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Abstract
It is well established that petrochemical pollution and radioactive fallout motivated scientific understandings of the biosphere and popular mobilizations against contamination. In this dissertation, I document a parallel formation with respect to animal agriculture. Specifically, I argue that factory hog farming constituted the paramount object of environmental crisis in the regional hubs where it first emerged. I demonstrate how stakeholders in agricultural communities mobilized in defense of the environment to make their concerns about health, ecosystem decline, inequality, and racism matters of public concern. Between 1970 and 2000, hog producers radically consolidated the market: the number of hog farms shrank dramatically while the size of hog farms soared. As living hogs became concentrated in dense regions of Iowa and North Carolina, the economic and environmental disruptions caused by “hog factories” sparked social and political contestations over the terms and conditions of a profound agricultural transformation. Throughout this period, hog farmers undermined, obfuscated, and denied the negative environmental impacts of their increasingly large and biologically risky operations. I show how the swift reorganization and consolidation of the hog industry severely modified environmental conditions, worsened health outcomes, and drove inequality, especially in North-Central Iowa and Eastern North Carolina. I demonstrate how pork capitalists operated as a vanguard of anti-democratic norms and anti-regulatory political maneuvering by coercing precarious farmers into debt, dismantling the zoning and public health authority of municipal and county governments, exploiting economic crises to amass real estate, and spearheading aggressive lobbying campaigns. At the same time, I argue that peculiar environmentalisms responded to the rise of factory hog farming. In Iowa, white “family farmers” desired to preserve middle-class Corn Belt communities by resisting corporate control and by fighting to protect the ability for independent farmers to compete in the marketplace. In North Carolina, an interracial coalition of rural poor and middle-class farmers, anti-corruption journalists, and land loss prevention activists fought against the corporate vanguards of vertical integration and environmental racism, namely, Smithfield Foods and Murphy Farms. By the mid-1990s, rural advocacy and grassroots environmental organizations in Iowa and North Carolina were in frequent contact and united in their struggle against what they increasingly called “factory farms.” From the onset of capital-intensive hog farming, small farmers and their neighbors waged campaigns against uneven development, deregulation, and unbridled pollution. As agribusiness siphoned resources out of local economies, grassroots organizations and activists articulated a political vision rooted in the public interest of their communities. Factory/Farm pieces together a collection of struggles that took place between “family farmers” and agribusinesses; between science and tradition; and among the animals, homeowners, smallholders, and low-wage workers trapped in the cesspools of unregulated development. It challenges us to take seriously the centrality of animal agriculture to the emergence of environmental politics and to consider the terms and conditions of human-animal relationships in what might be understood as “rural America.” Factory/Farm confronts the messy reality of our agricultural system by thinking and writing with those who are compelled to live in proximity to massified animal life.