How many farm animals are killed for meat in Australia?
Here are some basic stats on farm animal killings in Australia:¹ ²
- Australia slaughtered 6.3 billion farm animals for meat during the 2010s. That includes 5.9 billion chickens, 49 million pigs, 291 million sheep, and 85 million cows.
- Slaughters per year climbed from 505 million in 2009–10 to 699 million in 2018–19, a 38% increase over the decade.
- The livestock industry reached a new milestone in 2020: the slaughtering of farm animals surpassed 700 million.
- On average, close to 2 million farm animals are being killed each day for meat.
Figure 1. Annual livestock slaughters in millions (Australia, 1990 to 2020)
Notes:
[ 1] Estimates are based on data published by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences. See:
Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES). (2020). Agricultural commodities: December quarter 2020 — Statistics [Datafile and codebook]. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/agricultural-outlook/data#agricultural-commodities. See Table 12.
[2] The terms ‘farm animals’ and ‘livestock’ in this piece cover only slaughters of cattle and calves, lambs and sheep, pigs, and meat chickens. Estimates of other livestock killed in animal agricultural production, such as layers in the egg industry or fish in aquaculture, are not provided due to insufficient data.
Originally published at https://vstats.substack.com.
