Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread, as the title suggests this is not about bread, as I hoped it was. Rather it's about people earning their bread, their livelihood. The term ‘bread’ is derived from the larger term ‘bread-winner’ as the one who is the primary provider of the household, and the ‘daily bread’ is simply referring their daily livelihood. As my time spent in the US, I often used to wonder how the different food companies were able to produce mass amount of food to keep the population fed. This movie is the answer and the revelation of how food is produced in Europe and the Western hemisphere.
The film starts off as we get a glimpse of daily sanitation rituals being carried off at a meat farm. The different scenes show us to transportation of livestock, machine assisted watering of plants, and a conveyor belt at a poultry farm where they separate the males from the female chickens (I know this as I have seen this done before in a different setting).
The machinery at poultry farm shows precision and efficiency as it sorts the young chicks into moving bins. The vaccination routine is also machine assisted which increases efficiency and production for the poultry farm. After few seconds, the young chicks have grown and we are shown the worker feeding them. The shot transitions into a break room where the worker is on a break with bread and tea, all alone.
Next, we get the scene from a vegetable farm. A tractor picks the potatoes from the ground. Next shot, the workers prepare and wear protective gears to apply pesticides and fertilizers to the plants. But most of the work is done by machine assistance, needing almost no human intervention. It seems as the vegetables are being grown inside a greenhouse setting which allows vegetables to be grown all year long, without any weather restrictions. The only human labour being done is picking of the ripened vegetables. After work, the worker seem to be enjoying a small break, again alone.
Now we see a bull and a cow where it