ABSTRACT
In the mid-1950s, pharmaceutical giant Charles Pfizer and Company launched a new advertising campaign that encapsulated the industrial and pharmaceutical revolution it helped bring to American farming. “Science Comes to the Farm in a Feed Bag,” Pfizer boasted in a series of full-color advertisements that stood out among the typical fare of the farm press. The main image in this campaign featured a scientist in a white lab coat, with a bag of feed over his shoulder, appearing as an ominous god amid the clouds. In the foreground stands a farmer, small in stature, who faces the giant deity of medicated feed. The text, taken from an address by Pfizer’s president John McKeen, promised that “every” American “livestock producer” (the term itself was a new bit of jargon) could look to feed companies for methods that would set new production records “each” and “every” year. See Fig. 9.11
In actuality, huge, urban-based corporations and industries may not have brought opportunity and profitability to every farmer each and every year. However, in a remarkably brief period after the end of World War II, they did contribute to a series of transformations in the infrastructure of American agriculture that some have identified as the “Second Agricultural Revolution.”2 These changes were especially apparent in livestock production, as farmers and the industrialists who participated in their enterprise sought to reshape and redesign organisms in ways that they deemed appropriate for an industrial society. Innovations with medicated feeds, manufactured housing, and redesigned landscapes spurred farmers to increase the size and capital investment of their livestock operations, to manipulate the natural rhythms of animals’ breeding, birth, weaning, rebreeding, and slaughter, and to conduct the business in ever more confined, streamlined, and centralized operations. These changes impacted the broiler (chicken) industry most intensely, but also reshaped turkeys into a smaller size and temperament suitable for a life indoors, moved cattle-finishing operations onto industrial-scale feedlots, and moved hogs from pastures to indoor confinement operations.3
