Consider the chicken you pick up at the grocery store for dinner. It might be one of the billions of packages of chicken contaminated with salmonella, a dangerous fecal bacteria, in the United States each year. Consumer Reports estimates that as many as 1 in 3 packages of some chicken products contain salmonella. Eating contaminated chicken and turkey can cause serious illness—days of fever, painful abdominal cramps, and severe diarrhea. Children, elderly, and family members with weakened immune systems face higher risks of severe illness, hospitalization, and even death. Salmonella alone is the leading cause of death from foodborne illness and sickens 1.28 million Americans each year.
A vast number of Americans agree: factory farming is inhumane, and the conditions under which we raise animals are unacceptable. However, it’s not just an inhumane system; it’s also a breeding ground for dangerous diseases. Foodborne pathogens that thrive in the unsanitary conditions of industrial agriculture, such as salmonella, represent one of the most constant risks to consumers.
In particular, the way we produce poultry—raising genetically identical birds in overcrowded, stressful conditions that weaken birds’ immune systems, combined with high-speed processing lines that spread contamination among birds—creates perfect environments for the transmission of disease. During transport to slaughterhouses, stressed birds are packed together and defecate on each other, increasing the chances of bacterial transmission.
Farm Forward’s most recent report uncovered that USDA allows highly salmonella-contaminated chicken and turkey to be sold by major poultry companies. Some companies, including (but not limited to) Perdue and Foster Poultry Farms, had 100 percent of their slaughterhouses receive the worst safety rating for both 2023 and 2024. Despite knowing their meat is highly contaminated, federal regulators have taken no meaningful action to address systemic contamination issues, allowing the companies to continue selling contaminated meat year after year.
The salmonella problem doesn’t stop at meat. Industrial animal operations generate inconceivably large amounts of waste every year, much of which gets spread on crop fields as fertilizer. When salmonella-tainted manure reaches farmland, it can contaminate fresh produce, particularly leafy greens like lettuce and spinach that are often eaten raw.
Soil contamination with poultry waste compounds the risk. According to a study testing 12 different salmonella strains, the bacteria survived an average of 129 days in soils mixed with poultry litter, with some strains lasting up to 336 days. This is significantly longer than in soil not comingled with poultry litter, indicating that using chicken manure as fertilizer, a common practice, can exacerbate the risk of contaminated soil causing infections from other crops.
Lurking behind the industrial animal sector’s reckless practices that cause widespread salmonella contamination is an even bigger danger: the industry’s role in driving the global crisis of antibiotic resistance. Consumer Reports found in the chicken they tested that all samples were contaminated with strains of salmonella that were resistant to at least one antibiotic and, even more alarming, 78% were resistant to multiple antibiotics.
Antibiotics have long been a critical tool in treating both common and severe human illnesses, including salmonella; we rely on these medications to keep us healthy. However, because two-thirds of FDA-approved antibiotics are now used for farmed animals at low doses to keep animals alive in overcrowded conditions that make them sick, bacteria have the chance to adapt and develop resistance to the drugs that are so critical in the treatment of human disease. These resistant bacteria then infect humans, increasingly resulting in “superbugs” that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to treat.
In no small part because of antibiotic resistance stemming from industrial animal agriculture, the World Health Organization warns we could enter a “post-antibiotic era” where common infections become deadly again. The poultry industry, then, is responsible not just for the hundreds of thousands of Americans it sickens with salmonella each year, but also for contributing to the potential demise of modern medicine.