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FOUCAULDIAN HOG FUTURES:
The Birth of Mega-Hog Farms
Dawn Coppin
Michigan State University
The development of mega-hog farms is a contentious topic throughout the United
States that has garnered a lot of attention in the past five years. This article examines
the construction of mega-hog farms in light of Michcl Foucault’s (1977) analysis in
Discipline nnd Punish. I argue that Foucault provides a good starting point but that
to undcrstand currcnt forms of agriculture we must extend his framework to include
nonhuman animals as active in discipline and resistance. In order to comprehend
how swine farming has shiited from the ancien regime to the disciplinary regime, I
provide details on the mutual construction of the swine, the farmer, confinement
architecture. and legislation.
FOUCAULDIAN HOG FUTURES: THE BIRTH O F M E G A - H O G FARMS
There is a meatpacking plant in Bladen County, North Carolina, in which 120,000 hogs
are killed each week (EisnitL 1997, p. 259). That is an average of 17,143 each day of
every week, or twelve every minute. The owners of the plant have asked for a permit to
increase its kill to 160,000 a week. How this came to be is an amazing feat of human,
swine, and technological discipline that is replicated across the United States at many
more meatpacking plants, although the one in Bladcn County is currently the largest.
Swine farming has undergone a major transformation in order to have such a large and
steady supply of hogs each week. Indeed, if you have listened to the radio or read your
newspaper in the last few years, you probably know that mega-hog farms, with thousands of swine concentrated in one area, are a contentious topic in many areas of the
country. Unlike many social movements that have a single focus, the topics of concern
that surround mega-hog farms range widely from worries about the siting and distribution of such facilities, about environmental consequences, and about the increasing
prevalence of corporate agriculture.
Most scholarly approaches to these topics have reflected the usual dichotomy between
social and physical spheres-namely, that social scientists only examine the social and
cultural phenomena (Durrenberger and Thu 1996; Page 1997), while physical scientists
look solely at the environmental and physical features (Donham 1990; Sneath, Burton,
and Williams 1992). This has indeed resulted in much useful information regarding the
Direct all correspondence to Dawn Coppin. Department of Sociology, Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards.422 Berkey
Hall, Michigan State University. East Lansing, MI 48824-1111;e-mail: dcoppinQuclink.herkrley.edu
The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 4, pages 597416.
Copyright 6 2003 by The Midwest Sociological Society.
AU rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permission$ University of California Press,
Journals Division, 2OOO Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley,CA 947Wl223.
ISSN 0038-0253;online ISSN 1533-8525
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reasons why groups opposed to industrial livestock agriculture form and the types of
gases in a confinement building, but such an inherent division in the analysis of the current manifestation of the swine industry legitimizes a division of our social and physical
world. There are edited collections that bring together social and physical aspects (Tylu
1996; Thu and Durrenberger 1998), but these elements remain separate chapters. I
believe that such dichotomies, at best, only allow for partial understanding of any given
issue. In this article, I seek to extend Michel Foucault’s work in order to examine how
both social and physical elements are mutually transformed.
Foucault is better known for analyzing the history of the human sciences and for critical studies of sexuality, medicine, the prison, and insanity. Certainly he has written very
little about hogs, I suggest nevertheless that the emergence of mega-hog farms has clear
parallels with many of the same concepts that Foucault argued were important in human
societies.By drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, I aim to illustrate how the experiences of human and nonhuman animals are entwined and thus extend Foucault’s work
beyond the human-centered realm.
FOUCAULT ON CONFINEMENT
Foucault’s contribution to research and thought can be found throughout the social sciences, and his influence can easily be seen in the number of bibliographies that cite his
work, as well as in the wide adoption of his concepts Perhaps the thing that many people
take with them after reading some of Foucault’s work is a general sense of his methodology, what Foucault calls “genealogy.” Instead of a simple cause-and-effect historical
reconstruction of any given issue, Foucault details the complex set of social, economic,
and material aspects of a topic and examines “the conditions of emergence of the present
at the micro-level of ‘forgotten’ social practices” (Darier 1999, p. 15). This focus on the
genealogy of an issue is important when examining the development of swine farming
because it is only through attention to such details that we can see the interwoven,
mutual transformation of human and porcine experiences and interfaces
For the purposes of this article, I examine the transition in hog farming from extensive small farms to intensive mega-hog operations in light of one of Foucault’s betterknown books, Discipline and Punish (1977). I argue that his analysis of the evolution of
punishment from public torture to imprisonment provides the clearest analogy with the
US. swine industry. Foucault opens this book with an extremely graphic description of a
man being hung, drawn, and quartered in the approved style of public torture in eighteenthcentury France. The first part of Discipline and Punish proceeds to describe the role and
underlying ideology of public torture, as it existed in the social conditions of the time.
Taking this as his starting point, Foucault ( 3 977, p. 23) then examines the social and material complex and concludes that current penal law and human sciences “both derive from a
singIe process of ‘epistemologico-juridical’formation” rather than being separate institutions. Central to this process is the transformation from a monarchy and punishmentcentered society. what Foucault calls the ancien regime, to a republic and disciplinary society.
Criminals who were once punished are now rehabilitated through rigid schedules and
checks. Children find their days divided by hours in school, soldiers’ bodies learn precise,
automated movements, and factory workers are watched to maintain productivity. The
notion of an architectural and observational panopticon that monitors our movements,
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and so trains us to monitor ourselves, has created a world of docile bodies “that may be
subjected, used, transformed and improved” (p. 136).
One of the main points of Diwipline and Punish is that power is diffuse and found
within relationships rather than held by any one pcrson or group in an absolute form.
Foucault argues that such power entails disciplining the individual body with “meticulous, often minute, techniques” such as timetables, architectural partitioning of space,
ranking, observation, and repetition of action (p. 139). Integral to this “micro-physics of
power” is a detailed record collecting system that provided the foundation for the establishment of some of the human sciences, such as psychology. These records enabled both
the development of knowledge and the exercise of power over the subjects about whom
records were being collected. Physical confinement also plays a significant role in Foucault’s vision of the disciplinary society, whether in prison cells. army barracks, or even
business cubicles.
