The antinomies of feed and feeding in animal agriculture

Abstract

This paper is about the environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture through a focus on feed and feeding. We review a large and interdisciplinary body of scholarship on animal agriculture to show that the production of feed, and the feeding of animals in confined systems of production, is associated with degradation, exploitation, and violence. At the same time, and especially in the current conjuncture, feed and feeding research and scholarship highlight ways to address and mitigate animal agriculture's environmental problems while also providing hope for more ethical multispecies relations on the farm. We map the antinomies of feed and feeding through three analytical registers: feed as object, feeding as practice, and feed/ing as conversion. We argue that feed and feeding are at the center of the contemporary politics and ethics of animal agriculture — both as a site of exploitation and domination, but also as a contested promise of a more ethical and sustainable animal agriculture. Our conclusion examines how the antinomies of feed and feeding are both incompatible and yet bound together, an issue that we argue provides critical insights into the contemporary environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture.

Introduction

Feeding is the act of giving food to living beings to nourish, sustain, and foster. Yet, when this common-sense definition is set against how billions of animals on the planet are fed — i.e., industrial livestock like chickens, pigs, and farmed fish — a definition of feeding that emphasizes nourishment and fostering fails to capture the often-violent practices of feeding. Indeed, the etymology of feeding is associated with the term force-feeding in the context of “animal husbandry.” While feeding animals suggests a form of care, industrial animal agriculture is focused on growth and governed by the rationale of metrics. The longstanding metric “feed conversion ratio” (Boyd 2001; Finlay 2003) points to a feeding regime that aims to replicate an industrial model of “inputs” and “outputs.” If life is fostered in industrial animal agriculture, it is for as short as time as possible and is guided by logics of efficiency and growth rather than animal nourishment and well-being.

The focus of this paper is on the antinomies of feed and feeding in industrial animal agriculture, which reveals a complex and politically charged field. Geography and allied critical scholarship on animal agriculture have shown how the production of feed and feeding practices on industrial farms are central to the environmental, ethical, and social problems associated with animal agriculture. Yet, at the same time, the animal agriculture industry and academics involved in researching feed point to how feed and feeding are where the problems of animal agriculture may be mitigated or even resolved. The problem of feed and feeding in industrial animal agriculture, then, is that they are a source of exploitation, degradation, and violence but also, for some, a source of hope for sustainable transitions, animal welfare, and multispecies ethics. This antinomy, we argue, is central to the environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture in what we might call the Anthropocene.

Our contribution is to reveal and map the antinomies of feed and feeding in industrial animal agric-aquaculture through three conceptual registers. First, there is a large body of political economy scholarship that has focused on animal feed as object. This work has shown how animal feed is a commodity that circulates regionally and globally to support industrial animal agriculture. Through this framing, scholars have traced the organization and impact of feed production and distribution, and its central role in the myriad of unjust and environmentally harmful problems of animal agriculture. At the same time, feed is being reformulated and re-imagined as playing a central role in addressing some of these environmental, moral, and social challenges in conventional animal agriculture. The second register is feeding as practice. Feeding practices that attend to individual animal subjectivity and animal agency are seen by some as a way of embedding care and just multispecies relations into animal agriculture (Emel, Johnston and Stoddard 2015). Feeding practices that hold promise for ethical animal agriculture are juxtaposed against feeding systems on large-scale industrial farms that prioritize growth and production efficiencies while suppressing animal subjectivities. The final register is feed as conversion. Here, the focus is on the animal's work as a metabolic transformer of feed into a wide range of products for human consumption (Blanchette 2020; Landecker 2019; Oliver 2024; Wadiwel 2019). Scholars and policymakers concerned with feed as conversion contrast metabolism a site of domination and exploitation against its potential for improving the efficiency and sustainability of animal agriculture.

We use antinomy as “a device of argument and analysis” that allows us to map the different positions on feed and feeding across the three registers (Turner 2018). We recognize that antinomies are more than contradictions and tensions: they are, as Jameson (1994: 1) has argued, “propositions that are radically, indeed absolutely, incompatible.” Antinomies as a concept has been used in agro-food studies as a way of understanding deep-seated and fundamental differences in the politics of food consumption and production (e.g., Beacham 2022; Meah and Jackson 2017; Warde 1997). The analytic provides a way of revealing and exploring structural oppositions that resist being resolved in practice (e.g., Weeks 2011).

