Chasing pigs, chasing profits: (De)territorializing organic and free-range pig farming in Norway

Summary

Organic and free-range pig farming offers a potential solution to multiple agricultural concerns, including high pesticide and antimicrobial use, excess fertilization, biodiversity loss, and animal suffering. Organic pig production, which includes outdoor access and rearing, has been one solution promoted by the European Union. This study, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with organic and non-organic free-range pig farmers in Norway, suggests that while promising, sustaining these production systems faces challenges related to animal welfare, land management, and market dynamics for pork. Specifically, we note how the weak symbolic value of organic labels and principles for pigs and pork result in fragile markets, whilst pigs’ rooting undermines not just soil and farm boundaries, but potentially their welfare. Farmers have responded by forming new relational foundations, including situating pigs as a working animal contributing to the broader productivity of the farm, and decommodifying pigs and pork in favour of using them to sustain broader social relations that produce other values and opportunities. We conclude by noting that the flexibility and adaptability of pigs opens multiple trajectories of change, with regards to market organization, farmer collaboration and breeding pigs for rearing outdoors. If Europe is to reterritorialize the pig and pork industry around alternative production methods it requires a fundamental reimagining of the socio-material relations underpinning this industry, its moral frameworks, and our relationship to pigs and pork.