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Fecal free: Biology and authority in industrialized Midwestern pork production

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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.

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Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges with deep gratitude the help of the many hog farmers and other actors in the Illinois hog industry who devoted their time to his research and helped him understand the nuances of contract production and industrial swine husbandry. Special thanks go to Doug Constance, who read an earlier version of this article, and also to the editor and anonymous reviewers at Agriculture and Human Values who provided insightful commentary and suggestions that improved the final version of the article. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2006 meetings of the Rural Sociological Society.

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  1. Henry Ford Community College, 5101 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, Michigan, 48128, USA

    Ronald Rich

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Correspondence to Ronald Rich.

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Rich, R. Fecal free: Biology and authority in industrialized Midwestern pork production. Agric Hum Values 25, 79–93 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-007-9094-9

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