Optimizing Pigs

What I remember most is the smell. It wasn’t the smell of pig dung. I’m used to that.

I was in the back seat of a pickup, driving down a gravel road just south of the Iowa-Missouri border. Back in Iowa, my home state, pigs outnumber humans eight to one. Most of them live in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where thousands of pigs per unit spend all but the very beginning and very end of their lives under the same roof, on a cement floor, crowded above a tank filled with their own manure. When the massive circulation fans on the far end of any facility go out, the entire herd can die from asphyxiation within minutes. The wind carries the smell of these facilities for miles across the Midwest countryside. It’s a smell that sticks to our clothes, our hair, and to the lettuce that grows in our vegetable gardens.

This wasn’t that smell. This was a bitter, dark smell. From the driver’s seat, Scott Dye, our guide, who has been fighting against the unregulated expansion of Smithfield pork operations in Missouri for decades, saw them first.

“Buzzards.”

We pulled into a gravel roundabout. Below the circling birds, a semitrailer sat parked next to a ten-foot platform from which, sometime earlier that week, a worker had dropped a load of dead pigs into the empty trailer below. The scavengers made huge ellipses in the humid air above our heads. I sent my drone up to take a few pictures.

A truck full of dead, rotting pigs sits parked at a CAFO near Unionville, Missouri. All photographs by KC McGinnis, copyright © 2025 by KC McGinnis.

I was on an assignment for the Washington Post, along with Evan Halper, an investigative reporter. Halper’s report would show how companies such as Smithfield Foods, the country’s largest pork producer, profit from state-led initiatives to combat climate change by capturing methane gas emitted from pig manure and selling the gas to California for carbon credits.

From the drone’s eye view, I could see many more of these facilities dotting the landscape to the south of us. These are the kinds of places that tens of millions of pigs across the Midwest, whose distant ancestors once roamed the forests of Europe and North Africa, now call home. If you eat pork, virtually all of it comes from facilities like these.

Halper’s report reveals the irony of an emissions reduction policy that actually hampers the sustainability efforts of Missouri farmers like our guide. The California policy falls short not only because it makes an unsustainable method of farming more profitable, but because it operates under the same instrumental, high-efficiency logic that gave us CAFOs in the first place.

A facility in Missouri where methane from pig manure is processed and routed to a gas pipeline.

Modern industrial pork suppliers have optimized hog production so that even when a percentage of hogs don’t survive confinement conditions and end up rotting in the open air, the system is still many times more profitable than traditional pig farming. They have made a precise science of raising pigs for human consumption. A machine feeds them, through a tube at regular intervals, the exact blend of carbs, fiber, protein, and fluids for maximum caloric output in the minimum time frame (usually about six months from weaning to slaughter).

This mechanistic approach to animal life spills over into popular perspectives on human well-being. As a result, some lifestyle influencers may find themselves in unexpected alignment with the logic of the factory farm. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bryan Johnson rose to notoriety for thinking he could extend his life with plasma infusions using the blood of his seventeen-year-old son, but he doesn’t limit his quest for maximum human longevity to novel medical treatments. Johnson looks to an exacting diet, one that is “methodically crafted based on gold standard scientific evidence for optimal nutrition.” He describes the exhaustive process, developed first on himself, which involves the recording of “hundreds of biomarkers” to produce algorithmic health protocols which are then used to dictate diet, mealtimes, and sleeping schedules to precise and apparently scientific exactitude. With obvious parallels to methods from industrial agriculture, even Johnson admits that such submission to the algorithm can appear dystopic. Yet he insists: “We humans are going to be run by algorithms because they are superior to us.”

By consuming animals raised in intensive farming facilities, we also submit to an algorithm. We participate, often unwittingly, in a form of “biohacking” that long precedes the more extreme antics of biohacking “pioneers” such as Johnson, who explicitly seeks to push the boundaries of what is considered natural for humans.

Pigs at a CAFO near Batavia, Iowa, will spend their lives in this space.

Of course, Johnson could argue that his scheme for human optimization is natural because the rationale behind his diet is rooted in the natural sciences, in the very building blocks of his body. A factory farmer may say something similar about his process being derived from natural principles. He may note that his detached, scientific approach to raising pigs is more dependent on a close examination of porcine biology than earlier, more primitive forms of pork production. His process is natural, he might say, because it’s strictly scientific; it does away with all the sentimental, superfluous, cultural bits that treat hog-raising more like a dance than a science.

If “nature” means “unspoiled by human culture,” then farmers who give their animals names, take them to fairs, let their children play with them, feed them kitchen scraps, and recite quiet blessings before slaughtering them are smuggling superfluous practices into these animals’ lives; human practices that are not replicated in nature. If these practices feel more natural than factory farming, it’s not because they are more aligned with science. They feel more natural because they are more social.

We have factory farms because of a mechanistic and anti-social understanding of nature, one that treats both humans and animals as objects for scientific optimization. This logic is so pervasive that it shows up in some surprising places. It turns up, for example, in the world of paleo and carnivore diet influencers, who make the pitch for a diet high in animal protein as a return to an earlier epoch in which humans were more connected to nature. In the end, though, a paleo influencer can’t sell a product as impractical as an enchanted communion with the vast, interconnected world. To be successful, the product they sell must entail a scientific-sounding optimization of one’s personal biome, usually for the purpose of losing weight, extending one’s life, or finding a mate.

Throughout her life as an intrepid philosopher of human and animal nature, Mary Midgley argued that our assumption that nature is neatly organized, like so many organs of a steam engine, is not some detached reflection of reality, but rather a projection of our own social situations onto our understanding of nature. We assume the world works like a steam engine, or the brain like a computer program, or language like a machine learning algorithm because we are dazzled by the advances of contemporary technology and science. But unlike both factory farms and paleo diets, nature is often painfully inefficient, resistant to human classification and organization. There are many more efficient ways to produce calories for human consumption than tending to weeds in a vegetable garden. What is “natural” and what is “optimal” often do not go hand in hand.

Jean and Thomas Lappe eat lunch at their home in Morning Sun, Iowa. Their home is surrounded by nineteen CAFOs, which Jean’s doctor believes has contributed to health issues.

For humans, having a culture is part of what it means to live according to nature. Factory farms, then, are a violation of nature not only because of their distance from some real or imagined pristine origin, but because they aren’t sufficiently social. Yet nostalgia for more traditional or even primitive agricultural practices can be unnatural, too, if we pursue these ways of life as a means toward achieving individual optimization. Such lifestyles can make us more isolated and antisocial. And for us humans, as for pigs, an antisocial way of life is against nature.

“Care for nature is part of a lifestyle which includes the capacity for living together and communion,” writes Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato si’. One doesn’t need to be a passionate environmental advocate to acknowledge that the treatment of pigs in CAFOs is incongruous with such a lifestyle. Since Laudato si’ was published in 2015, a new generation of influencers – lifestyle influencers – has ascended, offering a vision of replicable, predictable habits and rigid daily itineraries we can use to take back control of our lives, much as a farmer may seek to diminish all elements of unpredictability from the lives of his animals. But perhaps before accepting influencers’ habits, regimens, and rules for life designed to restore a semblance of order to our chaotic lives, we should step back and ask a different question: Is there a version of human life on the other side of the era of factory farming that is neither a misguided attempt to return to an imagined past, nor a relentless plodding toward a technologized future?