The Urge to E-X-P-A-N-D

During the early 1930s, the outlook for British farming had been bleak: as inhabitants of the largest agricultural free-trade market in the world, farmers were exposed to sinking food prices and a flood of cheap imports. Unable to compete, employment in the agricultural sector fell and productivity decreased until 60 percent of British food had to be imported. Although it undertook brief forays of agricultural support during the 1920s, the British government only gradually abandoned laissez-faire policies: the Agricultural Acts of 1931 and 1933 created tariff walls and marketing boards for various farm products.¹ Reacting to worrying developments on the European continent, the United Kingdom established a Food Department in 1936 and began stockpiling food and agricultural supplies. By 1939, British officials were propagating agricultural expansion to provide additional calories in the likely event of war.²

Following the outbreak of hostilities, the nascent alliance between producers and officials developed into a corporatist system of decision-making. Corporatism is a system in which representative groups assume some responsibility for the self-regulation of their constituency in return for privileges, a close relationship with the government, and the ability to reach bargained agreements with state agencies. Corporatism was particularly pronounced in the British health and agricultural sectors.³ In the case of agriculture, farmers were integrated into War Agricultural Executive Committees, which were controlled by the Ministries of Agriculture and Food. Staffed by officials and farmers, committees enforced ministry directives at the local level but also advised and graded farmers’ productivity. Unproductive or recalcitrant farmers could have their land expropriated. Attempting to maximize caloric output, wartime administrators prioritized plant production and introduced guaranteed prices by purchasing farmers’ produce.⁴ While pig and poultry stocks plummeted and feedstuffs were rationed, British farmers increased caloric output by 50 percent.⁵ By the end of the war, farmers were celebrated for feeding the nation during the Nazi onslaught.

Producers’ integration into corporatist structures had advantages for officials and farmers alike. Enabling vital government control over wartime food production, it also fostered self-organization of agricultural interests.⁶ Despite occasional expropriations and diminished individual freedom,⁷ the majority of British farmers and their lobby, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), were eager to continue the profitable corporatist alliance with the state after 1945. Corporatist prospects were promising. In contrast to the interwar years, most farmers’ coffers had been flushed by fixed wartime prices and subsidized rural development. The postwar economic situation made the Labour government equally willing to continue the corporatist alliance. In August 1945, the United States’s termination of the Lend-Lease agreement necessitated the repayment of wartime loans and left Britain critically short of foreign currency. Attempting to reduce expensive imports, the government embarked on a program of subsidized agricultural expansion with the Agricultural Act of 1947. Perpetuating annual price reviews and intervention purchases, the act was designed to give farmers and farm workers fair returns and stimulate agricultural investment.⁸ Agricultural productivity was to be improved by the newly founded National Agricultural Advisory Service, improvement grants, and corporatist marketing boards for agricultural produce.⁹ Farm organizations were integrated into decision-making both at the national and regional levels. Eager to control government expenditure, officials soon relied on organizations like the NFU to self-coordinate support by a “myriad of small independent producers”¹⁰ for expansion programs, disease eradication, and farm improvement. In return, the NFU gained an exclusive and powerful place at the table when it came to determining price supports and the regulation of new technologies.¹¹ According to Michael Winter, the NFU soon became so influential that membership appeared “almost ‘compulsory’ for many farmers.”¹²

Corporatist agricultural arrangements remained stable even after the end of postwar currency shortages and rationing. Ignoring accusations of feather-bedding farmers, successive governments supported a system of deficiency payments, which replaced direct intervention purchases: once market prices fell below guaranteed official prices defined by annual reviews, the state paid farmers the difference between guaranteed and real prices. Similar to the United States, sinking international food prices and domestic surpluses soon made state expenditure rise dramatically in areas like beef and dairy production. Attempting to curb expenditure by improving agricultural efficiency, the Conservative government’s 1957 Agricultural Act allowed limited annual reductions of price guarantees and shifted the emphasis from subsidies to improvement grants, which by 1960 constituted about 40 percent of agricultural support. The government also abolished powers of supervision and eviction. However, the underlying corporatist consensus on further increasing production remained intact.¹³

