Creating Feed for Meat: The Science of Feeding Animals in Industrial Farms (1954-2019)

Pigs, chickens and cattle in factory farms need to eat. A lot. Millions of tons of feed are shipped across oceans to make industrial livestock production possible. This creates global problems, like deforestation in the global south, manure surpluses in the global north, and competition between animal feed and human food production. Until now, historians have neglected the history of livestock feed, especially in comparison to the human diet. The aim of this paper is to show the crucial importance of livestock feed as a scientific technology. Feed contributed just as much to the rise of industrial agriculture as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mechanization and new breeds of plants and animals did. This paper focuses on one small country with a particularly intensive industrial livestock sector: the Netherlands; and on the period of significant intensification of this sector: the second half of the twentieth century. Lacking the land to produce the massive amounts of feed needed for these new ‘factory farms’, the Netherlands imported most of it – like soy and fish meal from Latin America. These commodities ended up in a new kind of feed: ‘compound feed’. Animal scientists were decisive for creating the best and cheapest compound feeds in order to maximize animal productivity – with major social-economic, environmental, welfare and health consequences for human and non-human animals across the globe.