Ventilation shutdown and the breath-taking violence of managing infectious disease emergencies in industrial poultry production

Keywords: ventilation shutdown, industrial livestock production, biophysical contradictions and overrides, infectious disease risks
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Powerful ventilation systems are a crucial technology in industrial poultry production, mitigating unhealthy ambient conditions resulting from great concentrations of animal bodies, biowastes, and chemical agents. Although air quality remains poor in these crowded spaces and adversely affects both human and avian health, such intensive production of flesh and eggs would be impossible to sustain without ventilation. But bad air is just one of many biophysical and techno-scientific challenges posed by intensification, chief among them increasing infectious disease risks to both human and avian populations. This paper examines the intersection of these two central problems in industrial poultry production, and how ventilation systems normally used to manage bad air have been turned off during disease outbreaks in order to quickly and cheaply kill infected flocks within enclosures by hyperthermia and hypoxia—euphemistically termed ventilation shutdown. Our analysis of this nascent practice gives attention to the role of federal agricultural agencies in underwriting the development and implementation of technologies of mass death to be deployed when disease outbreak turns birds (and, later, pigs) from low-value commodities into biowastes that threaten human health and industry stability. By examining the extreme violence inflicted upon animal life through this innovation in industrial design, this paper sheds light on the precarity of industrial livestock production as it manages chronic and acute problems arising from its extraordinary biophysical contradictions, and on the unaccounted costs and risks entailed.