At the same time, it is important to note that antinomies are not only “irreducible and irreconcilable oppositions,” but that they are also “bound together” (Turner 2018). In the context of this paper, the antinomies of feed as object are held together by past, present, and visions for future economies. The antinomies of feeding as practice are held together by relations of care, where care is both a source of multispecies ethics but also a site of contradiction and irreconcilable entanglements with industrial systems. Finally, feed as conversion is held together by a commitment to understanding metabolic processes, but this site is also full of contradictions between efficiency and growth, labor, and exploitative work. Mapping the antinomies of feed — as well as attending to how they are bound together — provides key insights into the contemporary environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture.

The three conceptual registers of feed as object, feeding as practice, and feeding as conversion were developed through our review of a large body of work on animal agriculture; they are specific ways of understanding and approaching animal feed and feeding. The registers are not mutually exclusive and researchers often address more than one in the same analysis (e.g., Gillespie 2018; Weis 2013). Yet, the registers of object, practice, and conversion are useful in revealing, and helping us map, the different environmental, ethical, and social antinomies associated with feed and feeding in industrial animal agriculture. They also allow us to cross terrestrial and aquatic environments where feed is sourced, and where animals are contained and raised as commodities for human consumption.

In focusing on feed and feeding, our paper engages and brings into conversation different traditions within geography and beyond concerned with the multiple environmental, political, and social problems associated with animal agriculture. This body of scholarship has approached animal agriculture in different ways: as an issue for geographers and other social scientists concerned with the political ecology of animal agriculture at regional and global scales (Bailey and Tran 2019; Boyd and Watts 1997; Friedmann 1982; Hansen 2018; Hansen, Jakobsen and Wethal 2021; Howard 2019; Page 1997; Winders and Nibert 2004; Winders and Ransom 2019); as a problem for animal geographies and a concern for multispecies relations (Barua 2019; Buller 2013, 2016; Gibbs 2021; Gillespie 2022; Holloway, Bear and Wilkinson 2014; Narayanan 2023; Porcher 2011, 2014; Stoddard and Hovorka 2019); and as a problem of food and the politics of sustainable consumption (Bruckner, Colombino and Ermann 2019; Buller and Cesar 2007; Evans and Miele 2012; Gillespie 2011; Miele 2011; Neo and Emel 2017). While this scholarship recognizes the importance of feed and feeding, it is usually contextualized as a part of a broader assemblage of animal agriculture. Through our analysis, we argue that feed and feeding are central to the contemporary environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture.

We go forward by examining feed and feeding through the three registers of object, practice, and conversion and for each we examine their respective antinomies. We conclude by examining how the antinomies of feed and feeding are both incompatible and yet bound together, an issue that we argue we argue provides critical insights into the contemporary environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture.

Feed as object

The starting point for animal feed as object is to examine how political economy/ecology scholars highlight the role of feed in industrial animal agriculture. In this scholarship, the conceptions of past and present economies coalesce around animal agriculture where feed is an essential input for livestock complexes and global food regimes, along with the attendant economic, political, social, and environmental contradictions. Feed as object shapes global trade, contributes to increased and cheap meat consumption, and degrades environments where it is produced and/or extracted. Examples include Jarosz’ (2009) feedgrain–meat complex, Specht's (2020) twentieth-century US cattle–beef complex bringing into being cheap meat, Weis’ (2013) global industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex and Boyd and Watts’ (1997) southern broiler complex, which adopted just-in-time chicken production to maximize material and time efficiencies in the latter half of the twentieth century. Feed as object is also a key element of global food regime analysis. In the post-war period, as Friedmann (1992) has argued, the global sourcing of hybrid maize and other raw materials for feed was a key driver of industrial animal agriculture in North America and parts of Europe. Much of the research on feed complexes and feed–livestock regimes is centered on North America and Europe, but recent research on the rise of Asian meat complexes has provided new insights into feed and its role in industrial animal production. Jakobsen and Hansen (2020: 105) for example argue for “an Asian articulation of the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex.” Different regional complexes reveal different dynamics in the relationship between feed and animal agriculture. For example, whereas the rise of industrial meat production in the United States and Europe was driven by surplus production of grains and oilseeds, the production of meat in Asia has required enormous increases in feed imports (especially soy).

The scholarship on feed–livestock regimes and complexes both reveals and conceptualizes the material connections between animal agriculture and feed production sites (Cusworth 2023) on land and in the water, and the implications for politics and the environment. Weis (2018) has conceptualized industrial animal agriculture as the production of “things,” connecting to hidden landscapes that have been transformed and devitalized by animal feed production leaving behind animal “ghosts.” Oceans are also enrolled to provide animal feed. Haalboom (2020) argues that the rise of Dutch industrial pork production must be connected to the “shadow” places off the Peruvian Coast that provide fishmeal, a crucial feed additive. These interventions and several notable others (e.g., Coles 2022; Cushman 2013; Wintersteen 2012) underline the point that feed is not only environmentally damaging and results in the ongoing transformation of land and waters disrupting social lives and ecologies, it also underpins a system of industrial agriculture.

