Industrial agriculture is perpetuating one of the greatest threats to mankind. From the rampant overuse of antibiotics in factory farm animals to the heavy spraying of pesticides on food crops, industrial agriculture has given rise to deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

In the United States, more than 2.8 million antimicrobial resistant infections occur each year, causing 35,000 deaths. Globally, the annual death toll due to antimicrobial resistance is 1.27 million.

Infections resistant to last-resort antibiotics have jumped nearly 70 percent since 2019.

The germs are multiplying so rapidly that the number of deaths caused by drug-resistant infections could outpace those caused by cancer by the middle of the century, according to a study in the Lancet. In 2050, drug-resistant bacteria will be associated with 8.22 million deaths worldwide, rivaling those killed by cancer in 2022.

Antibiotic resistance is primarily attributed to the over-prescription of antibiotics, but the other main drivers are human drugs given to livestock raised on factory farms and antibiotic pesticides like glyphosate.

Factory farms expose humans to deadly antibiotic-resistant infections

In 2017, the Food & Drug Administration banned antibiotics use for growth-promotion, but continued to allow farms to use antibiotics routinely to prevent disease, which has the same effect. Farms still report using antibiotics for growth promotion even though the practice is illegal.

Chloramphenicol, a medically important antibiotic that’s been banned from agriculture for 30 years, still shows up in beef, poultry and pork products. Consumer Reports detected it in samples of meat products sold in the U.S. Recently, it has turned up in beef jerky sold on Amazon in Canada and beef shipped from Argentina to China.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says chloramphenicol “can cause serious side effects such as bone marrow suppression, including aplastic anemia, a rare but serious condition. There are also concerns about its potential to cause cancer, genetic damage and antimicrobial resistance.”

Nearly two-thirds of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are administered to conventionally raised cows, pigs, and chickens to prophylactically treat disease.

The result is antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be passed on to humans through the consumption of animal products or produce or water contaminated with animal manure.

Manure is a major reservoir of antimicrobial-resistant genes.

World Animal Protection U.S. tested 45 water samples and 45 soil samples from eight sites, both upstream and downstream of factory farms in North Carolina. All 90 samples tested positive for at least one antibiotic-resistant gene. Resistance to tetracyclines was identified in 89 out of 90 samples, and 23 out of 90 were resistant to additional antibiotics, like penicillin, that are critically important to human medicine.

This explains why people living near pig farms or cropland fertilized with pig manure are 30 percent more likely to contract MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria.

And why farm workers in intensive animal farming environments are 3200 percent (32 times) more likely to develop antibiotic-resistant infections than the general population.

The findings highlight the need to transition to regenerative organic agriculture where animals are kept healthy by spending their lives outdoors foraging in the sunshine and their waste is absorbed by the pasture.

Antibiotic pesticides sprayed on farms fueling drug-resistant infections

In addition to drug-dependent factory farms, antibiotic resistance is also coming from pesticide use. Hundreds of millions of acres of farmland are sprayed with antibiotic pesticides that confer resistance to bacteria in the soil and water they contaminate. Chlorine and the other disinfectants used to treat tap-water don’t kill superbugs.

According to Beyond Pesticides, over the last decade, scientific evidence has established a link between common herbicides and antibiotic resistant bacteria. A 2015 study found that Salmonella and E.coli exposed to the herbicides glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D built resistance to commonly used antibiotics. Subsequent research found that soil sprayed with these same herbicides has higher numbers of antibiotic resistant bacteria than areas where the chemicals were not applied. Even those areas won’t be safe for long, as resistant genes move through the environment via horizontal gene transfer.

New evidence that agricultural soils exposed to glyphosate are a breeding ground for hospital superbugs

Antimicrobial resistance isn’t just driven by bacteria evolving to resist antibiotics; certain weedkillers can have the same effect.

Scientists publishing in Frontiers in Microbiology recently showed that the most common species of multi-drug-resistant bacteria from hospitals are not only resistant to multiple antibiotic classes, but also to high concentrations of the weedkiller glyphosate. 

These results suggest that weedkillers have the unintended side effect of selecting for antimicrobial resistance among bacterial communities within the soil.

Fungicides sprayed on farms fueling drug-resistant yeast and mold infections

It’s not just bacteria that’s growing resistant to important medications. Reports of new cases of a drug-resistant fungal yeast infection have scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on edge.