One of the aims of this article is to show that many of thc concepts that Foucault
developed in thinking about human society can he usefully put to work in looking at the
development of the swine industry. There, too, the ancien regime of hog farming with all
its horrors and hardships is quite different from those found in the current disciplinary
regime and so begs the question of how thi\ shift occurrcd. In order to get a sense of this
transformation I will turn now to an overview of previous human-swme experiences
before returning to the current time and conditions.
A BRIEF HISTORY O F U.S. HOG F A R M I N G
The ancestors of modern swine can be traced back forty-five million years ago to entelodonts in the Eocene Epoch (Hcdgepeth 1998, p. 35). There is evidence that early
humans (Homo erectus) shared regions of Europe and Asia with the wild boar about
600,000 years ago, but the actual domestication of swine did not occur until 10,000 years
ago at the earliest (Caras 1996,p. 118; Hedgepeth 1998,pp. 36-38). Since that time, “hog
and human development have advanced hand-in-hoof, so to speak, in a symbiotic sort of
equilibrium” (Hedgepeth 1998, p. 43) that continucs to evolve. In fact, the current strife
over mega-hog farms (also known as factory farms, large-scale swine facilities, and confined animal feeding operations) is simply the most recent, though arguably the most
disruptive, example of this mutual reconfiguration.
After colonization in the United States, small herds of swine were usually raised as a
side venture in a truly diversified farming operation and as an alternative way to market
corn when the price per bushel was low. Farmers could usually count on getting a good
price for their hogs; as a result hogs were commonly known as “mortgage raisers,”
because if all else failed farmers could always sell their hogs to make thc mortgage payments (Towne and Wentworth 1950; Horwitz 1998). These hogs tended to live on pasture or open dirt lots with minimal cover from the wcather. By the mid-1950s, if a farmer
wanted more control over his (usually) hogs, he turned to the “Cargill” unit as the most
popular hog finishing facility at the time. At most this arrangement offered partial confinement with an open front lying area, a sloped, solid concrete pad, and passive or natural ventilation (Pitcher 1997).These systems did not require much startup capital and
were fairly self-contained with almost n o external inputs as far as feed and reproduction
were concerned.
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This period of swine farming mirrors Foucault’s description of the ancien regime in some
respects. Individual hogs had a substantial amount of frecdom and self-determination.
Kept on pasture or even left to forage in the woods near the farmstead, hogs chose what
they ate and when; they built their own nests when it was time to farrow (give birth);
and they were able to choose their own sexual partners. This is not to say that the life of
swine in the ancien regime was all sweetness and light. Most animals, including humans,
have a large number of offspring when it is unlikely that they all will reach a reproductive age. Hogs are no different. In the ancien regime, it was the fate of many a piglet to be
crushed to death by its mother as she lay down. Even if a piglet survived farrowing and
weaning, there was little protection from the weather. Certainly in the Midwest United
States the intense summer heat and freezing cold of winter were likely to kill several animals regardless of how well the farmer tried to care for them. Morbidity was also an
important factor as many disease-causing organisms lived in the soil and were passed
from one hog to another, thus reducing the potential well-being of the entire herd.
Most farmers during this time raised at least a few swine if only for their own household consumption. Thus, farmers were as much of an undifferentiated mass as Foucault’s
description of the mob in eighteenth-century France. Farmers were also left pretty much
to themselves to decide how they were going to raise the hogs; federal control was
almost nonexistent with the only relevant federal legislation being thc 1899 Federal
Refuse Act (a prototype of the Clean Water Act) that was no more than a couple of sentences of guidelines. Continuous observation of either the farmer or the swine was
extremely difficult, and certainly very few records were kept that could be used to control their actions (for more details, see Towne and Wentworth 1950; Coppin 2002).
This all changed in the 1970s-1980s as the current disciplinary regime took its first
steps and total confinement facilities began to replace pasture operations. Developments in confinement architecture, medicine, reproduction, nutrition, and waste management were all physical transformations necessary to enable the successful existence
of mega-hog farms. I will examine a couple of these aspects in detail below, but for now
I want to draw your attention to the appearance of the architectural partitioning of
space that allows for constant observation and the collection of records, all of which
were central to Foucault’s disciplinary regime. A typical hog operation today, involved
in all the stages of swine raising from breeding to finishing hogs to market weight, is a
quite different place than the farm of fifty years ago. Breeding is most commonly done
through artificial insemination, although estrus may be detected either by a live boar, a
human, or a machine. Once pregnant the sows are kept in an individual crate for about
three and a half months until a few days before they are due to farrow. At this time they
are moved to other individual crates where the sows give birth and where they and their
litters stay for two more weeks until the piglets are weaned. The piglets are then moved
to a nursery building for a month, then to a growing building, and finally to a finishing
building where they stay until they are five to six months old at which time they are
loaded onto a semi-truck to go to slaughter.
The social conditions that accompany swine farming have also been transformed in
the shift from ancien to disciplinary regime. The amount of human labor required to
produce one hundredweight of hogs has been steadily dropping since the 1950s (Bureau
of the Census 1975, p. 501), and as the building design modifications fostered this trend
of fewer people raising more hogs, the swine operations grew bigger and bigger. While it
is possible that on any given farm the actual buildings have remained the same, the daily
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farming practices and overall composition of swine production have been transformed.
Mega-hog farms have become ver)‘ capital intensive and have faced increasing public
opposition as the facilities get larger, confine more hogs in proportionally less space, and
replace the small-scale pasture-based farms. The farmer remains an active agent throughout the evolution of the U.S. swine industry, although the role and composition of this
agent has changed dramatically with the professionalization of the swine farmer into a
pork producer (Coppin 2002). While retaining agency in certain aspects, the U.S.farmer
is now subject to more control than in the ancien regime as state and federal legislation
has increased in scope and complexity. In addition, the farmer is also subject to disciplinary mechanisms from a wider variety of sources than before.
