Land, Industrial Livestock, and Interspecies Relations

Abstract

Abstract Industrial livestock production commands almost one-third of all cultivated land and is the driving force in the surging global production and consumption of animal-based foods. This chapter argues that while the industrialization of livestock has achieved striking increases in productivity, it is nevertheless an inefficient way of organizing land to produce food, and has established new and violent interspecies relations. It considers how domesticated animals have related to land in farming and herding systems throughout agrarian history and examines how industrialization and the pursuit of scale obliterate these relations, disarticulating animals from land, accelerating reproduction, standardizing and immobilizing growing populations within dense enclosures, and re-articulating animals to land through vast flows of grain and oilseed production. It considers the key barriers to scale in livestock production and the ways they are overridden, and then unpacks the un- and undercounted costs and risks associated with these contradictions. Finally, it situates industrial livestock production in relation to the contested notion of sustainable intensification and reflects on the need to confront the unconsciousness that shrouds these systems.