Two specific cases further illustrate the central role of feed and industrial animal agriculture — the rise of pork production in China and the extraction of pelagic fish for animal agri-aquaculture. First, the rapid growth in pork production in China and the industry's “need for feed” has had significant political and ecological impacts globally (Sharma 2014). The global “meat grab,” or what we might flip and call a “feed grab” refers to the increased grain and oilseed production especially in Latin America (Schneider 2014). Giraudo (2019) shows how feed is central to Chinese “going out” strategy and in Latin America includes corporate land purchases, corporate takeovers, and investment in feed export infrastructures. The shift to feed production has resulted in social and political changes through the concentration of land ownership and corporate control, resulting in the marginalization of small- and medium-sized farms (Oliveira 2016; Peine 2013; Stølen 2021). The expansion of soy in Paraguay, for example, is associated with corporate control, debt, and dispossession (Wesz Junior 2022) and is conceptualized as an example of agri-biopolitics (Hetherington 2020) or Chinese neo-imperialism in Latin America more generally (Giraudo 2019). These new livestock–feed complexes depend on new geopolitical connections and their effect is to transform social and environmental relations in both sites of animal production and where feed is produced.

Our second case is the role of fish meal and fish oil, sourced from pelagic fish, and which have been critical to the rise of industrial animal agriculture on land and in water. The grain–oilseed–livestock complex is land-bound and tends to overlook the role of marine sources of feed such as fish meal and fish oil. But this terrestrial focus is changing quickly as scholars have begun to highlight the role of fish in industrial animal feed (Clarke 2022; Cushman 2013; Franklin 2008; Haalboom 2020; Rude 2022). In parts of Europe and the United States, marine sources of feed helped to advance the shift to industrial forms animal agriculture by further decreasing the price of commercial feeds (Cushman 2013; Rude 2022). Haalboom (2020: 3) shows how Peruvian imports of fishmeal allowed “landless” Dutch farmers to increase production “independently of the area of land these farms had for growing feed” (emphasis in the original). Although the source of feed may have been aqueous — and it may have left an unusual flavor in chicken and pork (see Haalboom 2020) — marine feed as object points to many of the same environmental and social problems as feed produced on land (Bailey and Tran 2019). In contributing marine feed to industrial farms in Europe and North America “shadow” places experienced ecological and social effects. As early as the 1970s, Peru's fishmeal industry collapsed due to overfishing and the sector has remained vulnerable to dramatic booms and busts with significant impacts on the local towns and regions (Clarke 2022). But this is not the only coastal region that has seen unsustainable fishing to support industrial animal agriculture on land and in the sea. West African coastal regions, among several others, have experienced devastating impacts on local fish-dependent communities (Changing Markets Foundation 2021; Franklin 2008; see e.g., Rude 2022). The work on feed as object emphasizes the disastrous environmental and social consequences of systems of production that are central to supporting industrial animal agriculture.

The antinomy of feed as object is both a site of disastrous problems and a site of possible transformation of animal agriculture economies. Industry and researchers promise new and innovative “alternative” and “novel feeds” to address the environmental implications of conventional feeds. Farmed animals become consumers of new kinds of “untapped” feeds, and in turn contributors to future economies. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization states “Livestock systems have the potential in advancing circular bioeconomies, serving as both recipients and as contributors” (FAO 2023: 26). In the bioeconomy, new sources of feed will seemingly solve a multiplicity of problems from a reliance on fossil fuels, to overfishing to re-purposing waste (Turnbull and Oliver 2021). This trend is especially evident in marine aquaculture with new sources of feed — mesopelagic fish, krill, insects, marine tunicates, seaweed, and kelp among many others — are offered as possible new inputs for fish feed and an alternative to conventional sources of fishmeal and fish oil (Cottrell et al. 2020). Promoters of industrially produced macro- and micro-algae and single-cell proteins promise land-sparing and shifting agriculture to crops that can be consumed by humans. Finally, while farmed animals have always consumed “waste,” “alternative feeds” include waste from industrial agriculture and aquaculture and other raw materials that are not suitable for human consumption (Govoni et al. 2023; Oliver and Turnbull 2021). In this way, livestock are promoted as playing the role of “upcyclers” of so-called waste material (Glencross et al. 2024; Sandström et al. 2022). On the basis of these new developments, the FAO has claimed that livestock in the bioeconomy are able to “transform feed, much of which is not suitable for direct human consumption, into valuable proteins such as meat and milk” (FAO 2023: 26). Feed as object holds tension as a problem of enormous environmental issues but also a site where proponents of industrial agriculture suggest its transformation through sustainable source of feed.

