Do farm adverts show how animals really live?

The objection

“Farming isn’t all factories. The packaging shows cows in green fields, hens roaming the yard. That’s the farming I’m supporting, and there’s nothing cruel about that.”

The answer

The farm on the packet is a picture someone chose. When the Animal Law Foundation, a UK animal-law charity, went through the websites, adverts and products of 47 producers of dairy, eggs and meat for a 2025 report, 84% of the 44 that used images of animals included pictures, videos or drawings of animals living outdoors [1]. Most of those producers, 61%, also showed animals indoors, but every animal in those pictures looked healthy; fewer than a third of these producers showed spacious conditions, and nearly half used blurry, cropped or unclear images [1]. All nine supermarkets it looked at showed healthy animals outdoors on their websites, and the six that also showed animals indoors showed only healthy ones [1]. What shoppers are shown of indoor farming is a cleaned-up version of it, and even where the field is real, the pictures stop well before the end of the animal’s life.

How many farm animals live like the ones in the adverts?

Only a minority do: the Sentience Institute, an animal-advocacy think tank, estimated in 2019 that about 74% of the world’s farmed land animals were in factory farms [2], which Our World in Data (2023) puts at around 23 billion animals at any one time [3]. The Institute calls the figure substantially uncertain, because the land-animal estimate leans heavily on data from the Worldwatch Institute, whose methodology is unclear [2]. Our World in Data reasons that more than three-quarters of the roughly 70 billion chickens slaughtered each year will be factory-farmed, since chickens are the animals most likely to be farmed intensively [3]. The Institute’s US estimate, built from the USDA’s Census of Agriculture, puts the share at 99% of livestock in 2022, including more than 98% of hens and pigs and more than 99% of chickens and turkeys [3].

Cattle come closest to the picture on the carton. In the US they are a little more likely than other farm animals to be raised outside in fields, yet 75% are still fed in concentrated feeding operations for at least 45 days a year [3]. In Britain, a survey of 863 dairy farms in 2012 found that 8% kept their cows indoors day and night while they were giving milk and 1% never housed them at all, but only 31% kept to the traditional pattern of grazing all summer with no feeding indoors; on 38% of farms, every milking cow got some of her feed indoors through the summer [4]. Herds were larger, on average, on the farms that fed indoors, and the researchers, March and colleagues (2014), concluded that all-summer grazing is no longer the main system on British dairy farms [4]. How little a free-range or humane label guarantees is covered in the answer on humane and free-range farming.

What do the adverts leave out about dairy cows?

They leave out how short a dairy cow’s life is and what happens to her calves. Dallago and colleagues, reviewing cow longevity in the world’s high milk-producing countries in 2021, give a dairy cow’s life expectancy as around 20 years and say it is rarely seen under modern commercial conditions; in Canada, they note, Holstein cows that die of natural causes do so at 9.1 years on average [5]. In the figures from official milk-recording agencies that they gathered for nine of those countries, covering 2018 to 2020, the average cow had left the herd, culled or dead, at 3.9 years old in Canada, 4.6 in France and 6.4 in Ireland, the highest of the nine [5]. The review warns that countries measure longevity in different ways, and some of the samples are narrow: the US figure comes from a single recording agency’s 2,140 herds, and Brazil’s from one crossbreed that makes up 0.09% of the country’s cows [5]. Most cows are culled for something other than low yield: failure to get pregnant is the commonest reason for involuntary culling worldwide, and in Canada from 2014 to 2019, 73.6% of culls were for problems such as infertility, mastitis or feet and legs, against 7.2% for low milk production [5].

Her calves go long before she does. The European Food Safety Authority reported in 2023 that the great majority of dairy farms separate cow and calf immediately after birth, and that in Europe’s veal trade the male calves, along with some females not kept to replace the herd, are moved at about two to five weeks old to auction markets or straight to specialised veal units [6]. In 2018 two animal-welfare groups, Eyes on Animals and L214, filmed unweaned calves spending days on the road across Europe.