Feeding Factory Farms: The Feed Industry and the Industrialization of Livestock Farming in the Netherlands (1920s-1960s)

Abstract

This article demonstrates the crucial yet neglected role of the compound feed industry in shaping industrial livestock. It uses archival and published sources of the Dutch compound feed industry as an example. Compound feed became a crucial scientific technology for agricultural “modernization” during the interwar period and the Second World War. But this development was not unidirectional. Different possible trajectories for “modern” livestock production were fiercely debated in the 1950s, even within the compound feed industry itself. The large private feed industry affiliated with the food oil industry played an important role in the eventual narrowing of possibilities. Its “industrial front” lobbying success is a major explanation why the “industrial ideal” became dominant in Dutch livestock farming despite its controversial nature.