This is the final story in a series of articles on how factory farming has shaped the US. Find the rest of the series and future installments here, and visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

For years, Jeff Simmons — the president and CEO of the large US pharmaceutical company Elanco — ridiculed a seemingly unlikely target on social media: the plant-based meat industry.

As startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods rose to prominence, Simmons attacked veggie burgers and meat-free chicken as highly processed foods that “won’t do” in the effort to feed a growing population. (Even though experts widely acknowledge that plant-based meat would, in fact, better help feed a growing population, as it requires less land and water and generates far less greenhouse gas emissions than animal meat.)

But take a closer look at Elanco, and Simmons’s opposition isn’t all that surprising. The company he runs, which spun off from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in 2019, is a world leader in developing and marketing pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics and vaccines — for both pets and livestock.

In the US, nearly all meat, milk, and eggs come from factory farms, which are prone to being overcrowded, stressful, disease-ridden environments where animals are especially susceptible to infections. Products from companies like Elanco are integral to preventing and treating those inevitable infections, serving an essential role in industrial animal agriculture.

If plant-based meat were ever to displace some of the conventional meat supply, it would mean fewer factory-farmed animals, and thus less profit for Elanco.

“Alternatives to animal-derived protein,” among other things, the company wrote in a 2019 financial report, “could negatively affect the market for our products.”

In the press and on social media, Simmons has also exaggerated the potential of technology to slash livestock emissions. In 2021, he claimed — without citing evidence — that some cattle operations could reach net zero emissions within a decade, and that we shouldn’t expend energy on changing people’s diets to fight climate change. That flies in the face of consensus from climate scientists and agriculture experts, who, in a 2021 survey, overwhelmingly agreed that rich- and middle-income countries need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, which currently account for about 15 to 20 percent of global emissions, and that slashing meat and dairy consumption is the most effective way to do it.

On conference stages, Simmons has criticized Bill Gates’s bullish support for meat alternatives and a Chipotle marketing campaign critical of factory farming, while another Elanco executive criticized raising animal welfare standards for chickens.

Elanco declined an interview request for this story and didn’t respond to a list of detailed questions. “For 70 years, Elanco has pioneered ways to improve animal health and wellbeing and raise livestock more sustainably,” the company wrote in a statement to Vox. “We work alongside farmers and veterinarians to bring forward leading innovations in nutrition and diet management, digestion optimization as well as on-farm sustainability solutions.”

The company’s work can be thought of as part of the “animal-industrial complex” — a network of companies, governments, and public and private research centers that, according to sociologist Richard Twine at Edge Hill University in the UK, make up the factory farm system, promote its continued existence and expansion, and defend it from criticism.

“There’s a lot of effort being put into protecting business as usual,” Twine said.

That animal-industrial complex encompasses meat, milk, and egg companies and their trade associations, pharmaceutical companies like Elanco, genetics companies that

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