Alternative feeds that promise to transform industrial agriculture are attracting significant investment, research funding, and state support. In Norway, the global leader in salmon aquaculture production, state investment into alternative feeds for farmed fish is substantial including for the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research and the Nordic Centre of Excellence on Bioeconomy, both of which have partnered with private feed corporations to develop new. ¹ In Canada, the state-supported “protein supercluster” aims to develop new and more sustainable sources of animal feed for livestock on land and in the ocean. Organizations representing institutional investors and venture capital such as FAIRR ² and Hatch Blue ³ have also emphasized the role of alternative feeds as sites of investment and profit. But in practice, the extent to which new and more sustainable feeds are being used is very low. In salmon aquaculture for example, a 2020 report noted that only 0.4% of novel ingredients were being used in aquafeed (NCE Seafood Innovation 2022). On the one hand, the development of alternative feeds is a kind of corporate greenwashing, framed around the new bioeconomy (Turnbull and Oliver 2021). On the other hand, it is more than promissory (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kröger and Dressler 2022). The work applied to researching alternate feeds has effects and allows the system to continue or contribute to discourses such as sustainable intensification (cf. McGregor et al. 2021).

New sources of feed, including the intensification and incorporation of waste into feed, do not fundamentally change what is happening on industrial animal farms. On the contrary, they serve instead to entrench existing systems of intense animal production with all of its environmental and ethical problems (Folkers and Opitz 2022; McGregor et al. 2021; McGregor and Houston 2018). This is also the case for “new” feeds that are presented as circular and part of the bioeconomy such as “land animal by products,” which are sourced from industrial agriculture and are considered to be a valuable source of protein for animal feed production (Oliver and Turnbull 2021). Finally, the focus on feed as a source of transforming animal agriculture deflects attention away from the problem meat consumption to the efficiency and sustainability gains which are promised through “sustainable intensification” (McGregor et al. 2021).

The antinomy of feed as object juxtaposes feed as a source of degradation and exploitation against feed as a solution to the environmental problems of animal agriculture and a route to a more sustainable system of protein production. These are opposed positions, but they are bound together in how feed is situated within, broader capitalist complexes and regimes. Political economy approaches draw on food regime theory and industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complexes, while the proponents of feed as a source of sustainability frame its role through the emerging bioeconomy, a new and ostensibly more sustainable phase in capitalist development.

Feeding as practice

Feeding as practice is the second antinomy and is inspired in part by a specific material-semiotic tradition in science, technology, and society (STS) that has for many years called attention to the importance of world-making practices (Law 2009). Law and Mol's (2008) work on the practice of boiling pigswill, which was implicated in the United Kingdom's devastating foot and mouth disease outbreak, is an example of this approach to animal feeding. Their aim was to use feeding as practice to illustrate its material politics: boiling pigswill, they argue, is a political technique that “works to draw the world together whilst simultaneously helping to divide it” (Law and Mol 2008: 135). Specifically, they show how boiling pigswill divides older feeding practices from more modern ones, while at the same time holding together production sites that are disease-free. Here, we ask: how and what does feed as practice draw together and divide, or what is the antinomy of feeding as practice?

For some scholars, feeding can be used to draw together ethical multispecies relations on farms, and at the same time divide or distinguish it from industrial animal agriculture. The antinomy of feed as practice, then, juxtaposes feeding practices that can happen through close human–nonhuman animal relations against existing feeding practices in industrial animal farming. In contrast to industrial feeding practices, which are seen as a site of exploitation in animal agriculture (Oliver 2024), feeding ethically enrolls animal agency. Emel, Johnston, and Stoddard (2015), for example, call for an approach to animal agriculture that fosters what they call “livelier livelihoods,” a system where “species difference is valued and animal agency is enabled to benefit the lives and livelihoods of the humans and nonhumans on the farm” and this is extended to the surrounding ecosystems. Emel et al. illustrate their case by contrasting pig production in a CAFO and a permaculture pig farm in North Carolina. Predictably, while the CAFO acts to “disable pig agency,” the permacultured pigs work with the farmer by eating and improving soil fertility while simultaneously “satiating their omnivorous appetite and desire to explore” (Emel, Johnston and Stoddard 2015: 173). Similarly, in their research on grass-fed beef in Ontario, Canada, MacKay's (2023: 9) research participant farmers argued for the “nutritional and social value of rotational grazing,” arguing that this is an important way feeding can be used for “cow care.” But Mackay highlights how the practice feeding centers the feeder rather than the cow, and the focus on care must be positioned alongside of killing. The practice of ethical feeding generates a kind of care but this is accompanied by complex entanglements (cf. Bear 2021).