This industrialization of hog production is considered to be the latest phase in widespread agricultural structural change, “characterized by the expanding presence of very
large, highly integrated pork producers” (Benjamin 1997, p. 2). Even though the demand
for pork has barely risen-from 16,615 million pounds in 1980 to 17,117 million pounds
in 1996-the number and size of mega-hog farms have increased (Bell 1998,p. 77). In a
paper prepared for the 1997 U.S. Meat Export Federation Pork Conference, Ronald
Plain shows that the number of US. hog farms has decreased dramatically from over
one million farms in 3 967 to 157,450farms in 1996.At the same time, the average number
of hogs per farm has increased nearly five-fold (Plain 1997, p. 1).In 2002, there were
75,350 U.S. farms with one or more swine that together raised 58.9 million head; however 53 percent of the total inventory came from operations of 5,000 head or larger
(USDA 2002). Plain (1997) predicts that slightly more than sixty thousand farms in the
U.S. will still be raising hogs in 2007. The national trend is reflected even in areas that
have not been historically important pork-producing states. North Carolina fairly
recently became the state with the second largest swine population in the United States
(first is Iowa), and between 1985 and 1995 hog production tripled while the number of
hog farmers dropped from twenty-three thousand to eight thousand.
This historical description of the two regimes has necessarily had a snapshot beforeand-after quality to it, as space limitations prohibit a more detailed evolutionary account.
Nevertheless, even at this superficial level, it is clear that swine farming has changed in
significant ways for both the hog and the farmer. Certainly there are benefits as well as negative consequences for those involved in each of the regimes In the uncien regime before
the advent of mega-hog farms, the swine and the farmer had far more self-determination
and ability to act as they chose. Few, if any, records were kept about either of them, and
so long as pork was available nobody really cared how that pork was raised. Swine could
be counted on to make money for the farmer, and their care and maintenance required
little in the way of capital investment. With the establishment of mega-hog farms, both
the swine and the farmer experience more direct control over many aspects of their
lives. Reams of records are collected and analyzed to help determine future actions.
With a single confinement building costing $130,000 or more, pork production has
become a very capital intensive business, and it is becoming doubtful whether the hog
will be able to retain its title as “mortgage raiser” as prices at the slaughterhouse plummet. The analogy with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is clear, but there are parts of
the transformation of the swine industry that cannot be covered by simple reference to
Foucault’s work. I now turn first to my research methods and then to the details of how
the swine industry moved from an ancien to a disciplinary regime. In doing so, I aim to
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illustrate how we need to move beyond a simple Foucauldian description of humancentered discipline to incorporate the rest of the active world in which we live.
RESEARCH M E T H O D S
The arguments I make here are supported by a variety of sources. Through a combination of research at thc University of lllinois libraries, the lllinois State Historical
Library, face-to-face interviews, attendance at public meetings, and internet research, 1
gathered newspaper, trade magazine, and journal articles; self-histories, instructional
manuals, and reports €rom agricultural and rural advocacy organizations; and transcripts
of interviews and public hearings. Twenty-eight people participated in semi-structured
conversational interviews, with the number of interviews per person ranging from one
to six and in time between forty-five minutes and two and a half hours each session. I
made no effort lo cnsure a random sample of interview participants; instead, participants were seen as key informants and the interviews aimed to maximize the variation
in responses in order to include many standpoints (Glaser and Strauss 1967).With this
in mind, I spoke with pork producers of all sizes of operations, specializations, and ownership arrangements; land grant university animal scientists and extension staff; opposition organization leaders; swine veterinarians; and pork commodity advocates. In the
following sections, excerpts from these interviews are attributed with the person’s real
name and position, except where pseudonyms were requested, the use of which is
clearly marked.
TYPES OF DISCIPLINARY AGENTS
Foucault discussed many types of disciplinary mechanisms that were integral in the
emergence of the modern prison system. It should come as no surprise that we can find
a similar collection of mechanisms at work in the creation of large-scale swine facilities
However, Foucault argued against agents and agency per se, instead preferring to focus
on the relations of power in which we find ourselves. Along with Susan Hekman (1995),
Amy Hequembourg and Jorge Arditi (1999), and Tim Newton (1998) who have criticized Foucault’s notion (or lack thereof) of agency, I believe that it is important to
examine the ways in which people and nonhuman animals are active in creating the conditions of our society and nature. As I aim to show, in the present disciplinary regime,
these agents often work in tandem and simultaneously albeit at different levels and in
different avenues.
Disciplining Swine
Humans discipline hogs through two main routes. One is through the genetic selection
of certain traits (e.g., larger litters, less backfat, and docility), which arguably entails a
different form of power/knowledge relations and a different tactic of normalization than
found among humans. Aldon Jensen, a prominent swine nutritionist, says that previously “breeding was a matter of selecting animals” but that now it is more a case of
selecting specific characteristics and using gene manipulation techniques to reproduce
those characteristics (interview, March 21,2000). In the United States, the average number of piglets per litter has increased from 7.17 in 1975 to 8.49 in 1996,concurrent with a
Foucauldian Hog Futures
603
rise in the average number of litters per sow per year (Plain 1997,p. 2). Additionally, in
1975 a sow could expect to give birth to 2.54 litters in her lifetime; by 1996 that number
had risen to 3.08 (Plain 1997, p. 3). This type of transformation in the physiology of the
hog has no parallels in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Therefore, more than a discursive shift in how humans talk and think about swine. the creation of mega-hog farms has
required the physical creation of a new hog. Swine and a variety of human agents-from
farmers to animal scientists to meatpackers-are actively involved in this process
Genetic manipulations have also reduced the amount of backfat on a hog from one
and a half inches in the 1950s to one-third of an inch now. Before 1954 “a hog was a
hog.” but with the development of live carcass evaluation programs came a source of
poweriknowledge that enabled meatpackers and pork producers to be better able to
control the leanness of swine. George “Dick” Carlisle, a professor emeritus from the
University of Illinois and a pork producer, explained this new mechanism of control
known as the Probe and Weigh Program:
The probe made a little nick through the skin in the back about that long [approximately one inch], and actually we used an exacto knife to make the nick, and then
you took a small steel ruler and poke it down through that fat, and when it hit the
muscle, it would stop, and you measured the backfat. It sounds kind of cruel, but it
was effective . . . but nowadays they quit using the steel ruler, and they use ultrasound. Much easier. (interview, April 28,2000)
Since carcass merit is highly heritable (i.e., the meat-to-fat ratio of the offspring is highly
correlated with that of the parent) knowledge of which hogs to breed became important
in order to get the higher prices that slaughterhouses started to offer for leaner meat. It
is important to note though that change does not run one-way; selection pressures on
the physiology of the hog are mirrored in the reconfiguration of the meatpacking houses
as skilled labor is replaced by machines and repetitivc unskilled labor (Stanley 1994;
Eisnitz 1997; Fink 1998). Here a change in the physical world is unavoidably caught up
with a change in the social realm.
