Hogs, Antibiotics, and the Industrial Environments of Postwar Agriculture

A quick comparison of photographs or videos that depict American livestock production in 1945 and 1960 will reveal an obvious difference: between those years, chickens, turkeys, and hogs essentially disappeared from the pens and pastures of the rural landscape. Instead, these animals moved indoors, into ever more confined, streamlined, and centralized operations that drastically reshaped the modes of food production.

This essay focuses on the impact that industrializing strategies brought to the realm of swine production. Although hogs displayed an ability to resist the industrial model before World War II, in the postwar era agricultural and industrial leaders created new forms of the pig that grew more uniformly, more consistently, and more predictably. Farmers sought and found methods to reduce their dependence on relatively expensive and inefficient human labor by transferring labor inputs onto the hog itself. By altering the feeding, housing, and management issues associated with the hog, farmers essentially embraced the role of industrial managers who focused less on animal husbandry and more on controlling labor and energy inputs. In turn, innovations with medicated feeds, manufactured housing, and redesigned landscapes spurred farmers to increase the size and capital investment of their livestock operations, to manipulate the natural rhythms of animals' breeding, birth, weaning, rebreeding, and slaughter, and to conduct the business in ever more confined, streamlined, and centralized operations. In all, the changes compressed the time, space, labor, and energy associated with hog production and the changed the relationship between hog and the hog producer in drastic ways.

These discoveries fit into a context of a nation that was eager to increase meat production and to reshape rural society in tune with industrial, urban, and masculine norms. World War II fears of a "meat famine" and Cold War ideology also fueled these developments. The emerging assumption that the United States was a leader of the "free world" caused many to suggest that farm producers had a duty to maximize food production and look at markets beyond the United States. Thus, this paper traces a crucial transformation in American food production, and illustrate connections between the modifications of animal organisms and trends in the American society at large.

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