Banks Are Bankrolling Factory Farms 32x More Than Alternative Proteins

How banks are quietly funnelling hundreds of billions into industrial animal agriculture — and what we can do about it.

Most social ills don’t emerge from nowhere: they’re heavily funded systems borne out of corporate interests and buoyed by heaps of cash. Factory farming is no different.

In the past few decades, "fossil fuel financing" has become a popular talking point among climate activists — if we can get banks to divest from oil and gas companies and invest in renewable energy, we can slow climate change. The logic also applies to our food systems. Enter: “factory farm financing“, a critical economic lever for change. If we want to reduce meat consumption at a meaningful scale, we need to level the playing field by pressuring banks to stop funding industrial animal agriculture and instead pour that money into more ethical, sustainable alternatives. Here’s how we can start.

The Scale of Factory Farm Financing

When you deposit money into your bank account, it doesn’t just sit there — banks use up to 90% of that cash to generate more money. Some of it is lent out to regular people (think small-business loans or mortgages) at higher interest rates so banks can make a profit. But another chunk of that cash is invested in bonds and stocks, including for corporations that aren’t so ethical. That means that when you hold your money in a bank account, your money may be loaned out to factory farm giants — like JBS, Tyson, or Minerva — without you even knowing about it.

How much? It’s difficult to say for certain, since many of these investments aren’t widely publicized. Still, a recent Foodrise report found that the 55 largest livestock companies received over 600 billion US dollars from 2015 to 2022:

Image source: Foodrise

This money has allowed factory farming giants like Tyson and JBS to consolidate their market power, especially by gobbling up smaller companies and streamlining their operations. Over time, it also legitimizes factory farming as an institution — social influence as well as economic.

But the issue of factory farm finance and greenwashing doesn’t stop with retail banks. The UN’s Green Climate Fund invested 175 million into animal agriculture, and the World Bank invested almost $2 billion into industrial meat, dairy, and feed operations. The majority of this money, 77%, is going to industrial animal agriculture (a term more or less synonymous with ‘factory farming’).

Given that we produce about 350 billion kilograms of meat every year, bank investments in factory farming amount to about 25 cents per kilogram. However, this money is primarily being used not to keep meat prices low, but to spread factory farming in places where it hasn’t yet taken root, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. This means that reducing factory farming financing is especially important in mitigating the spread of animal agriculture, even if it won’t raise meat prices in rich countries very much.

As I have written before, the development of factory farming in Africa is extremely concerning — while improving food production is important for global health, the rapid investment in factory farms by wealthy foreign investors will cause significant harm to animals and African communities. Better solutions include scaling up the production of alternative proteins and intensifying plant-based agriculture. However, that’s not where the money is going — banks’ investments in factory farming alone are 32 times those in alternative proteins.

Animal ethics matter too: banks could choose to finance farms with higher welfare standards, but most don’t. According to Sinergia Animal’s bank ranking, 78% of the banks they reviewed have zero ethical requirements for investing in factory farms.

On nearly all metrics — ethics and sustainability alike — banks are failing to lead the way, and consumers don’t have any idea. We need to change that.

Lessons from the Fossil Fuel Movement

The fossil fuel divestment movement has been campaigning for well over a decade now to stop pumping money into Big Oil; however, the evidence on its impact is mixed. On the one hand, the number of large banks with some form of climate investment policy has nearly doubled since 2015. On the other, there has been no decline in fossil fuel lending since the Paris Agreement:

Source: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2025

However, several studies have shown large differences in fossil fuel spending by country — places like Europe are doing well while others, like Canada and Japan, aren’t. Countries with more divestment commitments also have less FFF financing, particularly driven by NGO commitments. This correlation indicates that while the FFF movement hasn’t stopped the flow of money, it has been able to mitigate it.

Public institutions are also outperforming private ones; for example, the 40 public signatories to the Clean Energy Transition Partnership have reduced fossil fuel financing by 78% over the past few years. Taken together, it’s clear that fighting unsustainable financing is an uphill battle, but activists are slowly chipping away at it.

