Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms

Abstract

In the 1930s, erosion caused storms of dust to hurtle across the American Great Plains and Midwest. While agricultural conservation methods helped remediate this landscape, recent studies suggest the region is contending with a new type of particle cloud: desiccated fecal dust that renders the vitalities of factory farms airborne, potentially exposing those in their surrounds to various forms of illness while spreading antibiotic resistance genes. Thinking alongside these findings, and based on research within corporate hog farms, this article develops an ethnography of excrement by tracing the practices and knowledge of people who live and labor in proximity to late industrial lifeforms, such as confined pigs and resistance genes, and who are tasked with intimately shaping this unruly waste that has the potential to affect broader populations. In so doing, it analyzes the maintenance of American animals’ toxic health alongside the politics of labor with complex anthropogenic materials.

Understanding antibiotic use: practices, structures and networks

“… 50 , 76 An ethnographic study of the intensive, industrialized conditions of an American pig farm highlights the tensions around profit, turnover, human and animal health. 77 In terms of human workers, healthcare practitioners in urban health clinics in South Africa give antibiotics to vulnerable patients partly in light of their precarious living conditions, and to enable them to stay at work or return there quickly. 38 …”

A metabolic history of manufacturing waste: food commodities and their outsides

“…While changes in breeding and transport are important to the intensification of animal agriculture, developments in feeding practices such as protein supplementation, microbial fermentation of vitamin B 12 , and the development of growth promoters transcended key bottlenecks to the industry's expansion. Facilitation of the intensification of animal agriculture has resulted in extraordinary amounts of animal waste, with costs displaced on neighboring communities and ecosystems (Blanchette 2019).…”

Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab

“…It rather joins accounts that highlight the substances and ideas that seep through the infrastructural cracks and bind laboring bodies to often distant scientific or industrial processes (e.g. Blanchette, 2019;Droney, 2014;Hecht, 2012).…”

“…A number of studies have recently addressed the inequalities aggravated by different chemical exposures. See, for example, Hecht (2012) for unequal exposures in uranium mining, Murphy (2008 : 698, 2017 : 496, 497) and Shapiro (2015 : 371) for poor home owners in North America, Chen (2020) for how exposures affect queer bodies and panics about Chinese lead reinforce racial stereotypes, Weston, 2017 : 80, 81) for how governmental thresholds of ‘safe radiation levels’ affect less mobile local populations near Fukushima, and Blanchette (2019 : 15) for how exposures to chemicals in US pig farming affect a disenfranchised and predominantly immigrant labor force).…”