Several studies offer concepts and devices for feeding ethically on the farm. Ibáñez Martín and Mol (2022) for example propose the Spanish term “gustar” as a way of fostering more ethical human–nonhuman relations in animal agriculture. The term gustar reflects the active collaboration and participation of humans and animals that feed and eat. Gustar is not restricted to the humans that eat but also depends on the animal being fed. In this way, gustar is a way of articulating the love and care that goes into raising and eating animals on their Spanish farm. Donati's (2022) contribution repurposes the idea of “gastronomy” to explore its potential for ethical production of goat cheese on a farm in Australia. While gastronomy is typically used to signal qualities in human consumption of food, she uses the idea of “creaturely gastronomic subjectivities” to include both human cheese eaters and the goats producing the milk. In this formulation, how the goats eat and are fed is fundamental to living well across species: feeding well is more than nutrition and “must attend to how food might be pleasing to goats” (Donati 2022: 274). In a second study, but this time on a small-scale chicken farm, Donati (2019) develops the term “conviviality” to illustrate the ethical potential of “free choice” feeding regimes. The specialized breeds of chicken arrive with instructions to offer the birds the “opportunity to select between a mixture of six grains” (Donati 2019: 124). The breed requires free choice (albeit still limited) feeding that accommodates individual bird needs and inclinations.

Research has revealed some of the challenges in using feeding practices that aim to connect to animal agency and subjectivities to build more ethical multispecies relations. On Ibáñez Martín and Mol's farm in rural Spain, for example, pigs need to be taught how to eat alternatives to commercially manufactured feed. As they write, “In the weeks before these pigs join the household, they have only eaten industrial feed. The transition takes effort. It is important, says Damián, to ‘acostumbrar al cerdo a la comida de casa’ — to allow the pig to become accustomed to the food of the house” (Ibáñez Martín and Mol 2022: 4). Not all animals are able to transition away from industrially produced feed. On Donati's Australian chicken farm, specialized breeds of chicken do well in a feeding regime that allows for choice, but commercial breeds of chicken were unable to adapt to a life of foraging and free ranging environments; these “chickens are designed to sit next to feeders, expending as few calories as possible to obtain food” (Donati 2019: 124). Farm animals that have been bred to consume industrially produced feed seem unable to adapt to more ethical feeding practices.

It is not surprising that the concept of care has also been used in several studies to explore feeding practices that underpin more ethical animal agriculture (cf. Reisman 2021). Care is enrolled in the most widely condemned feeding practice in animal agriculture: the force-feeding of geese to produce foie gras. Heath and Meneley's (2010) research based on two artisanal foie gras farms in France and Canada. Here, the practice of feeding generates caretakers within “traditional” small-scale and artisanal farms. Traditional approaches to foie gras production that are reproduced in these artisanal operations “focus on intimate, ongoing relations between animals and their caretakers, with an investment of an ‘ethics of care’” (Heath and Meneley 2010: 440). The practice of feeding opens up opportunities to focus on the feeder and the generation of caretakers.

A critical feature of feeding as practice scholarship is that it draws on cases that happen on small scales and artisanal farms where it is possible to care for and feed an individual animal (cf. Buller 2013). This work explicitly or implicitly juxtaposes small-scale and specialized animal agriculture (including for foie gras) against large-scale and industrialized animal production. Yet, this straightforward divide between small and large and artisanal care and mass production when it comes to feeding practices is, as we show, troubled by cases where feeding in industrial systems is also understood as a form of care thus helping to show the tensions inherent in the practice of feeding.