The second route of human discipline over hogs is also corporeal but is through the
lived experiences of the hog rather than being, in effect, prior to their life. This second
route is more closely related to Foucault’s examples of criminals, military personnel, and
hospital patients, in that architecture and production of a certain type of being are key.
While there is variety among the different types of swine houses used in intensive confinement, all share the aim of separating swine from each other according to specific
rules. Possibly the most common type-certainly the most protested-are the individual
stalls in which sows are kept (see Figure 1).
During the three months, three weeks, and three days of gestation, a sow is confined
to a narrow two feet by six feet (60 cm by 182 cm) crate with concrete or metal slotted
floors and metal bars separating hcr from her neighbors. There is a feeder and water
container at the front of the crate, and her excrement is pushed through the slats into a
pit beneath her crate when she lies down. Such absolute confinement enables the producer to ensure that the sow gets the right kind and amount of food without fear that
pen mates will eat her share. It also enables the producer to give specific vitamins, minerals, and medicine if needed and allows the producer to track each sow’s development with
precise knowledge of her experiences throughout gestation. Shortly before she farrows,
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FIGURE 1. SOW IN FARROWING CRATE
the sow is moved into another crate, which is essentially the same design as before
except there is a small adjoining space that is separated by bars that only come twothirds of the way down. This enables the piglets to crawl out of the way when their
mother lies down instead of being crushed beneath her. Many sows used to be strapped
or chained to the floor once they had farrowed to let the piglets suckle whenever they
liked, with the idea that they would grow faster if they could feed at will. However, this
practice has been illegal in the United Kingdom since January 1999 and is beginning to
lose support in the United States as well, in part because the sow resists such treatment
by not producing as much milk when she is strapped down.
For Foucault (1977, p. 141), the creation of “docile bodies” depended on “the distribution of individuals in space” that was accomplished in part by enclosure and partitioning such as described above. To this end, Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was vital in the
successful adoption of prisons as the main system of punishment. The architecture of
the prison itself was changed to make the prisoners in their cells open to observation at
all times, while simultaneously hiding the observer. This had the effect of making the
priSoners always be on their best behavior in case they were being watched, but this
system also laid the foundation of human sciences (such as psychology) as detailed information was continually being collected about the prisoners.
Foucauldian Hog Futures
605
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at cvcry point, in which the individuals are
inserted in a fixcd place, in which the slightest movements are supervised. in which all
events are recorded. in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and
periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous
hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and thc dead-all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. (Foucault 1977,p. 197)
The individual in this case could just as easily be porcine as human. Mega-hog farms are
renowned for “enclosed, segmented space,” and the buildings are designed so that the
individual human can quickly see the activity and well-being of each hog. There are
many more records kept now on both the individual hog and its genetic line than was
the case even thirty years ago. Steve Colby (pseudonym), a pork producer who operates
a 1,200 sow farrow-to-wean facility,’ describes the variety of information he now keeps
in comparison to what his grandfather did:
I have a PigCHAMP computerized record keeping system and on the farrow-to-finish
side we have all the mating information, farrowing information, numbers of preweaning death loss, as well as reasons for pre-weaning death loss. [PigCHAMP] ties
that back to facilities so we can look and see if a certain facility has a higher death
loss than another one. It enables us to check out some physical components of the
facility foreign types or ventilation types that might be contributing for one reason or
another to death loss. And the reasons that baby pigs are dying, if a lot of baby pigs
are bcing crushed or some other reason, and we can follow them back and maybe
make necessary changes. Or even genetic reasons, if we lose a lot of pigs to ruptures
or things like that, scrota1 rupture where the intestines will come out into the scrotum. And we keep a lot more records than we use to. It used lo be that we’d write on
the calendar maybe when thc boar was put in with a pen full of sows and if you took
him out three weeks later, why, then those sows could farrow any time over those
three weeks and that’s about all you wrote down at that point in time. Maybe when
you put some pigs in the finisher you’d write down the date when they went in, and if
some of them are still around a year later, why, then you’d figure things weren’t going
so well. (interview, November 8 ; 2000)
Clearly, the disciplinary mechanisms of confinement, observation, and record keeping
work as well for mega-hog farms as Foucault argued they did for human prisons. And as
was the case for prisons and the development of psychology, the ability to confine large
numbers of swine in one place entailed a different kind of knowledge than had previously existed regarding swine activities.This is not to say that mega-hog farms came into
existence as mere test cases for animal science. Rather, the heterogeneous assemblage
of humans, swine, machines, medicines, and feed that constitutes a mega-hog farm was
originally designed to optimize pork production, and knowledge production was a
necessary by-product in much the same way that psychology is a side effect of incarceration instead o€being its sole purpose.
