Factory Farm

History of Factory Farming

For at least 10,000 years, humans have intentionally and unintentionally reconfigured their environments as they have devised ways to raise, store, harvest, and selectively breed their domesticated plants and animals. This article highlights significant reconfigurations in livestock rearing that have taken place since the 19th century.

[Page 146]In North America, the development of mechanical refrigeration enabled the dramatic expansion of the meatpacking industry and thus led to further intensification in livestock production. By the late 19th century, stockyards in Chicago, Illinois, served as a striking example of the mass-production trend. Meat had become yet another of the wide variety of factory-produced consumer items epitomizing American capitalism and its growing dependence on economies of scale. Although the working conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry led Congress to enact the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act shortly after the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), legislation on behalf of farm animals would not exist for several more decades.

In the 1960s, the U.S. company Iowa Beef Packers triggered a major revolution in meatpacking by redesigning the slaughter and packing process to fragment tasks and deskill work. This allowed for the reduction of wages while making it easier to replace laborers; sped up the chain of production; and relocated plants to rural areas, which were less expensive operation locales and usually did not have organized labor. The Iowa Beef Packers model dominated beef processing from that point onward and was adopted in poultry and swine operations, all of which depended increasingly on factory farming.

The post-World War II boom in U.S. and European industries and populations contributed to this expansion of factory farms, as urban and suburban regions overflowed into surrounding farmland. Attendant shifts in production occurred as large-scale commercial agribusiness replaced subsistence and small-scale farming, so that by the 1990s, less than 2 percent of Americans were even involved in production agriculture. Just before World War II, one-fourth of the U.S. population worked in agriculture.

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