During the 1950s, many farmers invested wartime earnings and borrowed heavily to expand production and productivity.¹⁴ Agricultural magazines like Farmers Weekly and the NFU’s British Farmer were full of advice on better husbandry methods, disease eradication, and basic economics for expanding farmers.¹⁵ Presenting technological sophistication as a badge of pride,¹⁶ agricultural boosters intermixed the trope of having “fed the nation at war” with scenarios of global overpopulation.¹⁷ For younger farmers, the rule was “never farm backwards.”¹⁸ One article claimed that while “nature intended a bird to lay only 24 eggs a season,” scientific nutrition and husbandry meant that “there [was] no reason why she should not reach the 300 mark.”¹⁹ Frequently reminded to treat an animal “as a manufacturing unit,”²⁰ “the urge to E-X-P-A-N-D”²¹ was said to be particularly pronounced in young ambitious and modern farmers.

Farmers heeded the urge. While Britain produced 762,000 tons of meat in 1947, it produced 1,713,000 tons in 1960.²² Meanwhile, the number of workers on British farms declined from 843,000 in 1950 to 645,000 in 1960 with total factor productivity increasing from 67.5 in 1953 to 83.4 in 1963 (1973 = index 100).²³ However, not every farm intensified production. While Andrew Godley and Bridget Williams have shown that vertically integrated intensive rearing systems soon became common in the poultry sector,²⁴ Karen Sayer and Abigail Woods have noted that intensive and confined production methods were adopted unevenly in the pig, cattle, and egg production sectors. Contradicting public notions of universal factory farming, much of British livestock production remained characterized by a diversity of indoor and outdoor production systems.²⁵ In part, this diversity had cultural reasons. Some farmers feared that improved efficiency would increase social divides between a shrinking number of farmers and the general public while others feared technological alienation from animals and healthy nature.²⁶

From Wariness to Routine

Postwar economics, corporatism, and the diverse structure of livestock production also impacted antibiotics’ introduction to British farms. Veterinarians and farmers were already familiar with therapeutic antibiotic use for individual animals. However, in contrast to their rapid demand-driven introduction in the United States, nontherapeutic antibiotic applications had to be actively “sold” to initially hesitant British livestock farmers.

Similar to the United States, the interwar period saw a growing number of drugs and supplemented feeds used on British farms. However, effective remedies for infectious disease remained rare. As late as 1938, manuals like the Handbook of Modern Pig Farming had only been able to recommend a combination of preventative measures and culling for most diseases.²⁷ Advertised in British trade journals from 1938 onward, new sulfonamides significantly enhanced farmers’ and veterinarians’ ability to treat disease in individual animals. The new drugs later also featured in James Alfred Wight’s (alias James Herriot) popular semi-autobiographic books on his time as a veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire between the 1930s and 1950s.²⁸ In Vet in Harness (1974), Wight’s character diagnoses calves with pneumonia and convinces the farmer to use M&B 693 (sulphapyridine). The recovery is miraculous: “I didn’t know it at the time but I had witnessed the beginning of the revolution …. The long rows of ornate glass bottles with their carved stoppers and Latin inscriptions would not stand on the dispensary shelves much longer …. At last we had something to work with, at last we could use drugs which we knew were going to do something.”²⁹

Initially, sulfonamides were obtainable without a veterinary prescription. Although interwar officials were beginning to substitute self-regulation with what Stuart Anderson has called “a medical system of control through the writing of prescriptions,”³⁰ legislation remained fragmented. In 1920 and 1925, the Dangerous Drugs and Therapeutic Substances Acts restricted narcotics and mandated the licensing of producers of biologicals like vaccines and sera. However, so-called poisons remained available over the counter in licensed pharmacies. Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain’s power to determine whether a substance was a poison and who could sell it meant that most new drugs—including the azo dye derived sulfonamides—continued to be categorized as poisons.³¹ The 1933 Pharmacy and Poisons Act’s “trade or business relaxation” enabled farmers to purchase sulfonamides by signing the Poisons Register of a pharmacist, who was an Authorized Seller of Poisons.³² In 1941, sulfonamides’ legal status as poisons was both restricted and confirmed by the Pharmacy and Medicines Act, which listed a range of conditions that should only be treated by medical doctors.