While intensive confinement came after the establishment of animal science as a discipline, refinements in each are ongoing as more knowledge is gained and more aspects
of swine necessities come under the temporary control of humans. An early example of
this mutual configuration is in the iron requirements of piglets. As do all mammals, piglets need a certain amount of iron in their diet, which they cannot get straight from the
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sow’s milk. When piglets were born outside this was not an issue because iron is easily
obtained from soil and hogs are somewhat renowned for rooting in dirt. As farrowing
was moved indoors, though, more of the piglets became anemic and susceptible to secondary illnesses until farmers started to put an eight-inch square piece of sod in the farrowing pen. Farmers did not know why this helped until agricultural science examined
the iron content of soil and began instead to create a synthetic form of iron. This was
then joined with sugar and directly injected into the piglets’ blood to provide enough
iron until they could get sufficient amounts from solid feed (Stanley Curtis, interview,
May 4,2000).
The experience of swine as farming moves into intensive confinement also mirrors a
central shift that Foucault described in the creation of criminals and homosexuals. In
Discipline and Punish the shift is from punishing crimes (which are sets of practices) to
punishing the criminal as a type of person who can be found underneath the crime itself.
In the same fashion, in The History of Sexuality Foucault (1990, p. 43) discusses how “the
sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” In each
case, a change in poweriknowledge transforms the relationship of individuals to their
society. This can be seen in swine farming, too, as particular farming practices produce
particular kinds of hogs that are suited only 10 those practices and the broader system of
which they are part.The development of leaner market hogs has meant that these creatures are now more susceptible to the cold and drafts and, especially in the Midwest
where winter temperatures often drop below freeaing, such hogs can no longer survive
outside climate-controlled buildings. Further, to get the increases in litter size, farmers
have tended to breed white-skinned sows, often known as “mother breeds” for their
large litters, which has resulted in light-skinned piglets that can get sunburned if left outside (Stanley Curtis, interview, May 4,2000). Again, this is a problem for the Midwest
and the other up-and-coming pork producing states such as North Carolina and Utah
where sunshine is most common. If the emergence of intensive confinement facilities
has created a hog that cannot survive outside of its system, then the inverse is also
true-feral o r wild hogs that survive quite well outdoors cannot cope with the conditions inside.
Our sow herd today is pretty well adapted to this kind of farrowing [so] that you
could no more put a wild pig or sow or a feral sow in one of those environments and
expect them to perform well. It just wouldn’t happen. Because it would be so frustralcd, anxious, and emotional that they’re going to have all kinds of stress hormones
out there, some of which arc antagonistic to oxytocin and its effects on uterine contraction and so you have a lot of static uterus problems in such sows, the piglets die in
utero, and you’ve got one H of a mess. (Stanley Curtis, interview, May 4,2000)
This type of interaction between hog and human shows how power is relational rather
than absolute. The humans in this case tiy to transform the hog into something different,
and in some cases the hog will go along with these attempts and in other cases the hog
will resist. There are also a number of unexpected consequences arising from these
interactions that enable power to be continually redistributed. Large-littered, lean, and
docile swine are more desirable to producers, but to get such creatures humans in turn
have to provide complete shelter, a constant temperature that is desirable to the hog,
outstanding nutrition, and great medical care-arguably something that many human
Foucauldian Hog Futures
607
beings do not have. In examining the details by which the ancien regime becomes the
disciplinary regime, we can better understand the temporal characteristics of such a shift
and better comprehend the multiplicity of agency. This approach stands in contrast to
Foucault’s description of thc transformation in rcgimcs as being abrupt and discontinuous in which we are all caught in relations of power without any agents participating in
the transformation.
Disciplining Farmers
Beyond human discipline of hogs, the current incarnation of pork production also
entails disciplining the farmers themselves from many avenues. Farmers have never
been passive victims in the evolution of the U.S. swine industry. Indeed, the transforrnation from the ancien regime to the disciplinary regime would never have happened without the active engagement of those who directly raise hogs for market. For example,
many of the interview participants and primary documents stated that hog farmers
chose to move their swine into confinement facilities because they expected it to
increase their profits through savings in time and labor, increases in feed efficiency, and
decreases in disease problems (Muehling and Jedele 1963; Mueller and Muehling 1964;
Kadlec et al. 1966). The current form of architecture and management system in megahog farms emerged partly through the actions of individual farmers physically trying out
different arrangements over the years. However, this agency does not preclude farmers
from being subject to disciplinary mechanisms. The clearest manner in which this happens
is with those producers who have contract operations, whereby they agree to produce so
many hogs by a certain time for a bigger, usually corporate, producer. Similarities can be
found in Foucault’s work (1977) where he emphasized the importance of the minute
control of activity in the various disciplines, which was often found in the form of time
tables and lists of rules that specify precisely what happens and when. Examples of this
type of microphysics of power can be seen quite readily in the contracts that producers
sign. Table 1 shows an example of the degree and extent of control that corporations
have over their contractors.
Biological systems cannot be controlled to the same extent as inanimate systems, but
producers still have a definite routine and scheduling of events. At one swine operation
1 visited all the piglets are weaned on Thursdays so that by the following Tuesday the
sows are back in estrus and can be bred again. On the piglets’ third day of life the producer has to dock the piglets’ tails, clip their needle teeth, give injections of supplemental iron, and castrate the males. ‘These are just some examples of the minute control of
activity that are prevalent throughout pork production. It is also worth noting that both
the farmer and the hog are being controlled and recreated to fit in with the existence of
mega-hog farms.The farmers in this instance arc closer in analogy to the prisoners in Discipline and Punish, but they also share characteristics with the jailers or prison guards.
While Foucault does not explain how the jailers are remade in the new institution of prisons, the recreation of all the agents is important to understand in the emergence of megahog farms. It matters very much that the farmer is transformed through the same disciplinary process as the swine. In order to comprehend this aspect of mutual construction
we must go beyond Foucault’s analysis.
