User:ImagineWorldPeace/sandbox

This section weaves complementary temporal classifications in the development of industrialized animal agriculture as used by Nibert (2013) Franklin (1999), and Warren (2018). The transition and gradual spread of horticultural (a.k.a. subsistence) to agrarian and to pastoral farming can be traced back to about 7000 BCE (Crossman 2019). Once humans began harnessing cows and horses for plowing, ancient horticultural societies (which depended on human labor for plant cultivation) gave way to what is typically known as “true agrarian” societies  (Nibert 2013). The plows allowed for larger areas to be cultivated, which led to an increase in the number of people available to become warriors, protect accumulated food, and suppress dissent among elite-exploited lower classes (Nibert 2013).

The Neoliberalization of Animal Agriculture
Sociologist David Nibert (2013) [INSERT PAGE #] contends that early nomadic pastoralist cultures, which consisted of “numerous associated patriarchal clans in which a man’s power and status were linked to the number of dominated animals under his control,” were different from agriculturalists in that they were almost entirely dependent upon the use animals for food/resources. As grazing leads to the need for new lands to replace exhausted pasture (Franklin 1999), it was particularly due to that animal use dependence that early nomadic pastoralists were motivated to find—or take—fresh pastures and sources of water. Therefore, he proposes that the term “domesecration” (defined as the systemic enslavement and biological manipulation of social animals that leads to “objectification, subordination, and oppression) be used in place of “domestication” (Nibert 2013:12).

Modernity

According to Franklin (1999), modernity can be defined by four periods that each represent keynote tenets of modernist thinking. Starting with the Enlightenment era, a “small number of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and writers” in “disciplines such as economics, sociology and the natural sciences” dedicated their efforts to discovering “universal laws” that would provide clear paths to human advancement. The era of Classical Modernism, a time that saw the first large corporations—the entities that would alter the cultural composition of the working class for years to come—begins just before the midway point of the 1800s (Franklin 1999). During the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had a soil depletion crisis, which the nation dealt with by importing tons of organic fertilizer in the form of guano from Peru [1] (Lymbery and Oakeshott 2014), shifting to the less sustainable model of  pasturage (especially in Ireland and Scotland), and importing wheat and other grain mainly from Germany, Russia, and the United States. As it turns out, “a large part of the British metabolic rift was transferred abroad” (Foster and Clark 2018). [INSERT PAGE #]

Lincoln had a significant legacy in American agriculture. According to historian Eric Foner (1995:ix), the pre-Civil War Republican Party adhered to the ideology of free labor, a philosophy based on the idea that “free labor was economically and socially superior to slave labor and that the distinctive quality of Northern society was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning independence.” Those aligned with the slave-based plantations system of agriculture argued against the distribution of open land (one of the tenets of free labor ideology), for they viewed it as public promotion of an agrarian ideal that was an anathema to their way of life (Dimitri, Effland and Conklin 2005).

The secession of the southern states in 1860 made it so that “proponents of free distribution of public land and other forms of assistance to small farmers” in Congress were effectively unopposed (Dimitri, Effland and Conklin 2005). [INSERT PAGE#]In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed four laws that were pivotal to the development of the American agricultural industry: (1) establishment of the Department of Agriculture[2] on May 15; (2) updating of the Preemption Act of 1841 with the Homestead Act of 1862 on May 20; (3) provision of funding for the construction of the transcontinental railroad on July 1; and (4) establishment of the land grant university system with the Morril Land Grant College Act on July 2 (Rasmussen 2022).

The Railroad’s National (and International) Beef Connection

[CINCINATTI àPORCOPOLISàRAILROADàCHICAGO] The early meat factories of Chicago became the blueprint for animal slaughter, first in developed nations and later spread to the rest of the world (Cudworth 2015). When the two sections of the railroad connected on May 10, 1869, new areas of the West were opened to settlement (Rasmussen 2022), and with this white settlement came the “clear and systemic” mass extermination of the buffalo and Native Americans so that cattle ranching could prevail (Rifkin 1992:77). Food Regimes theorists identify the period of 1870 to 1914[3] as the time in which Western European nations outsourced grain and meat production to their settler states (Warren 2018). According to Franklin (1999), [INSERT PAGE] “when Western ranges opened the British invested heavily in railways liking the West to Eastern parts and in new refrigeration technology to bring Western range cattle to England as fresh beef.”

The implementation of the feedlot system. In 1876, with the help of a small regional railroad, Augustus Swift was able to disrupt the live cattle shipping system by implementing the feedlot system, in which cows would be fattened by being fed corn and slaughtered nearby. The meat alone, not the live animal would be shipped (Hubbs 2010). By 1900, range lands were overgrazed and overstocked, so the feedlot system proved to be a way around a barrier to extend capital accumulation beyond environmental limits (Franklin 1999).

Gradually, slaughter and butchery—once a visible and repugnant part of inner-city regions—were moved to rural areas so that the entire process was entirely moved to rural areas by the early twentieth century (Fitzgerald 2015, Franklin 1999, Kirby 2010). The resulting spatial separation led to the abstraction of the killing process, wherein farmers could retain the honor of husbandry and consumers could eat more standardized pieces of frozen, precut meat without recognizing them as pieces of a recently living animal (Fitzgerald 2015, Franklin 1999, Kirby 2010).

