Paper short abstract:

An examination of environmental justice protests against commercial cattle feeding. This piece employs historical methods to identify how the rise of monoculture practices within the U.S. Great Plains depended on disproportionate and contested circulations of waste, toxins, and labor.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United Black Coalition of Lubbock, Texas engaged in a series of protests against the expansion of commercial cattle feedlots disproportionately sited in their neighborhood. Throughout their campaigns, Coalition leaders consistently drew on the excessive dust and noxious odors created by these facilities in an effort to unite Lubbock’s Black community and address longstanding issues of environmental inequity within their city. In doing so, they brought attention to how processes unfolding in urban space were key to facilitating the integration of two emergent systems of industrial agriculture, irrigated grain farming and large scale cattle ranching. While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the Southern Plains of the United States was remade from a barren and unstable landscape into the center of U.S. beef production during the mid-20th century, the perspective of working class communities who navigated such transitions have been under examined. In this paper, I propose that foregrounding such perspectives illuminates how networks of urban expertise and power were key to facilitating and incentivizing farmers and ranchers' transition to mechanized systems of production. In turn, I argue that underlying the formation of this monocrop landscape was a complex and dynamic circulation of waste, chemicals, and labor. For the Coalition, the smells emanating from the feedlots were a daily reminder of their unequal role in the region’s emerging agriculture economy, and their organizing sought to expose these toxic entanglements.