Superbugs Start on Farms

The FDA released data showing a roughly 16% one year increase in sales of medically important antibiotics for use in farmed animals, from 2023 to 2024.

Read that again. These are antibiotics classed as essential for human health, sold in rising quantities into a food system that keeps animals in conditions where disease is predictable, outbreaks are routine, and “prevention” often means dosing whole groups because the system cannot cope any other way. We have normalised something that should sound absurd on its face: More medically important antibiotics are sold for use in livestock than for humans each year.

That is not because pigs, chickens, cows and turkeys are uniquely unlucky. It is because industrial animal farming concentrates living beings into high density environments where pathogens move fast and stressors stack up, so antibiotics become a structural support beam. Not an occasional intervention, a dependency.

The FDA banned using medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in 2017. In theory, that was a turning point. In practice, it mostly shifted the story from “growth” to “disease prevention”, while keeping the underlying conditions intact.

You cannot regulate your way out of a business model that requires medication to stay viable.

Here is what the FDA data does not routinely give the public:

▫️how much antibiotics are used for treatment versus prevention

▫️how long animals are kept on antibiotics

▫️how usage varies by farming system and company

▫️where the biggest spikes are coming from, and why

So sales data becomes a proxy for use. It is an admission of opacity: we are measuring a crisis through the till receipts because regulators are not tracking what actually happens in barns, sheds and lots. And even with that limited lens, the picture is ugly.

In 2024, the largest quantity of medically important antibiotics sold for use in animals was for pigs, totalling 3 million kilograms, about 43% of total sales. Cattle were close behind at 41%.

That is not “a few bad actors”. That is the core of the system.

And the most dramatic swing was in chickens: sales intended for chickens rose 79% in 2024. Overall chicken sales are still a smaller slice of the total, but the direction matters. When you see a spike like that, the question is not “which bug went around?” The question is “which part of the supply chain tightened the screws so far that disease control reverted to pharmaceuticals?”

Public health veterinarians and researchers have not seen evidence of a sudden, natural surge in bacterial disease across food animals that would neatly explain it. Animal numbers did not jump in a way that explains it either.

So what did?

One plausible answer is the least cinematic one: corporate backtracking. Commitments to reduce antibiotic use get announced, celebrated, quietly softened, then abandoned when margins bite. The animals still live in the same conditions, but the press releases change. The antibiotics fill the gap.

A 2025 peer reviewed umbrella review that pulled together 80 systematic reviews and mapped the whole food system as a network of cause and effect. The researchers built a causal loop diagram showing over 40 feedback loops that reinforce antimicrobial resistance.

That matters because it kills the comforting myth that AMR is mainly about individual misuse, like someone not finishing a prescription. Yes, misuse in human medicine exists. But in food production, the problem is ecological and cyclical.

A simplified version of what the review mapped looks like this:

▫️Animals receive antimicrobials.

▫️Resistant bacteria and resistance genes increase.

▫️Manure carries those resistant microbes into soil and water.

▫️Water irrigates crops. Crops carry microbes onward.

▫️Wild animals, farm workers, waterways, fields, and food become vectors.

▫️Resistant microbes cycle back into animals and people.

▫️More resistance means infections are harder and costlier to treat, so pressure for more antimicrobials rises again.

This is not a leak in the system. It is the system moving as designed. And the engine that keeps it running is not ignorance. It is economics.

The umbrella review reinforces what should already be obvious: animal health, human health, and ecosystem health are not separate compartments. They are one connected reality.

When you treat millions of animals as units of production, you do not just create ethical bankruptcy. You create biological consequences that do not respect barn walls, property lines, or marketing slogans.

This is what “One Health” means when stripped of conference jargon:

▫️resistance spreads from farms into environments

▫️environments feed resistance back into food and bodies

▫️bodies carry resistance into communities and hospitals

▫️hospitals become the last line of defence for a problem created upstream

If you are looking for a neat boundary where animal agriculture stops and “public health” begins, you will not find one. There is no firewall between the two.

A CDC-linked analysis showed infection rates from carbapenem-resistant bacteria rising sharply in the US.

Carbapenems are last resort antibiotics for serious infections. When resistance expands there, you are into the territory where modern medicine starts losing basic fights.

The report described a difficult to treat resistance gene called NDM. Only two antibiotics work against it, both expensive, and administered intravenously. Cases remain relatively small, but the trend is the warning flare:

▫️carbapenem-resistant infections rose about 69% between 2019 and 2023

▫️NDM cases rose about 460% in the same period

The researchers also warned about undercounting. Many states do not fully test and report, and data from several large states was not included. There is also the concern of unrecognised carriers enabling community spread.

This is the future we are sleepwalking into: routine infections become complicated again, expensive again, dangerous again, because we sacrificed antibiotics to keep animal farming “efficient”.

The FDA is being asked to “investigate what is driving the rise” and to track how antibiotics are used on farms. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Because even perfect tracking does not solve a system that needs antibiotics to prop itself up.

The European Union has targets: a stated aim to reduce antimicrobial sales by 50% from 2018 levels by 2030. Targets are not magic. But they reveal something important: some regulators are at least willing to name the scale of the problem and put numbers on reduction.

In the US, the lack of targets and the lack of granular tracking creates the perfect environment for performative oversight. The system gets to claim responsibility while remaining structurally unchanged.

When people say “reduce antibiotic use”, they often mean “please keep the same production model but with fewer consequences”.

Denmark reduced antibiotic use in pig farms partly by increasing space per pig and improving ventilation. That is telling. When you improve conditions, you reduce the need for constant pharmaceuticals.

But even that example has limits, because it still accepts the premise that these animals exist for production and profit. The deeper point is unavoidable:

If your food system depends on medically important antibiotics as routine infrastructure, it is not a food system. It is a public health hazard with a marketing department.

The question is not “why did sales jump 16%?”

The question is: Why did we ever build a food system that makes this possible?

We have an industry that treats sentient beings as commodities, concentrates them into conditions where disease is predictable, and then leans on the same medicines humans depend on to keep the machine moving. And when resistance rises, we act surprised.

There is no clever workaround for this. There is no comfortable version of this. There is only honesty.

If we want antibiotics that still work, we need to stop feeding them into an industry designed to need them.