To scale down factory farming and accelerate the food transition, we need to do the same. Luckily for us, the playbook from the energy transition and a swathe of research are already at our fingertips.

What We Can Do About It

First up: spread awareness of the problem, motivating people to switch from banks that invest in factory farming or otherwise signal their dissatisfaction to their banks. The good news is that most people don’t support factory farming — up to 90% of people would support transitioning from factory farms to a more humane, sustainable form of agriculture. We need to tap into this sentiment.

I suspect that people are far more likely to support a shift away from factory farming financing than they are to change their diets. Take, for example, something called the “vote-buy gap” — a phenomenon in which people are more likely to vote for legislation that impacts animals (say, banning the use of cages in farms) than take action that the same legislation would create (i.e., buying cage-free eggs). The same may be true for banking. If one’s choice of banks is the same as voting with their wallets, they may be more likely to pressure or switch banks than they are to boycott factory-farmed meat. This opens up entire legions of potential allies, broadening the coalition.

Lobbying for public divestment also has many indirect benefits: it can signal a larger social shift, which could deter future investments and general positive media coverage. Take the story of Jordi Casamitjana, a British citizen who was fired from his job after objecting to his employer for investing his pension fund into companies that harm the environment and test products on animals. He subsequently sued his employer and won, showing that employees often have the power to direct their funds.

These narratives and lobbying efforts can, over time, create a powerful stigma against investing in factory farming. A 2022 report from Animal Ask argues that the potential stigmatizing effects of a divestment campaign are likely its most important components. This stigma has two benefits: it reduces the likelihood that banks will invest in factory farming and further normalizes and legitimizes the movement to stop it, thereby creating a larger pro-animal, pro-environment coalition.

We also need to talk about money (something I’ve argued we don’t do enough of). The climate movement showed that divesting from fossil fuels wouldn’t harm the returns for big banks, meaning that banks that invested with their conscience wouldn’t lose any money. We can create the same narrative for factory farming and even show that investing in Big Meat is economically risky. One report found that 28 issues related to factory farming investments could harm returns, including increased pandemic risk and environmental litigation. Another report found that up to 235 billion pounds of EU and UK investments may be at risk if diets continue to change. If we can demonstrate that investing in Big Meat is risky for banks, they’ll be less likely to do so.

EU assets in animal agriculture are at risk if Europeans continue to shift toward plant-based diets. Image source: Kortleve et al., 2026

To play devil’s advocate: how likely is it that a single bank´s refusal to finance a factory farm company would affect other investments — in other words, is it possible that another bank would swoop in and fund the project, resulting in the same number of animals being farmed? Let’s examine research on fossil fuel financing. A 2022 study found that coal firms subjected to strict bank divestment policies cut their borrowing by 25% compared to peers — and that this translated into real emissions reductions, particularly because the coal industry relies on capital from a small number of banks, leaving companies with few alternative financing options. However, the authors note that private sector action alone is insufficient.

That’s where norms and regulations come into play: by creating industry standards, we can ensure that no single bank can swoop in and fund new factory farms. Some researchers argue that regulation could create a tipping point and ensure long-term change. They could even create a positive feedback loop, where green investments increase policies which increase green investments — a virtuous cycle. That’s why we will need comprehensive frameworks to evaluate how rapidly banks are phasing out factory farming investing, which will allow us to compare sectors easily.

Individual actions are only part of the solution, but a necessary precursor to systemic change.

The Bottom Line

Shifting Big Banks’ money away from factory farming won’t be easy, but a sustained effort from individuals and organizations may eventually chip away at the problem. If we can create a feedback loop in which consumer actions, industry regulations, and investment norms work together to promote more ethical and sustainable investing, we can help mitigate the expansion of factory farming.

If you want to help tackle factory farm finance, here is a tool for you to check whether your bank finances factory farming. You can also send your bank a message about your concerns or even find a more ethical bank:

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