FIGURE 6.1

An early antibiotic advertisement, M&B 693, Veterinary Record, August 1940.

Throughout the early 1940s, actual drug availability was, however, severely constrained by wartime shortages. This was also true for the new biological antibiotics. Produced by biological organisms, antibiotics like penicillin were regulated not as poisons but as therapeutic substances. Their distribution was controlled by the wartime Defence Regulations. Because of AMR concerns and limited supplies, prescription requirements for biological antibiotics were enshrined in the 1947 Penicillin Act, which was extended to encompass chlortetracycline and chloramphenicol in 1951.³³ Access to sulfonamides was also restricted. Although full-time farmers could still purchase sulfonamides directly from pharmacists, the 4th Schedule of the 1933 Pharmacy and Poisons Act now exempted sulfonamides from prescription requirements only when they were “contained in ointments and surgical dressings or in the preparations for the prevention or treatment of diseases in poultry.”³⁴

Relatively unaffected by wartime cuts of animal production, dairy farmers were among the vanguard of 1940s British antibiotic users. Government efforts to increase milk output and reduce labor inputs had led to a national drive against mastitis. Following veterinary diagnosis, farmers were given access to subsidized sulphanilamide to treat infected udders. The strategic importance of wartime milk production is also illustrated by the fact that precious penicillin, which was still being recycled from human urine, was donated by Howard Florey for experimental use against udder infections in 1941. Although doses remained low (about 10,000 units per treatment), veterinarians studying mastitis were granted preferential penicillin access in 1943. After 1945, penicillin trials against mastitis caused by Streptococcus agalactiae in commercial herds fostered optimism about wider disease eradication.³⁵

British pharmaceutical producers catered to rising veterinary demand for chemotherapy against mastitis. In 1946, Wellcome introduced collapsible single-dose mastitis tubes with penicillin G in oil-wax suspension, which did not require refrigeration and were less irritating than preparations containing sulfonamides or gramicidin.³⁶ Sulfonamides and biological antibiotics were also used to treat pneumonia, footrot, and calf diphtheria.³⁷ However, supply problems prevented trials of US broad-spectrum antibiotics and streptomycin until the early 1950s.³⁸ As late as 1951, British officials complained about the “absolutely prohibitive”³⁹ cost of aureomycin treatments.

Rising agricultural demand for antibiotic prescriptions soon led to discussions about what constituted “rational” drug use. Strengthened by their wartime integration into disease control programs and 1940s prescription requirements, British veterinarians were in a far more powerful position to influence antibiotic use than their US colleagues.⁴⁰ However, veterinarians’ ability to prescribe and sell antibiotics also created a conflict of interest. While national veterinary organizations promoted the image of veterinarians as reliable antibiotic stewards, local vets were incentivized to use antibiotic prescriptions to maximize income and secure the loyalty of paying customers. As early as 1948, articles in the Veterinary Record, organ of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), debated responsible prescription practices: “many practitioners are receiving requests from their clients to leave a supply with them, to make provision for the immediate treatment of new cases or to be used for control purposes.”⁴¹ Because farmers knew how easy it was to use antibiotic tubes, many were unwilling to pay veterinary fees for every single treatment and demanded bulk prescriptions for self-use. The situation presented a quandary for veterinarians, who depended on local farmers’ good-will for their income: “Some, influenced perhaps by ethical considerations or by the sight of boxes of penicillin tubes left lying about on the window ledges of cowsheds, might wish to read into the wording of the [Penicillin] Act the inference that on no account should a penicillin preparation be left for the farmer to administer himself. Some might go to the other extreme and take the view that penicillin may be freely supplied to the client.”⁴² Veterinarians should try to strike a balance between stewardship and an “unnecessary restrictive”⁴³ prescription approach.

