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- Title
Fecal free: Biology and authority in industrialized Midwestern pork production.
- Authors
Rich, Ronald
- Abstract
Ethnographically, “fecal free” is a lexical marker that invokes a form of industrialized swine husbandry used in large-scale confinement hog production. Using participant observation and interview research with Illinois contract hog producers, I explore the basis of this husbandry in the biological fragility of confinement hogs. Rather than biology being a simplistic “state of nature,” as it was in early neo-Marxist and populist studies of the 1970s, the frailty of confinement hogs suggests that industrial hog biology is a socially constructed state that justifies the use of contract-based hog production units and their coordination with animal processors. The frailty of confinement hogs results from their genetic characteristics, from the conditions in which they are raised, and from a production rationality that equates animal health with production efficiency. I detail the multiple-site methods, confinement technologies, and contract-based production organization required to raise biologically fragile hogs. And I link hog biology directly to the unequal contract-based relations between actors in industrial pork networks. My study emphasizes the relevance of ethnographic analyses within a political economy of agriculture by describing specific relations of inequalities in local and regional production units and distribution networks that form the building blocks of larger global agro-food systems.
- Subjects
ILLINOIS; SWINE; ANIMAL culture; CONFINEMENT farms; SWINE housing; ANIMAL health; AGRICULTURE; RURAL industries
- Publication
Agriculture & Human Values, 2008, Vol 25, Issue 1, p79
- ISSN
0889-048X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10460-007-9094-9