The antinomies of feed and feeding in animal agriculture

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.