Part of the reason that farmers are experiencing more and more discipline from various sources is that they are becoming part of a wider network of power relations. No
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THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 44/No. 4/2003
TABLE 1. SWINE CONTRACT PROVISIONS
Contract Items
Affecting Pay
Pay per pound or head
Number of pigs placed
Breed placed
Placcment date
Feed content
Feed volume
Vaccinations
Medications
Market time/weight
Equipment additions
Housing modifications
Carcass disposal
Unmarkctable pigs
Nct weight gain of pigs
Who does labor
When labor done
De termined
by Tyson
Determined
by Producer
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
(meet Tyson guideline)
Source: Morrison 1998, p. 153
longer is the farmer in a simple network of a few hogs, the farm family, the local butcher,
and the consumer, with occasional visits from a veterinarian. Instead agriculture is typified by the increasing prevalence of integrated agribusinesses where the farmer is now
in a power relationship that also includes pharmaceutical, seed, genetic, and construction companies, along with banks, land grant universities, and legislation (Friedland,
Busch, Buttel, and Rudy 1991; Benjamin 1997; Thu and Durrenberger 1998). Here we
can see some of the broader social reconfigurations that occur as mega-hog farms
become prevalent. A quick look at the 2002 USDA swine report shows that although
only 9.6 percent of the nation’s pork producers are considered “large-scale” (over 2,000
hogs), they account for 75 percent of the entire national pork inventory. lndeed, with
Smithfield Foods’ round of acquisitions, it alone now has “13 percent of US. pork production, encompassing 785,000 sows and an annual production of nearly 13 million pigs”
(Avery 1999).
Consolidation is also rampant in the meatpacking plants and, within the last decade,
the number of places to which farmers could sell their hogs has decreased dramatically.
This has enabled the meatpacking industry to exert more direct pressure on both the
farmer and the hog by paying premiums for certain desirable traits, such as leanness,
larger hogs, homogeneity, and larger deliveries of swine. The latter characteristic requires
bigger swine operations so that more hogs are ready for market at the same time. In
effect, the integration of meatpacking plants and large-scale facilities has occurred
jointly and this concurrence has severely restricted the farmers’ options both in the
methods of rearing and the conditions of sale (Braun and Braun 1998; Horwitz 1998).
The point here is that as swine farming has shifted from the anczen regme to the disciplinary regime, many more actors are caught up in the assemblage, or relations of power.
Foucauldian Hog Futures
609
These different actors can be thought of as multiple layers of discipline within the porkproducing industry that move in and out of alignment, so that at any one position in the
assemblage the actor is experiencing several types and sources of discipline that can
often be contradictory.
Other Disciplinary Agents
The emergence of mega-hog farms involved many agcntS both human and nonhuman,
two of which are briefly examined in this section. The responsibility of the ultimate consumers of swine products cannot be ignored. In 1988, the National Research Council
(NRC) issued a report, based on medical recommendations, which encouraged people
to reduce their consumption of animal fat. Pork producers had been working for several
years by this time to reduce the proportion of fat to meal in the hog, and the NRC
report was simply the icing on the cake. The pork consumer’s role is important because
if an increase in the demand for leaner meat had not come from the consumers to the
producers, it would be unlikely that the average hog would have so little fat that it needs
to be inside climate-controlled buildings. This is not to say that confinement facilities
would disappear if people were happy to eat higher levels of animal fat, but rather that
the facilities might have taken a different shape without the necessary attention to insulation, supplemental heat sources, and ventilation that are so important in the current
arrangement of mega-hog farms. At the same time, some pork consumers are joining
together with small-scale pork producers, suburbanites, environmentalists, rural advocate organizations, and folk who neither eat nor produce pork in order to oppose the
construction and operation of mega-hog farms. These coalitions arc yct another layer in
the heterogeneous assemblage that comprises the disciplinary regime, much to the exasperation of certain producers who get extremely frustrated with mandates to produce
pork without odor (Wright 2000).
There is one more player in this poweriknowledge network surrounding mega-hog
farms that deserves a bit of attention. Legislation a1 the county, state, and federal levels
cannot be overlooked and is itself the outcome of conflict and a redistribution of power.
Since mega-hog farms have gained national attention there has been a slew of bills
introduced at all levels of government that aim to control a vanety of aspects, most commonly odor and water pollution. Perhaps most noteworthy is the struggle taking place
among county boards, states, and federal agencies over who has, or oughl to have, the
final authority with respect to facility siting. regulations, and monitoring. The US. Environmental Protection Agency has argued for national rules because the water pollution
from livestock waste can potentially cross county and state boundaries since watersheds
do not adhere to political statutes. County boards want to control the siting of intensive
confinement facilities in the same way that they control the siting of landfills, prisons,
and other locally unwanted land uses. Agriculture is the only business that is not subject
to local zoning regulations, and many residents and county board members argue that
mega-hog farms were not the type of agriculture they had in mind when these laws were
written. “No matter how you cut the bacon. the large hog farms closer resemble an
industrial operation than the traditional agricultural operation-a small family herd that
supplements income’’ (Jacksonville Journal Couricr, June 30, 1996, p.12). Even more
tension is generated as state governinents step into the arena.They argue that rules and
regulations ought to be formulated at the state level because any federal rules will be
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THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 44INo. 412003
too broad and unable to account for the topological differences between stales, while
local control is apt to be subverted by emotions and political games.
In the midst of this wrangling sits the farm and producer subjected to many regulations, although the picture varies slightly from state to state. At the very least, there are
environmental laws that influence the construction of the qwine buildings, the waste
container, and the disposal of waste. There are laws regarding how far the facility has to
be from neighbors and public facilities such as parks. Some states require the manager
of large operations to pay moncy and take a test to become a certified operator. There
are laws that prohibit the use of certain hormones and medicines for the swine. Occupational health and safety laws are also present. and some states even have laws regarding
ownership status that aim to prevent corporate facilities. Once again, though, farmers/
producers are actively engaged in shaping these laws through their actions and alliances
with regional and national organizations such as the National Pork Producer’s Council
and the Farm Bureau (“Reject Tax Change, Okay PAC“ 1985; Coppin 2002).
As this section illustrates, there arc many disciplinary agcnts at work in the swine
industry, and these agents often operate in disparate ways, producing tension and contradictory stimuli. While the individual farmer is frequently blamed for swine operations
growing bigger and bigger, very few larmers have the control that they-and othersmay think they have. In addition to all the other transformations that ensue, what it
means to be a hog farmer is itself shaped by other social, economic, and material factors
over which thc farmer has little direct influence.
