Factory Farms in a Consumer Society

Originally conceived in response to the industrialization of American agriculture, the term "factory farm" became an increasingly popular metaphor in American culture through the twentieth century. While agricultural engineers could be heard using the term in heralding the efficiency and predictability of large and wisely managed farms, critics used the term to signal a threat to the more bucolic "family farm" that evoked so many images of honest work, self reliance, and national identity. As a result, the metaphor quickly became pregnant with concerns about individual autonomy and national integrity that far exceeded the specific concerns of industrial farming.

This essay examines the emergence and transformation of the metaphor of a factory farm in the twentieth century. Developed to describe a specific trend in agricultural organization, the metaphor today travels freely and is found in discussions of multiple domains of life, from industrial feedlots, to white-collar workplaces, to retail outlets, to individual bodies. This expansive use of the metaphor reflects the extension of disciplinary technologies to domains of life beyond those exemplified by the industrial workplace. In particular, technologies familiar from workplace management today extend to private and retail spaces, such that people are disciplined in their role as consumers as much as their role as workers. I argue that the metaphor calls attention to the powerlessness of citizen-consumers under globalization, but then lends itself to a politics that calls upon those same citizen-consumers to take responsibility for political change.

Down on the Factory

Though the specific origin of the term "factory farm" is unknown, it certainly becomes noticeable in the first half of the twentieth century, as the mechanization, division of labor, and intensified regulation of activities endemic to industrial manufacture begin finding expression on American farms. While today the term is used almost exclusively in critiques of agribusiness, earlier usage was clearly more optimistic, heralding the potential benefits of applying the scientific knowledge of management and organization to farms. From within the perspective of industrial progress, the factory farm promised greater efficiency, higher crop yields, and more predictable commodities markets. As one agricultural engineer wrote in 1917:

Nobody will object to calling a farm a factory. It is a factory. The soil and the seed are the raw materials, and from these are manufactured a variety of finished products, through the agencies of sun, air, moisture, power, and implements. The finished products of the farm factory are cereal, forest, vegetable, and fruit crops, and livestock and livestock products, are they not?

(quoted in Fitzgerald 2003, 109)

It was not always clear, however, what this terminological development signaled in terms of concrete agricultural practices. Writing nearly three decades earlier, economist Alfred Marshall offers a brief discussion of factory farming that suggests the transformation will be more quantitative than qualitative. Closing the section of his Principles of Economics that focuses on large-scale industry, Marshall (1890/1961) writes: "Our knowledge on many disputed points would be much increased … if some private persons, or joint-stock companies, or co-operative associations, would make a few careful experiments of what have been called 'factory farms'" (652).¹ From his hypotheses, however, it is clear that Marshall might just as well have said "large farms" instead of "factory farms," since he proceeds to describe this new possibility as differing only in size, not in technique, from traditional family farms. He thus questions the feasibility of factory farms on three accounts. First, farming requires large pieces of land, and the amount of land required increases proportionately to the farm's productivity. Second, agriculture is dependent upon the seasons, which interferes with the aggressive investment of capital. Third, agriculture is not characterized by a division of labor as industrial manufacture is.

Clearly, Marshall was mistaken about each of these limitations. With regard to the inflexibility of land use, the natural limitations on crop density arising from soil fertility and threats of parasites have been largely overcome with the development of industrial fertilizers and pesticides. Soil management, crop rotation techniques, and the introduction of gasoline-powered farm equipment (allowing farms to grow commodity crops on land formerly required to raise fuel...