Even within large-scale industrial systems of animal production, there is space for feeding practices that can be or can be likened to care, or that are more “emotional” and less instrumental (Overstreet 2021; Wilkie 2005). In their analysis of welfare in animal agriculture in the UK, Buller and Roe (2018) have explored the potential for the coexistence of practices of care, including those associated with feeding, within industrial systems of animal agriculture. Central to their argument is the role of the “stockperson,” who should be recognized as an “animal careperson who engages with animals as ‘a sentient material body’ and less as a converter of feed to products” (Buller and Roe 2018: 177). The tension between care practices and the priorities of commercial animal agriculture, and the recognition of a “stockperson” as a “careperson,” are also themes in Lien's (2015) work on salmon aquaculture in Tasmania and Norway. Workers monitor the fish through what Lien calls “checking on the feeding” and ask the fish: “How are you doing today? Are you healthy? Is there anything I can do differently to make things better?” (Lien 2015: 67). The analyses by Buller and Roe, and Lien, show how feeding draws in practices of care even within industrial food production systems, and the role of the feeder as caretaker.

In other studies on animal feeding, the emphasis is on the antinomy within agricultural systems driven by efficiency and productivity, and care (Overstreet 2021). Enticott and O’Mahony (2024) reveal the tensions that exist between the productivist logic of urgency and speediness and the patience and slowness required to force-feed calves colostrum, a practice of care to improve their immunity to disease. Blanchette (2020) reveals a similar set of tensions in his analysis of pork production and the care work required to feed increasing numbers of “runts.” Sows regularly produce more piglets than they can feed on their own. The result is that the human feeding and caring for runts are now a normal part of production requiring specialized care and workers dedicated to this task. For Blanchette, feeding as a caring practice is a symptom of a larger problem in animal agriculture: “A new kind of animal appears to be emerging within concentrated animal feeding operations — one with new needs in terms of its dietary and care regimens” (Blanchette 2020: 140). In other words, the intensity of production in animal agriculture is such that it requires additional work (and care) through feeding to sustain it (cf. Reisman 2021).

The antinomy of feeding as practice juxtaposes what is possible at smaller scales and through close human–nonhuman animal relations against existing feeding practices in industrial animal farming. Feeding carefully holds promise as a way of enacting more ethical multispecies relations on the farm. The effect is to separate feeding as practice as a form of care at some sites from feeding practices as instrumental and a form of violence in others. Yet, separating large-scale, industrial production systems from small-scale, artisanal farms when it comes to feeding is clearly not straightforward. Rather than clearly dividing feeding practices across scales and systems of production, the antinomies of feeding as practice are bound together through an ethic of care that seems possible across scales and systems of production.

Feeding as conversion

Feeding as conversion is the third antinomy that we use to examine the environmental and social politics of animal agriculture. Industrial animal agriculture has long focused on improving the efficiency of feed conversion. Critical social science scholarship has shown that improving the efficiency of feed conversion is a source of exploitation and domination in animal agriculture. The ethical and political charge of this work is captured by Harrison who asked: “Have we the right to treat living creatures solely as food converting machines?” (Harrison 2013: 37). At the same time, feed conversion is a site of intense focus by the global feed industry and by the animal agriculture sector as they attempt to mitigate the environmental and climate change impacts of industrial farming, which in turn improves their bottom line. In this section, we trace this antimony through how scholars have emphasized conversion as a site of exploitation and domination before shifting to examine how feed as conversion is seen as a solution to the environmental and climate change problems associated with animal agriculture.

The central problem with animal agriculture for many scholars and activists is its industrial character. From the late 1960s and beyond, a significant number of studies emerged condemning how animal agriculture had become factory farming — with animals as a key cog in a larger agricultural machine. Prominent examples include Harrison's (2013) Animal Machines, Mason and Singer's (1980) Animal Factories, and Pachirat's (2013) Every Twelve Seconds among many others. This literature shares a common concern for how animals in these systems are hybrids of flesh and technology, bio-machines generating products for human consumption. While this body of work on animals as machines in industrial farming is longstanding, the critique that animals have been transformed by science and technology into machines continues to resonate in the literature (e.g., Novick 2023).