ROUTINE RESISTANCE
If power/knowledge is manifest in the routine practices of situations-the microphysics
of power-then any resistance must also be found at the routine micro-level as well as at
the more visible macro-level. Resistance is not something separate from power relations; it is instead an integral part of those relations As Foucault (1990, p. 95) explains,
“Where there is power, there is resistance, and yct, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. [There is a] strictly relational character of power relationships.Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points
of resistance.” This is certainly the case with intensive agriculture as a variety of social
groups and swine resist corporatization and intensification. Many people have criticized
Foucault’s notion of resistance as being too passive and reactionary (Ray 1988; Hartsock 1990; Michael and Still 1992;Faith 1994; fiequembourg and Arditi 1999).This form
of reactionary resistance is perhaps clearest for mega-hog farms, although of course
resistance does not always have to be considered passive.
Several studies have examined the increase in the grassroots social movement opposition of many rural communities to mega-hog farms being built in their neighborhoods
(Constance, Bonanno, and Lorenz 1998; DeLind 1998; Hendrickson and Pigg 3 998;
Kleiner, Seipel, and Rikoon 1999). Such resistance takes the form of public meetings,
rallies, Farm Aid concerts, legislative appeals, and occasionally death threats. Opposition to this type of agricultural restructuring also spills ovcr into local media and perhaps gets disseminated to a wider audience than were originally concerned. In a study of
twenty daily newspapers in Illinois, ten had significantly more coverage of opposing
arguments, while only two newspapers were significantly pro in their coverage of megahog farms (Coppin and Reisner 1999,2000).
Foucauldian Hog Futures
611
Timothy Luke (199Y, pp. 124-125) interprets Foucault’s sense of resistance as “environmental resistance [that] can even be recast as a type of civil disobedience, which
endangers national security, expresses unpatriotic sentiments, or embodies treasonous
acts.” While community opposition to mega-hog farms may not exactly be treasonous or
a danger to national security, it certainly encompasses acts of civil disobedience. and
many letters to the editor and news articles charge opponents as being un-American.
Foucault scholars who wish to extend his insights to an ecological realm see environmental resistance as “includ[ing] the questioning of existing dominant discourse and
practices around ‘nature”’ (Darier 1999, p. 237). If we take agriculture as being one
aspect of human-nature relationships, then the fight by communities, environmental
groups, rural advocacy organizations, and some farmers is definitely questioning the
prevalent discourse of expansion and intensification that dominates the agricultural sector. Tom Marx (pseudonym), a pork producer in west central Illinois, said he would
rather quit the swine business altogether than enter into a contract relationship with
corporate producers, even though giving up the farm would mean his children would not
become the fourth generation to farm in that area (interview, July 14, 1999). Many
farmers and nonfarmers alike argue that the mega-hog farms are more like factories
than farms and that these industrial operations are putting independent family farmers
out of business.
Critics say the operations-in which thousands of hogs are raiscd in buildings-are
not true farms but simply factories that produce pigs instead of cars or tractors.
(Champaign News Gazette, December 2,1999: p. B2)
We have heard a lot about “mega hog farms.” They are not part of our traditional
pastoral scene; do not confuse them with “family [arms.” Families do not live on
them; the owners. far removed from the scene. endure only thc smcll of moncy. Laws
governing homeowners or ordinary farmers will not protect us. (Champaign News
Gazette, May 19,1998.p.A4)
This is a typical reaction in an urbanized area of Illinois, but it does not differ dramatically from responses in rural newspapers:
Opponents of the hog farm, who call themselves Families Against Rural Messes.
argued that the $2.25 million facility would amount to an industrial site or a feedlot.
not a farm. (Charleston Times-Courier. May 1.1997. p. C3)
Bill Emmett, a McLcan County board mcmber, argued that it would makc sense for
large farms that are reminiscent of industrial assembly lines to be subject to local
controls. “Slaughtering 35,000 pigs next door to you is not the traditional farm,” he
said. “We’re asking for some local input where we have some say over what is in our
backyard.” (Flora Daily Clay County Advocate, November 6,1997. p. 3)
Many more news articles and letters echo these sentiments; together they offer an alternative view of what pork production could and should be. Opponents argue that if
intensive agriculture cannot be stopped completely then it at least needs to be distinguished from traditional forms of agriculture and should no longer be afforded the protection and benefits that farmers have enjoyed. In this light we can see that what
constitutes a farm is liable to be reconfigured through the same processes that recreated
the farmer and the hog.
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Some Foucauldian scholars have suggested that resistance can be found at an unconscious biological level that is every bit as important as the conscious forms of resistance
(Michael and Still 1992; Faith 1994). Indeed, “resistance. like power, is not static, monolithic or chronological; there is no one resistance, but rather infinite multiplicities of
strategic resistances’’ (Faith 1994, p. 57). If we can see resistance at a biological level,
then this opens the concept to a notion of nonhuman resistance, even to those who deny
nonhuman animal consciousness. As I have already shown, the hog itself has a very
important active role in the transformation of swine farming into pork production. For
example, the hogs who live in today’s version of intensive confinement are quite different
creatures from those who thrive on pasture or are feral. During the course of moving hogs
into total confinement, farmers were made aware of the hogs’ specific requirements and
what pen designs, feeding systems, medicine, and so forth, were acceptable to swine in
no uncertain terms. Swine resistance to certain configurations was often at an unconscious biological level, but this does not negate the resistance that did indeed occur. The
excerpt below from Aldon Jensen, a professor of animal science (interview, March 21,
2000), illustrates that those who work with hog5 even in a scientific fashion, acknowledge
the agency that swine have and their active participation in constructing farming practices
1 guess all of it [designing confinement pens] was trial and error in a sense. Even
though we tried to figure out what might be best in terms of materials and design, the
pigs were the ones that told us which one we would recommend. . . .There was a guy
in forestry [who] got interested in it [pen floor design] so he made bome slats for us
out of all different kinds of wood. . . .Anyway, we put some in out at the [experimental] farm but some of them were made out of pine, soft pine, and the pigs ate through
then1 the first night. . . .They fell in the [excrement holding] pit. Fortunately it wasn’t
a very deep one and so the men didn’t have a struggle getting them out.
