Power failures on intensive farms can kill thousands of animals within hours through ventilation failure, lighting loss, and feed and water disruption.
Power failure welfare represents a catastrophic but preventable risk in intensive animal farming. The same density and automation that makes intensive farming economically efficient creates extreme vulnerability when power fails. Thirty thousand broilers can die in hours in a closed ventilated house during summer heat. The solution is straightforward — backup generation capacity, monitoring alarms, and emergency protocols — but implementation requires regulatory requirements rather than voluntary adoption, because the economic cost of backup systems is borne by producers while the welfare cost of failure is borne by animals. Making backup power mandatory in intensive livestock facilities is a proportionate welfare protection.