If animals are treated as “protein conversion machines” in industrial agriculture, then feed is the energy that drives the animal, and its metabolic conversion processes. There is a rich body of scholarship that has traced how a wide set of actors worked to improve feed conversion by developing feed crops, nutrition, genetics, and other adjustments in animal agriculture including through confinement (Oliver 2024). Several studies provide key insights for specific animal species. Finlay's (2003) work on pig feeding systems in the pre- and post-war period in the United States traces the development of commercial feeds and its role in transforming the production of pork. Significantly for our discussion below, Finlay (2003: 238) argues that “farmers increasingly treated hogs as ‘workers’ to be brought into an industrial system” of meat production. Boyd's (2001: 638) analysis of chicken production in the United States remains a foundational contribution to how “the barnyard chicken was made over into a highly efficient machine for converting feed grains into cheap animal-flesh protein.” More recent work has traced the industrialization of poultry production outside of the United States. While farmed salmon are, for Lien (2015), “newcomers to the farm,” they are promoted by industry as efficient generators of protein and are celebrated by industry as having lower feed conversion ratios relative to land-based animal agriculture (Martin and Mather 2024). Finally, Welk-Joerger (2023) traces the role of technology in the form of calorimeters in measuring how feed was metabolized in animals. Their role, she argues, was to “scientists stripped bovines down to energy combustion machines to be reworked and overworked” (Welk-Joerger 2023: 1145). Much of this work is based on studies in the North America and Europe but there are important recent exceptions that examine animal agriculture as a conversion of feed into commodities (Srinivasan 2023; Woods 2015). Animals in industrial systems are machine-like feed converters, part of a metabolic process governed by the logic of efficiency and growth, and in turn become commodities for sale in capitalist markets.

Metabolism has been important in critically assessing and critiquing animal agriculture and recent work has highlighted feed conversion as the basis for a metabo-politics of food. Hannah Landecker uses the concept of metabolism as a “methodological prompt” to think through how feed (and waste) circulates through animal and human production and consumption systems (see also Cusworth 2023; Martin 2020; Oliver 2024). Beldo (2017) sees animal metabolism as “metabolic labor” and more recently, Wadiwel (2023) has extended the idea of metabolic labor as a way of theorizing value in industrial animal production systems. He proposes a theoretical reformulation of Marx's labor theory of value that includes food animals as a hybrid form of labor. Wadiwel underscores how feed and feed conversion efficiencies are key to how capital extracts absolute and relative surplus value from this hybrid form of labor. Conceptualizing the value relation for Wadiwel is key to understanding the violence and domination that animals experience in industrial systems of production.

But for industry and multilateral organizations like the FAO, feed conversion is a site of possibilities rather than domination (Cusworth et al. 2022; Martin and Mather 2024). The claim is that while animal agriculture's demand for feed has an oversized contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, more efficient feed conversion ratios hold the promise that animal agriculture can sustainably feed a growing global population. As a result of the focus on climate change, research and development on feed conversion seek new and novel feed ingredients that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers have identified a multitude of ingredients that promise to reduce emissions. They range from the mundane — seaweed, lemon grass, green tea, and extracts from basil — to the technical such as genetically modified crops and vaccines and pre- and pro-biotics (Araújo et al. 2021; Kolling et al. 2018; Leone and Ferrante 2023; Makkar et al. 2016). Following McGregor et al. (2021), the potential for feed conversion to address climate change in animal agriculture can be mapped across different scales from the animal's stomach to the animal's body and to the herd, and across geographical scales from local to international. At the scale of the animal body, the focus in feed conversion shifts from feed and the gut to efficiencies that can be achieved through selection and breeding. Ormond (2020: 142) has examined how breeding is now increasingly focused on developing “low carbon cows” and “the most feed efficient breeding animals” which are able to convert feed into body weight or milk with comparatively lower greenhouse gas emissions. At all of these scales, feed and its efficient conversion in the animal body are central coordinates for addressing animal agriculture's environmental impact and especially the contribution to climate change (Folkers and Opitz 2022).

Feed conversion problems and solutions are made visible through metrics, which in turn opens the way for other logics and comparisons across species, agricultural systems, and for investors. Chickens and farmed fish convert feed more efficiently than pigs and cows, which in turn is correlated to varied greenhouse gas emissions and climate change scenarios. Industry leverages these comparisons to make sustainability claims. The farmed salmon sector, for example, promotes its product as a climate-friendly protein more suitable to feeding a growing global population than land-based alternatives (Martin and Mather 2024). Encouraging the consumption of specific farmed animals that generate fewer emissions is one way of addressing animal agriculture's environmental impact. Another is to address feed conversion ratios in animal agriculture in developing countries, which are widely believed to be higher than they are in industrialized countries. McGregor et al. (2021: 1162) argue that the problem of high feed conversion ratios in developing countries provides the justification “for expanding modern agricultural systems to climate ‘inefficient’ farming communities” in the global south. Finally, large investment agencies focused on environment, sustainability, and governance criteria compile data on feed conversion ratios and other indicators to calculate climate-friendly systems of animal production. Indexes such as the “protein producer index” and other tools for investors contribute to comparisons of agricultural producers, investment decisions, shareholder value, and global rankings (FAIRR 2018). The metrics of feeding conversion produce technopolitical power that crowds out alternatives (Martin and Mather 2024).

