has travelled through the bath, a paralysed bird’s eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though ¬attempting to scream.

The next stop on the line will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, “all the time”. So you’ll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers – “kill men” – who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens “all the time”. ¬According to the National Chicken Council – ¬representatives of the industry – about 180 ¬million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him,¬ ¬Richard L Lobb, the council’s spokesman, sighed, “The process is over in a matter of minutes.”

Faeces, and other ‘blemishes’

I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men, who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank, which helps open the bird’s pores. Since faeces on skin and feathers end up in these tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin.

After the birds’ heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination ¬often occurs here, as the high-speed ¬machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing faeces into the birds’ body cavities. Once upon a time, US Department of Agriculture (Usda) ¬inspectors had to condemn any bird with such faecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the Usda to reclassify faeces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, faeces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish”.

Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, “People are done consuming the faeces in a matter of minutes.”

Next the birds are inspected by a Usda official, whose ostensible ¬function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two ¬seconds to examine each bird inside and out, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein conducted interviews with nearly 100 Usda poultry inspectors from 37 plants. “Every week,” he reports, “millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green faeces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumours or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.”

Next, the chickens go to a ¬massive refrigerated tank of ¬water, where ¬thousands of birds are ¬communally cooled. The Government ¬Accountability Project, a US whistleblower protection organisation, has said that the “water in these tanks has been aptly named ‘faecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around”.

While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99% of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue their use.

Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the ¬”faecal soup”). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags ¬during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity to turn waste-water into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of additional weight in poultry products.

What I’ve described is not exceptional. It isn’t the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or “bad ¬apples”. It is the rule. More than 99% of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this. For each food ¬species, animal ¬agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm – 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle.

Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the EU, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. All told, there are 50 billion factory-farmed birds worldwide. Every year 50 billion birds are made to live and die like this.

An act of mercy

Back at the turkey farm, men’s voices drift over from the granary. Why are they working at 3.30 in the ¬morning? Machines engage. What kinds of ¬machines? It’s the middle of the night and things are happening. What is happening?

“Found one,” C whispers, finding an unlocked door. She slides it open, releasing a parallelogram of light, and enters. The first thing that catches my attention is the row of gas masks on the near wall. Why would there be gas masks in a farm shed?

We creep in. There are tens of ¬thousands of turkey chicks. Fist-sized, with feathers the colour of sawdust, they’re nearly invisible on the sawdust floor. At first the situation doesn’t look too bad. It’s crowded, but they seem happy enough. The ¬exhilaration of ¬seeing what I came to see, and ¬confronting all of these baby animals, has me feeling pretty good.

I tiptoe around and explore, leaving vague bootie prints in the sawdust. The closer I look, the more I see. The ends of the beaks of the chicks are blackened, as are the ends of their toes. Some have red spots on the tops of their heads.

Because there are so many animals, it takes me several minutes before I take in just how many dead ones there are. Some are blood-matted; some are covered in sores. Some seem to have been pecked at; others are as ¬desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves. Some are ¬deformed. The dead are the ¬exceptions, but there are few places to look without seeing at least one.

One chick is trembling on its side, legs splayed, eyes crusted over. Scabs protrude from bald patches. Its beak is slightly open, and its head is shaking back and forth. How old is it? A week? Two? Has it been like this for all of its life, or did ¬something ¬happen to it? What could have ¬happened to it?

C will know what to do, I think. She opens her bag and removes a knife. Holding one hand over the chick’s head – is she keeping it still or ¬covering its eyes? – she slices its neck, rescuing it.

The UK meat industry ‘A remarkably similar story’

Anyone who cares about the issues raised by factory farming should not find any peace in ¬being British. While my research has focused on American agriculture, a remarkably similar story could be told about animal farming in the UK.

There are some important differences: sow stalls (gestation crates) and veal creates are banned in the UK, whereas they are the norm in America; poultry slaughter is almost certainly less cruel. But there are far more, and more important, similarities.

Approximately 800 million chickens, ¬turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year – more than 10 ¬animals for every ¬human. (If this number were to include cows and fish – which are, for different reasons, difficult to quantify – it would be dramatically larger.) Approximately 95% of poultry and 60% of pigs are raised on factory farms. The techniques and outcomes are often identical to those in the US.