Candida auris preys on people with a weakened immune system, affecting newborns, the elderly, diabetics, and people with autoimmune disorders who take steroids which suppress the body’s immune system. The fungal yeast infection is resistant to major antifungal medications and is quietly spreading around the globe.

It killed an elderly man who was admitted to the Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn. According to the New York Times:

The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.

Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president told the Times:

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump. The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

Candida auris’s origin was a mystery until it was detected on fungicide-treated apples. This is evidence that it was agricultural fungicide use that was responsible for its emergence. Non-organic apples and other fruits and produce are routinely sprayed with antibiotics while in storage to prevent spoilage.

Candida auris is one of dozens of dangerous bacteria and fungi that have developed resistance. Similar to how antibiotics are overused in livestock, scientists believe that overapplication of fungicides to prevent food crops from rotting may be contributing to drug-resistant fungi.

Farmers in the U.S. apply more than 100 million pounds of fungicides to about 17.7 million acres of cropland. Introduced in the 1940s, synthetic fungicides are sprayed on dozens of crops including corn, soybeans, wheat, almonds, apples, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, citrus, lettuce, peanuts, potatoes and sugar beets.

The pesticide industry says fungicides increase fruit and vegetable yields by 50 to 95 percent, allowing growers to gain $12.8 billion in profits. But the chemicals are showing up in U.S. waterways where they can incubate resistant fungal microbes and transport them into our drinking water.

Twenty years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey found one or more fungicides in 20 of 29 streams sampled near soybean farms. Since then, the fungicides have been breeding anti-fungal-resistant microbes, and it’s common to find them on farms.

Take, for instance, Aspergillus fumigatus. It’s a mold that can infect humans and cause invasive aspergillosis in immunocompromised individuals. Cases of invasive aspergillosis increased 3% every year between 2000 and 2013, and roughly 300,000 are diagnosed each year worldwide. Aspergillus fumigatus is commonly found both indoors and outside. Infection can occur by simply inhaling a small amount of the mold.

In human medical settings, A. fumigatus infections are treated with azole antifungals, so scientists hypothesized that azole-resistant A. fumigatus infections had their origins on farms that used azole fungicides.

They sampled soil, compost, or plant debris from 53 farms in Georgia and Florida that used azole fungicides. In addition, two samples were taken from organic farms and one was taken from a compost pile.

Of 700 A. fumigatus samples collected, nearly 20 percent (123 samples) displayed some level of resistance to the commonly used azole fungicide tebuconazole. Twelve of the 123 were highly resistant at clinically relevant levels for human health care.

No samples taken from organic sites contained resistant fungi, underscoring the fact that the best way to protect yourself and your family from drug-resistant infections is to eat organic food.

The researchers figured that if the strain of A. fumigatus infecting people developed its resistance traits on farms, that strain would also have developed some level of resistance to other, non-azole, agricultural fungicides. Sure enough, the azole-resistant strains also displayed resistance to other fungicides, but the clincher was that the genome sequences of A. fumigatus samples from farms matched those stored from clinical settings.

“The strains that are from the environment and from people are very closely related to each other,” study co-author Marin T. Brewer, PhD, said. “It’s not like there are different strains that are developing resistance in people and in the environment. It’s all the same. So people who have these infections that are resistant have likely acquired them from the environment.”

It doesn’t have to be this way

Farmers in Europe stopped using antimicrobials to boost growth over a decade prior to those in the U.S. They also no longer use antimicrobials routinely to prevent disease. Antimicrobials on European farms have dropped by around 43 percent over nine years up to 2020 at which point their use was more than 80 percent lower than in the U.S.

Organic farmers and food sellers worldwide prove that fresh produce can be grown, stored, and sold without resorting to antibiotic herbicides and fungicides and farm animals can be kept healthy without antibiotics.

Under U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic regulations, organic farmers and ranchers aren’t allowed to routinely feed animals antibiotics as a preventive measure. They are required, however, to administer antibiotics to animals when they get sick, even if that means the animal’s meat or milk won’t be able to be sold under the USDA Organic seal.

How do organic farmers and ranchers manage to raise livestock without the routine use of antibiotics to prevent disease, when industrial factory farm operators claim they can’t?

Animals in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are much more susceptible to disease, because they live in crowded, filthy conditions that cause stress that weakens their immune systems.

All livestock producers should be prevented from giving medically important antibiotics to healthy animals and should avoid the use of drugs that are critically important for human medicine when treating disease.

