Animal farming in New Hampshire is done on a small scale, but we still support the big factory farms located in other states with our purchases.
Ninety-nine percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs consumed in the United States comes from large-scale factory farms. Unless you avoid these ingredients altogether, you are almost certainly consuming them — if not directly, in baked goods, snack foods, and prepared meals.
Regardless, the idea that you can avoid causing animal suffering by buying animal products only from small farms is untrue. All animals raised for food suffer to some degree, even on small farms.
The suffering of farmed animals often begins just by being born. Farmed animals enter the world in bodies that have been selectively bred not for fitness and health but for whatever traits are valuable to the farmer.
Even the Heritage-breed chickens wandering freely around so many New Hampshire backyards are saddled with bodies that lay 20 to 30 times more eggs than their wild ancestors, who laid a reasonable 10 to 15 per year.