Factory Farms in Pennsylvania

Over the last two decades, small- and medium-scale livestock farms have given way to factory farms that confine thousands of cows, hogs and chickens in tightly packed facilities. In Pennsylvania, there were 998,000 hogs, 35,300 beef cattle, 54,600 dairy cows and 25.5 million chickens on the largest operations in 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture. Pennsylvania ranks fifth in the nation in factory-farmed egg-laying hens.