The antinomy of feed conversion juxtaposes metabolic efficiencies as a source of violence and exploitation against industry and multilateral organizations that emphasize the potential of feed and its efficient conversion to mitigating animal agriculture's most pressing environmental impacts. These antinomies of feed conversion map to radically different effects associated with conversion efficiencies, yet they are bound together through a shared concern with metabolism and metabolic processes. In other words, while these are presented as radically different approaches to the problem of animal agriculture, both depend on an analysis of the metabolic processes that are involved as feed is converted into the farmed animal body.

Discussion and conclusion: on the problem feed and feeding in animal agriculture

Our contribution is animated by a deep interest in feed and feeding in animal agriculture. We are concerned with how feed production and feeding practices underpin an existing system of exploitation, domination and violence, while also promising more sustainable and ethical futures. We were inspired by scholars across the disciplines that have been concerned with feed as part of the assemblage that makes up industrial animal agriculture, and by some, like Landecker (2019), who have urged a singular focus on feed. We have approached the problem of feed and feeding through three analytical registers that emerge from our close reading of the literature and through the analytical lens of antinomies. Our analysis of feed as object, feed as practice, and feed as conversion reveals three ways in which feed and feeding are presented as having diametrically opposed effects on farmed animals and the broader assemblage of industrial animal agriculture. Feed as object is either the source of environmental degradation and violence or it is a way of addressing feed's most pressing environmental problems. Feed as practice in small-scale and artisanal contexts may be the basis for care and a multispecies ethics in animal agriculture, which is in stark contrast to feeding practices on industrial farms that are often violent and focused only on growth. Feeding as conversion is the source of exploitation and domination in industrial agriculture or it is a way of improving the efficiency of animal agriculture and reducing its climate change impacts. These are the antinomies of feed and feeding in animal agriculture, and they provide insights into the contemporary environmental politics and ethics of this industry.

We noted at the outset, drawing on Frederic Jameson, that antinomies are radically different and incommensurable propositions. And this is the case in the three registers we use to examine feed and feeding. Yet, antinomies are also bound together in complex ways that we think are relevant to the politics of animal agriculture. The antinomies of feed as object share an approach that sees feed as a constituent element of broader economic complexes and regimes. The antinomies of feeding as practice share a concern with care that seems to have promise across scales from small-scale artisanal farms to large-scale industrial agriculture. Finally, the antinomies of conversion both draw on metabolism to articulate dramatically different effects — domination and violence or sustainability and efficiency. Feed and feeding are central to the environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture and underpinned by violence and domination. Yet, feed and feeding are simultaneously the sites of promised sustainability, and ethical multi-specie transformation.

Antinomies are rarely resolved in practice given that they are diametrically opposed positions (Turner 2018). Yet, they are bound together, which has several effects including for feed and feeding. First, industry efforts to transform feed through new ingredients, by demonstrating care in production, or by addressing greenhouse gas emissions, act to entrench existing systems of production with all their environmental and ethical problems. In other words, these efforts to promote change through feed and feeding sustain and may even intensify existing animal production systems (e.g., through “sustainable intensification”). At the same time, they provide new avenues for research and development and new sites of investment by states and private capital in ingredients that promise to shift animal agriculture onto a more sustainable track. Second, the focus on how animals are fed emphasizes production efficiencies and shifts the focus away from human consumption politics and its role in sustaining industrial animal farming. At the same time, the practices of feeding animals are governed by conversion and efficiencies and generate human “caretakers” thereby obscuring the violence and dominance that underpins industrial animal agriculture. Efforts to reform animal agriculture and to draw together humans and nonhumans through multispecies relations that are centered on feeding practices are necessarily limited. Third, feed and feeding are, we believe, guided by conversion and in turn (metabolic) work. The production of feed and its transformation in animals’ bodies depends on overworking the environment, overworking humans, and overworking animals (Besky 2019; Blanchette 2019), which in turn demands different ways of thinking about feed/ing in reimagining multispecies ethics.

Our final point is this: while feed and feeding in animal agriculture have the potential to play a progressive role in some contexts and at specific scales, much of the debate around feed and feeding is a trap, a trap of metrics, a trap of an industrial model and a trap of dependence. Solutions promise new feeds, or new ethics of feeding, or new conceptions of animal metabolic labor. But in the context of animal agriculture, we believe that this is a trap that continues to center the feeder, as an actor and the fed, as acted upon. Transforming and/or ending animal agriculture may require a new set of politics where we recognize the well-being of humans and nonhuman animals beyond the feeder and the fed.