This article examines microbial ecologies and industrial ontologies as they unfold in the animal worlds created by the American factory farm. Based in a hundred-mile radius region of the U.S. Great Plains—where some seven million hogs are annually manufactured from prelife to postdeath—it unpacks agribusiness managers’ varied modes of socio-ecological intervention once porcine overproduction causes disease to breach the indoor spaces of confinement barns. Maintaining the genetic potency of modern industrial animals requires managers to appraise how the pig has become intertwined with wind patterns, terrain gradations, and humanity. One result is that corporations are enacting intimate biosecurity protocols in workers’ domestic homes, a move that frames human sociality as a reservoir sheltering porcine disease. Workers are reimagined as a threat to the vitality of industrial hogs in ways that subtly alter the value of human livelihood and autonomy in this region. To situate how rural work became ambiguously posthuman, this essay develops a political economy of speciation. It inhabits managers’ abstract technologies that allow them to become attuned to the industrial pig as a fragile and world-defining species in need of new types of laboring subjectivity, while analyzing the postanthropocentric politics of class and value in a zone reorganized around forms of capitalist animality.

This review surveys the past 30 years of the anthropology of corporate animal agribusiness, analyzing how various themes embedded in the words of the article's title—industrial, meat, and production—have been taken up by ethnographers of confinement farms and mechanized slaughterhouses. In so doing, it describes how the literature finds the animal life-and-death cycle underlying modern meat to be a hybrid and uneven mixture of industrialisms both old and emerging, at once violent and caring, far-reaching yet incomplete. The review further examines the numerous and distinct ways that scholars have suggested that industrial meat production is an exceptional kind of industrialism: one that requires analytics, ethics, forms of critique, and modes of attention that differ from those developed by studies of other sites of manufacturing.

In the 1930s, erosion caused storms of dust to hurtle across the American Great Plains and Midwest. While agricultural conservation methods helped remediate this landscape, recent studies suggest the region is contending with a new type of particle cloud: desiccated fecal dust that renders the vitalities of factory farms airborne, potentially exposing those in their surrounds to various forms of illness while spreading antibiotic resistance genes. Thinking alongside these findings, and based on research within corporate hog farms, this article develops an ethnography of excrement by tracing the practices and knowledge of people who live and labor in proximity to late industrial lifeforms, such as confined pigs and resistance genes, and who are tasked with intimately shaping this unruly waste that has the potential to affect broader populations. In so doing, it analyzes the maintenance of American animals’ toxic health alongside the politics of labor with complex anthropogenic materials.

This brief essay proposes ways of seeing the city and the country as relational and interdependent, cued to a cultural moment at which these spaces are often scripted as occupying separate worlds with distinct issues and dilemmas. It does so by juxtaposing the present‐day struggles of Chicago's Back of the Yards, the setting of Upton Sinclair's infamous 1906 meatpacking exposé The Jungle, in relation to ascendant and highly industrialized pockets of the countryside. In developing a notion of ruralization, the essay seeks to draw attention to how specific industrial ruralities dwell within deindustrial cities, complicating well‐worn discourses that see urbanization as a unilinear teleology.

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