> I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost would simply be unimaginable.
It'd be quite easy to survive if there were enough people who cared about the well-being of animals and experienced sufficient economic stability to make consumption choices that don't necessarily maximize calories/dollar. Unfortunately those people tend to eschew animal product consumption all together, resulting in your (correct) analysis that the number of animals living in misery on factory farms is dramatically overtaking the number living at harmony on family farms.
I don't buy from factory farms, but any time I go to a local store or farmers market and see a good local cheese, I buy it. I've visited many of the farms personally and have never seen a situation where it didn't look like the animals were living their best life. To shut those farms down, kill off their bloodlines, and replace them with... a way smaller number of slightly different looking ruminants spending their whole existence feeling (rightfully) frightened for their life upon any external stimulus? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's the "ideal" case, in reality it's far more likely that the farm will be bought up by some big commercial entity willing to cut more corners than that the good fertile accessible land will simply be yielded to the wild. [1]
Even "small" farms have a number of practices that the average person would find appalling if they became aware of them. There's a place for graphic descriptions of these activities intended to upset and dismay "non-vegans" but I don't think that place is a tech board. If you are curious as to what these practices are, looking up videos/practices related to modern dairy production that are popular even on small dairy farms or male chick culling might be a decent start, PETA also has plenty of resources available. (I'm sure there are some really tiny family-owned farms that don't employ these practices.)
Aside from this, farms, like all industries, follow the "tendency towards monopoly" where ever larger players will consolidate, merge, and buyout their competition to maximize their collective control of the market share. I think as long as there is a market for animal products, that market will be overwhelmingly captured by large industrialized farms. It's precisely the most upsetting practices on factory farms that keep costs low enough to make products accessible to working class Americans.
It'd be quite easy to survive if there were enough people who cared about the well-being of animals and experienced sufficient economic stability to make consumption choices that don't necessarily maximize calories/dollar. Unfortunately those people tend to eschew animal product consumption all together, resulting in your (correct) analysis that the number of animals living in misery on factory farms is dramatically overtaking the number living at harmony on family farms.
I don't buy from factory farms, but any time I go to a local store or farmers market and see a good local cheese, I buy it. I've visited many of the farms personally and have never seen a situation where it didn't look like the animals were living their best life. To shut those farms down, kill off their bloodlines, and replace them with... a way smaller number of slightly different looking ruminants spending their whole existence feeling (rightfully) frightened for their life upon any external stimulus? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's the "ideal" case, in reality it's far more likely that the farm will be bought up by some big commercial entity willing to cut more corners than that the good fertile accessible land will simply be yielded to the wild. [1]
[1] "as average farm size has increased, the number of individual farms in the United States has decreased." https://www.statista.com/statistics/196106/average-size-of-f...