Eras of Heroic and High Modernism

The period of Heroic Modernism was characterized by the search for a sense of purpose and visionary solutions to the war-ravaged and economically susceptible aftermath of WWI (Franklin 1999). This was a dangerous and unstable time in which “destructive aesthetic visionaries were elevated to positions of power and influence” (Franklin 1999). By contrast, the rise of the United States as a political and economic hegemon led to the extremely stable High Modernism (early post WWII) era (Franklin 1999), in which trade was strongly influenced by US agricultural exports and the Bretton Woods agreement (Warren 2018). In the 1940s, middle class families could make a living in the American farm, for “farming was still seen as the quintessential small business, the basic economic unit for a society that prized individual ownership and wealth” (Leonard 2014) [INSERT PAGE

Neoliberalism’s Start

Food Regime theorists identify the period between 1970 and 1995 as the time when transnational corporations replaced states to become the main forces behind global agricultural trade policies (Warren 2018).

[How is it possible…]

Permitting Policies of the Twentieth Century
Franklin (1999) identified five elements that cultivated intensification in animal agriculture: (1) mechanization, (2) vertical integration (in which a company grows profits by gradually absorbing most of the production process) (3) government leadership, (4) industrial representation and lobbying (made possible by large companies purchasing its competitors during bust cycles), and (5) environmental factors. This section provides a complementary description of the evolution of Twentieth Century state policies that both saved American farming and led to the gargantuan size cannibalistic-like business approaches to animal agriculture taken on by the largest players in the industry: (1) The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), (2) WWII price controls, (3) The Green Revolution, (4) Nixon’s Withdrawal from the Bretton Woods Agreement, (5) The ‘chickenization’ of the pork and dairy industries.

During the early Twentieth Century, the traditional rural conservatism that fueled post-Civil War third-party movements became a Republican stronghold and fueled the prohibition movement (Knoke and Henry 1977:52). In this section I will briefly describe some of the most noteworthy policy precursors to the AAA. The Homestead Act of 1909, signed by William Taft, enabled dryland farming [4] by giving land to farmers who accepted more marginal lands, particularly in the Great Plains[CITE]. During Woodrow Wilson’s first and second administrations, the 1914 Smith-Lever Act (which created the USDA’s Extension Program) was signed, and the Food Administration for War put “artificially high price supports” to encourage mass farming production [cite, Welfare Ranching: 42]. Warren Harding signed the 1921 Packers & Stockyards Act to address anticompetitive activities among meat packers [CITE]. Once the Great Depression began, US farmers experienced a financial blow when prices dropped and their products became suddenly worthless (Haynes 2020). The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 (signed by Herbert Hoover) created the Federal Farm Board, which [?]  tried to keep crop prices from crashing by unsuccessfully asking farmers to limit crop production as well as buying and stockpiling crops to limit supplies [CITE].

FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Acts

The Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policy reforms, and rhetorical appeals to the “forgotten man” helped assemble new constituencies that absorbed some of the farmer and labor groups into the New Deal coalition (Eidlin 2016:488). With the AAA, FDR aimed to destroy surplus stock while paying farmers for their losses and to avoid producing more food (Haynes 2020, Smith 2019). However, the sheer waste involved in having animals killed and crops destroyed amid growing hunger among people caused a national outcry (Haynes 2020, Lambert 1972). In the fall of 1933, the FDR administration set up the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) to redirect surplus commodities to organizations helping the needy (Haynes 2020).

By the end of 1933, “more than half of the public grasslands of the West were overgrazed and eroded” (CITE Welfare Ranching: 43). During the spring and summer months of 1934, Dust Bowl storms spread and the resulting drought affects more than 75 percent of the country [CITE]. FDR signed the Taylor Grazing Act on June 28, 1934. Although the new law ended the old “giveaway policy” for federal lands and set land aside for the public domain, but “the heart of the act was its resolve to manage livestock grazing on this newly designated land” (Welfare Ranching:35). Through the 1935 Soil Conservation Act and 1936 Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, the Soil Conservation Service was established to “conduct surveys and develop preventative measures against soil erosion. Farmers were compensated for planting soil supporting crops such as soybeans and reducing production of crops that contributed to soil erosion” (Devarenne and DeSimone 2022). By way of executive order, FDR called for resettled farmers onto better farming land [CITE]. Although the Supreme Court struck down parts of the original AAA, after FDR’s “infamous 1937 court-packing plan,” Congress passed the AAA of 1938 (Smith 2019). The 1938 AAA, which would become the basis for all future Farm Bills, established the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation and paid farmers to keep croplands idle, bought excess crops, and compensated farmers for planting soil-friendly crops like soybeans.