First, the researchers were “told” what materials to recommend in building pens by the
injuries that the hogs experienced on their hooves and knees from the different materials such as concrete, wood, or expanded metal. If the injuries were too painful, then the
hog would not get up to eat, and thus would not gain weight in a manner consistent with
human desires. This type of resistance can be viewed as passive on the part of the hog
because things are happening to it rather than the hog doing things itself Second, hogs
evinced an active form of resistance because humans are denied control by the pigs’
own actions, in this case eating through the wood that made up their pens. Certainly,
there are more examples of passive swine resistance, but this may be because through
the reconfiguration process of swine farming humans have increased their control by
reducing the opportunity for swine to be active at all. Both of these examples support
Foucault’s notion that power is relational instead of something that can be wholly possessed. In each case, humans responded to the swine and made adjustments to the facilities that accommodated the source of resistance. Power and resistance are dynamic
and, as such, the specific configurations of power can always be unexpectedly altered.
A closer look at the structural transformation of swine farming shows another view
of the complex set of relations that intertwine hogs and farmers where each has to
adjust to the actions of the other. When hogs were kept outside, they had much more
control over their own behavior and pretty much looked after themselves with some
extra food, water, or straw from farmers if the weather got nasty, For millennia, hogs
Foucauldian Hog Futures
613
had been eating the right diet, getting enough exercise, and protecting themselves from
the elements and predators, all without the assistancc of human beings. Individual hogs
would die, quite often horrible deaths, but the species continued and spread across
Europe and Asia. Now as Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish (1977), a lot of
new types of knowledge emerge and arc necessary to successfully contain large numbers
of people in one place-especially if you are in the process of transforming them from
people who commit crimes into criminals. The same is true when swine farming is transformed into pork production. With intensive confinement operations came the need to
know about amino acids, vitamins, antibiotics, genetic manipulation, waste management, and so forth. As one animal scientist, Stanley Curtis, put it, “Is it any wonder that
we have problems with major confinement systems? The amazing thing is that we get
them to work at all!” (intervicw, May 17, 2000). If humans were going to remove as
much of the hog’s agency as they possibly could, then those humans had better know
what a hog needs to live, otherwise they would end up with a lot of dead hogs and not a
lot of high quality pork. As we have seen though, the knowledge of how to take care of
hogs came about only through a trial-and-error struggle as hog and human tried certain
configurations and adjusted themselves to the results. All of this occurred within the
broader networks of poweriknowledge that link the on-farm transformations with legislation, social movements, and integrated agribusiness. As a consequence of this engagement,
both hog and farmer were changed in ways that will arguably continue in occasionally
unexpected ways.
IMPLICATIONS FOR LONG PIGS AND SHORT PIGS
I have shown that Michel Foucault’s approach, which at first glance has little to do with
rural sociology or agriculture, can in fact be quite useful in exploring patterns and forms
of power in a distinctly agricultural setting. Even though it may seem surprising, modern
forms of swine farming actually have a lot in common with prisons, hospitals, and
schools. Perhaps we should not be surprised after all because agriculture as an integral
part of human life existed long before any of our other social institutions.
As we have seen here, a Foucauldian perspective can serve as a good starting point to
overcome some of the problems inherent in the usual dualist approaches in studies of
agriculture. It enables a comprehension of situated forms of power and resistance within
a network, but I have argucd that this network or assemblage needs to be expanded in
order to include nonhuman animals along with social relations, architecture, and sciences. Throughout this article I have taken a concept or thought that Foucault described
in Discipline and Punish and have looked to see how that concept plays out in the emergence of mega-hog farms. I began with a quick look at how swine farming has shifted
from the uncien regime to the disciplinary regime, and then I moved into the different
disciplinary mechanisms such as confinement, observation, record collection, and the creation of new types of beings. Through examples such as the increasing amount and extent
of regulations to which the producer is subject and the fight over the definition of a
“farm,” we have seen how Foucault’s insights can be extended from prisons to agriculture.
In order to understand the patterns of agriculture more fully, specifically pork production, it is neccssary to examine the hog as well as the farmer and other social agents.
When we do this we can see that the hog is an active participant in creating the conditions that enable mega-hog farms to exist. This is a significant extension of Foucault’s
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THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 44/No. 4/2003
work as the present analysis of mega-hog farms has shown that a nonhuman animal is
involved in both the discipline and the resistance that previously had been the sole province of human beings Certainly the form that porcine agency takes has altered over the
years and conditions-sows in tightly confined farrowing crates have far less opportunity to act than their foremothers who farrowed in forest nests-but they remain agents
of resistance and change. The attention that I have paid to the extended forms of the
microphysics of power has allowed us to perceive the details of the mutual configuration
of social roles and institutions with hogs and buildings all within a specific regime of disciplinary agribusiness. As such it is clearer to see how the transformation of the swine
industry from small-scale pasture-based farms to large-scale intensive confinementbased operations involved a wide network of many different actors. The latter picture is
much richer in detail than the thin, stylized sketch offered by Foucault, and thus it is also
easier to comprehend how the shift from one regime to another occurs. In sum, a Foucauldian approach is useful in explaining the birth of modern agriculture so long as the
perspective is decentered to include the participation of nonhumans
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological Society, Washington, D.C., 2000. Many thanks to Eileen Gebbie, Kevin Larkin, Andy
Pickering,Ann Reisner, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments
NOTES
1. To give a sense of the size involved with these hog operations, with 1>200sows Colby aims
“to farrow fifty litters a week, and market about twenty-four thousand pigs a year.”
2. Swine are the only mammals to share with humans the ability to get sunburned.
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