Arborio is a place famous for its rice. Mention its name and the last thing that comes to mind is a mega-farm capable of housing more than 274,000 laying hens. No, Arborio conjures images of rice paddies. Of mosquitoes. Of water. In the shops at the motorway service areas dotting the route to get there, rice is sold in plastic and fabric packaging as a local excellence. A land of rice paddies and, therefore, of political tradition — that of the mondine of Vercelli, the women workers employed in those very paddies, who marched and protested and won the right to an eight-hour working day and an hourly wage of 25 cents.

And yet, today, as you approach the village, an unfinished concrete colossus begins to tell a different chapter of history — that of an industrial sector, agribusiness, that shows no sign of retreating. The shed under construction in Arborio is visible from the road, and at first glance it could be any industrial building. So much so that, looking at images of the construction progress, conveyor belts for animal waste already appear to be in place on site. Specifically, these are laying hens (specimens bred expressly for egg production) kept in cage-free systems — meaning a type of facility that does not use individual cages but rather one single enormous cage, spanning the entire shed, whose floor is covered with gratings to prevent the build-up of faecal matter on the ground. A grid on which the hens spend their entire lives.

A new mega-farm, in Arborio

We are talking about more than 200,000 hens, more than 200,000 individual lives per production cycle, packed together. The high concentration of animals increases the facility's productivity; given that a single hen can lay up to 600 eggs over the course of her productive life — which lasts between one and a half and two years — multi-tier cage-free systems further maximise this collection process. And they do so by also exploiting the nesting instincts of these animals: hens prefer to lay their eggs in sheltered environments, which, within the space of an enclosed industrial shed, translates into the perches used for egg collection.

Two sheds are planned for the Arborio farm

The shed functions as a single cage for the hens

A structure measuring 160 metres by 24

The shed stands in the middle of the Vercelli countryside

A production and collection process that carries a considerable environmental impact, as companies are well aware. In this case, Bruzzese has stated on its website its commitment to environmental protection through a specific certification, ISO 14001. Teresa Agovino, an environmental engineer and UNWTO Sustainable Tourism Consultant, explains that this certification in reality provides no guarantees "regarding the company's sustainability" because, despite being an international standard, "it does not define thresholds to be met — it does not tell us, for example, whether the volume of emissions is acceptable or what the maximum water consumption should be, specifying for instance the cubic metres of water within a given time frame — but instead allows those seeking certification to set their own objectives, which are obviously personalised targets, and to improve on them." The certification, she continues, "refers to environmental management, not to specific parameters," and indeed does not determine whether an activity is sustainable by any measure — social, environmental or economic. It is therefore an internally drafted protocol, subsequently submitted to a third party, which in practice could end up being more of a label than a course of action genuinely consistent with the real needs of the territory.

While the FAO itself has been declaring for years that the livestock industry is a steady and massive producer of climate-altering emissions — backed by every campaign that exposes the concrete reality behind those figures — the livestock sector shows no sign of retreating. The impact of a laying hen farm is not limited to the resources it requires, such as water or land, but also encompasses the substances it releases in large concentrations.

Pollution from intensive farming

It is particularly efficient at generating excess ammonia and PM10 particulate matter (particulate matter being the collective term for toxic substances present in the air, measured according to their microscopic dimensions) — both atmospheric pollutants. Ammonia in particular is a primary pollutant that contributes to the formation of PM2.5.

The production of pollutants can at best be optimised, always according to industrial standards, but certainly not eliminated. The environmental damage caused by the concentrated presence of more than 200,000 hens per production cycle cannot simply vanish into thin air; at most it can spread across the Arborio area, undermining the quality of life of local residents, of the people who will work in the facility, and of the wild animals that inhabit those lands. Lands whose waters and soils will be contaminated — and which, setting aside the sheer volume of the structure, have already been affected by its very construction and the ecological toll that inevitably entails.

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Who opposes mega-farms

Leading the protests against the construction of the Arborio farm is the Comitato riso, which, together with other local groups including the collective Cani sciolti and Greenpeace, is running an awareness campaign, a petition drive and a mobilisation effort to oppose and prevent the completion of the facility and its start-up in Arborio — and they will be gathering again in Vercelli's main square on 29 June.

The Bruzzese company is no stranger to controversy. As far back as January 2012 it had already come under the spotlight of investigative reports and protest campaigns by Nemesi Animale, which brought images of the conditions endured by the hens kept there to public attention. The company subsequently took legal action, filing a complaint against the activists for having "filmed the stages of their own conduct and disseminated it online through journalistic and television outlets" — prompting even Striscia la notizia to get involved.

The footage showed the exploitative conditions the hens were living in — 328,000 crammed together in overcrowded conditions, with carcasses in both the cages and the corridors, birds visibly ill, bearing lesions and bare patches caused by rubbing against the cage bars, with deformities of the claws and beaks, in an obvious state of stress and suffering.

Once again, animals are left unprotected

"In the case of farming operations, there is no specific assessment of the animals' conditions," Teresa Agovino explains, again in reference to ISO 14001 certification — and indeed, it could hardly be otherwise. After all, these environments are built entirely on the exploitation of bodies whose presence is determined by productivity. A laying hen is allowed to live for a maximum of two years, before the clearance phase in which the "sanitary void" is carried out — that is, the removal of the birds once their productive capacity begins to decline.

A hen's life on a farm is subordinated to her ability to lay eggs, for as long as she retains the capacity to expel them at a certain rate. Yet the physiological decline of a body engineered for hyperproduction makes this timeframe not only predictable, but almost programmable. At a certain point in her existence she will no longer be able to perform. Rectal dysfunctions set in, retained eggs the hen can no longer pass, untreated wounds, infections, peritonitis, injuries caused by the violence triggered by the stress of being confined in a shed with hundreds of thousands of other hens, without even enough space to avoid treading on one another — and then, finally, death from trauma, disease, or the end of her "career".

Production stops for nothing

Emptying the farm and disinfecting it leaves it uninhabited for around thirty days. Then comes the new batch of hens that have reached laying maturity (at around five months old), and the machine starts up again. On a conveyor belt. It resumes devouring lives to produce eggs to be stacked up and delivered to supermarkets.

The short-circuit between what we know to be violent and polluting, and the condoning of its existence, is industrial legitimisation: production stops for nothing. Above all, why should an industry that materially profits from death show any sign of relenting when it can continue to operate by converting that structural violence into profit? We live in an age of awareness, and that is why sensitisation and mobilisation are growing — and will continue to grow — not only to prevent sheds of this kind from continuing to proliferate across the outskirts and provinces of our country, but also to put an end to a system based on the exploitation of non-human animals.