WWII Price Controls

On August 28, 1941, the FDR administration established the Office of Price Administration (Matchette and Danis 1995) in an attempt to prevent inflation due to a rapidly growing economy (Arablouei and Abdelfatah 2022). The OPA would share price lists containing the maximum amount of money a retailer could charge and each consumer would neither pay more than the price ceiling nor purchase more than their allotted (rationed) amount (Arablouei and Abdelfatah 2022, Rosalsky 2022). Although low-income Americans were largely unable to afford meat during the Great Depression, the system of equal rationing and price controls helped increase the percentage of meat consumption for the bottom proportion of the population (Arablouei and Abdelfatah 2022, Rosalsky 2022). The federal government added meat and cheese to the price control system in March 1943 and “multiple historical accounts” point to meat rationing as one of the greatest sources of mass discontent during and after the war: “[l]umberjacks in Washington state and miners in Pennsylvania went on strike, largely over a shortage of meat. The government ended up doubling the meat ration for miners” (Rosalsky 2022)

Price controls turned out to be a problem for the Truman administration. There was a post-war clash between OPA supporters, who “regardless of income or occupation…identified themselves as consumers who belonged to one big group of underrepresented citizens” (Jacobs 1997:934), critics like corporations who were eager to be free from production and profit limits (Arablouei and Abdelfatah 2022), and unprepared Truman administration itself as “top economic policy makers had no coherent strategy for dealing with problems of pent-up demand” (Jacobs 1997:934). In June 1946, price control legislation lapsed and the price of meat shot up (Jacobs 1997, Rosalsky 2022). When President Truman and a Democratic congress tried to extend price controls to appease the outcry from increased meat prices, an infuriated meat industry fought back (Arablouei and Abdelfatah 2022, Rosalsky 2022):

But meat producers now went for the kill. Advancing the battle front from the halls of   Congress to the local butcher shop and into household kitchens, the packers withheld their meat from the market in an attempt to panic the public into submission. After a week of renewed controls in August, slaughtering decreased 25 percent from the week before…While their cattle grew fatter and fatter, the packers would wait it out. All they had to do was win the public to their side. The missing meat became the top     news event, exaggerated in the press as a "famine." (Jacobs 1997:938)

The 1946 midterm elections were dubbed the “beefsteak elections” (Jacobs 1997) for delivering a big win for Republicans, whose campaigns promised “to bring back meat, end wartime controls, go back to normal life the way it used to be” (Arablouei and Abdelfatah 2022)

The Green Revolution

During the 1940s, the American family farmer could enjoy the benefits of independence while relying on a middle-class living. That began to change in the 1950s, when a number of scientific innovations that radically changed farming economics (Leonard 2014). The research, development, and technology transfer endeavors that characterize the Green Revolution consist of using genetic selection, irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides (Imhoff 2010, Jordan 1998), along with replacing hand labor with machine labor (Jordan 1998) to dramatically increase crop outputs. Although growing a single crop for thousands of acres was a sure way of ensuring that insects would wipe out that crop, the new pesticides made it possible to wipe out the insects instead (Leonard 2014, Lymbery and Oakeshott 2014). Through the Green Revolutions farmers became less dependent on rain or sun to and increasingly more dependent on “their relationship with their local chemical dealers” (Leonard 2014)[INSERT PAGE]. The lower price and abundance of corn and grains made them a fitting feeding staple for humans and non-humans alike (Trusts and Hopkins 2008).

The Agriculture Act of 1965

The 1961 Agriculture Act called on the Farm Credit Administration (established during the New Deal era to help farmers who had been turned away by banks [VERIFY]), to give cheap loans to “build barns or buy wheat threshers”  (Leonard 2014:68). Although the type of loan available to farmers through the 1961 Agricultural Act was a key component to Tyson’s strategy of turning independent chicken farmers into contract growers (Leonard 2014), it was the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965, the first omnibus farm legislation that, perhaps unintentionally, helped cement the power of the farm lobby: “For example, the 1965 Act established mandatory acreage allotments, planting restrictions, and marketing quotas, all of which disproportionately favored large farms.” (Smith 2019) [INSERT PAGE #]

Nixon’s Withdrawal from Bretton Woods

Details here

The Sociology of Industrialized Animal Agriculture
Foundational Research

Modernism is therefore selfishly human in orientation, self-absorbed in its clear sense of human materiality and interest. As an idea of the wealthier, educated classes, modernism was always aimed in part to improve the lot of the poorer classes. Until all humans were elevated from want and domination, the idea of radical reform of human–animal relations was impossible. Thus, Salt’s Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892) was bound to fail when it was first published, despite its rhetorical title and ethical appeal. At that time, workers were frequently on the breadline, most children lacked adequate healthcare, women were not enfranchised, and blacks and indigenous peoples had no civil rights. Apart from the sorts of growing sentiments documented by Thomas in the English case and by Cartmill in the American, it was undoubtedly the case that animals must, in the last instance, take second place to humans. (Franklin 1999) ?

Conflict

Symbolic Interactionism

Functionalism

Disagreements
Incremental Reforms

Radical Reforms

Transcend Capitalism

Total Liberation

Movement Infighting

Meat Paradox
Meat Eating

Mind-body Dualism

Gender

Conclusion
Conclusion here.