A systematic review published in the Lancet Planetary Health found that interventions that restrict antibiotic use in food-producing animals reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in these animals by up to 39 percent.

So why hasn’t the Food & Drug Administration stepped in to restrict antibiotic use in U.S. meat production? 

Could it have something to do with the fact that drug company lobbyists don’t want the government to do anything that might dent their $5.5 billion market for animal drugs?

Why hasn’t the Environmental Protection Agency done anything about the growing disease risk from the more than 475 antibiotics and antifungals sprayed on fruits, vegetables, and grains?

Could it have something to do with the fact that chemical company lobbyists don’t want the government to do anything that might dent their $108 billion market for pesticides?

Trump & Kennedy Aren’t Addressing Industrial Agriculture’s Drug-Abuse Problem

The Trump Administration is ignoring a legal petition that urges the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of medically important drugs as pesticides.

The petition points out that the CDC has determined that the medically important antibiotics the EPA has approved for pesticide use on crops can facilitate antibiotic resistance in bacteria, causing increased risk of staph infections and MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). 

It also notes that the United States lags behind many other countries in banning pesticides that pose higher risks to human health. Streptomycin, a medically important antibiotic, is banned from use on crops in many countries. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that more than 125,000 pounds of the medically important antibiotics streptomycin and oxytetracycline have been sprayed on crops in just one year. In that same year the use of medically important antibiotics and antifungals on crops totaled more than 8 million pounds.

In President Donald Trump’s first election, agribusiness companies contributed $4.6 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, twice what they gave to his Democratic challenger. That was why Trump’s USDA fought global guidelines on livestock antibiotics, rejecting World Health Organization recommendations to help preserve drugs’ effectiveness by halting their routine use in healthy animals.

For all the talk about making America healthy again, not much has changed since Trump’s second election. If anything, things are worse.

Before Trump took office again in 2025, the Food & Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine had several initiatives underway, begun under President Joe Biden, to better manage and track the use of antimicrobials in farm animals. These include draft guidance to encourage animal drug makers to voluntarily stop the continuous use of medically important antibiotics in food animals. The FDA was also close to publishing revisions of another set of voluntary guidance which tells drug makers how to assess the risk to human health from antimicrobial resistance when assessing the safety of new antimicrobial drugs for animals.

But the pendulum was already starting to swing back towards increased use of antibiotics for livestock. New data from the Food & Drug Administration show the volume of medically important antibiotics sold for farm animals going up for the first time in a decade, climbing 16 percent in 2024. Worse, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a significant number of pig farms admit to using antibiotics for growth promotion, even though that practice has been illegal since rules promulgated under President Barack Obama took effect in 2017.

Expect the boom in antibiotic use on farms to continue. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has sent a strong message to industry that his agencies won’t be policing antibiotic use on farms. This message was transmitted through staff cuts and inactivation of the President’s Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria.

The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine lost about 23 percent of its staff last year, and the CDC lost 3,000 workers. Both layoffs included employees who worked on antibiotic resistance.

The President’s Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria (PACCARB) includes public health, veterinary science, and agricultural industry experts and is tasked with advising the HHS on antibiotic resistance policy. It met two to four times a year between 2016 and 2024. After Trump took office, a meeting scheduled for the end of January 2025 was canceled, and the council hasn’t met since. That meeting was supposed to be dedicated to developing a five-year National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, to follow the 2020–2025 plan. Now, no plan exists. 

In October, HHS fired 55 employees in the office that oversees PACCARB. Kennedy’s HHS reorganization plan has that office being absorbed into the newly created Administration for a Healthy America.

Trump’s choice of Timothy Schell to lead the Center for Veterinary Medicine is also concerning. According to his Food & Drug Administration bio, “Between 2015 and 2019, Dr. Schell was at Elanco Animal Health where he led regulatory affairs strategies in several different areas, expanding the firm’s global initiatives in animal drugs and feed additives.” In other words, he was an industry lobbyist whose job was to keep the livestock antibiotics market open and profitable.

As Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, a group advocating for the end of factory farming, told U.S. Right to Know, “It’s pretty hard to take seriously the idea that FDA is going to curb antibiotic use on farms when they appoint a former…drug company lobbyist as the chief regulator.”

Shame on the Trump Administration for putting the profits and interest of the meat and pharmaceutical industries over the health of the American people!

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Reintroduce the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act and Expand the Bill to Restrict Antibiotic Pesticides!