In practice, veterinary journals’ exhortations for “rational” prescriptions could be trumped by what some condemned as “rank commercialism.”⁴⁴ Veterinarians’ control over the increasingly lucrative drug market also exacerbated tensions with pharmacists.⁴⁵ Writing to the Veterinary Record in 1953, a Cheshire pharmacist noted that little had changed since the 1947 Penicillin Act: “the simple fact is … the veterinary surgeon who supplies drugs in bulk for the farmers’ use is just as much keeping open shop as any retail pharmacist, and as such should not grumble if he meets competition from the pharmacist.”⁴⁶ Just how easy it was to obtain restricted antibiotics from some veterinarians is illustrated by the 1956 prosecution of three Yorkshire practitioners. After an undercover inspector had purchased antibiotics from an unqualified assistant, it emerged that it was common practice for local farmers to either come in person, send their sons, or ask for antibiotics on the phone. Drugs were promptly sold without an accompanying herd inspection. According to the accused vets, “it would be ludicrous to run out every time a farmer telephoned to say he had another outbreak of mastitis.”⁴⁷

While British farmers were happy to buy prescribed antibiotics to treat and prevent disease, they were initially more skeptical about nontherapeutic applications. Despite closely following developments in the United States,⁴⁸ subdued early perceptions of antibiotic growth promotion were caused by dis-appointing feed trials, the different composition of British animal feeds, and the late derationing of commercial feeds in August 1953.⁴⁹

Similar to the United States, British researchers had been interested in the nutritional value of antibiotic fermentation wastes since the 1948 equation of vitamin B₁₂ with APF (chapter 3). Collaborating with Glaxo Laboratories at Reading’s National Institute for Research in Dairying, nutritionist Raphael Braude started feeding streptomycin liquor residues to piglets in May 1949. Unaware of the parallel discovery of the antibiotic growth effect, Braude and his colleagues tested different combinations’ impact on weight gain and B₁₂ concentrations in livers. Initial results were disappointing: no growth promotion was observed and pigs fed streptomycin liquor did less well than controls fed iron supplements.⁵⁰ Following the 1950 announcement of the antibiotic growth effect, Britain’s Agricultural Research Council (ARC) commissioned a new round of antibiotic feed trials on pigs and poultry in research laboratories in Reading and Northern Ireland as well as by manufacturers like the Distillers Company, Glaxo Laboratories, and the British Oil and Cake Mills (BOCM). However, once again, trials with domestic procaine penicillin, streptomycin, and detergents proved inconclusive. In the case of pigs, antibiotics seemingly promoted the growth of animals fed Midwest-style vegetable protein diets but not of animals fed common British diets, which were rich in animal protein. According to Reading-based researchers, “the effect of the addition of antibiotic supplements [to domestic feeds] is unlikely to be of commercial importance.”⁵¹ Positive results were, however, achieved by adding antibiotics to the diets of runts and pigs suffering from scours.⁵² Trials on pullets at the Rowett Research institute in Aberdeen produced mixed results.⁵³

Following a meeting in October 1951, the ARC decided that initial data was insufficient to justify amending the 1947 Penicillin Act and commissioned further feed trials. This cautious approach was criticized by British antibiotic manufacturers, who warned about impeding commercial progress in “the birthplace of antibiotics” (chapter 5).⁵⁴ Focusing on pigs, the second round of ARC-sponsored trials tested US aureomycin supplements alongside British-manufactured procaine penicillin solutions and B₁₂. One group of pigs was fed an antibiotic supplemented diet containing vegetable and animal protein (white fish meal), which was considered typical for British agriculture, while the other group was fed an American “vegetable protein” diet. This time, both penicillin and aureomycin were found to promote animals’ weight gain by between 1.4 to 40.2 percent over control animals. Live weight gains were greater on vegetable diets with US aureomycin slightly outperforming British penicillin. A second set of experiments with antibiotic creep feeds for suckling pigs led to similar results. However, strong variations between individual trials made British experts shy away from uniformly endorsing AGPs. In 1953, the ARC cautiously concluded that the average farmer “should be able to derive a more positive commercial benefit from the improvement of food conversion.”⁵⁵ Despite ongoing uncertainty about feeds’ action and performance, it was thought that AGPs led to 8 to 10 percent speedier growth and about 5 percent better food conversion in pigs and poultry.⁵⁶

A second important reason for British farmers’ lukewarm endorsement of AGPs may well have been the ample domestic supplies of vitamin B₁₂. As described in chapter 3, an oversupply of cheap vegetable protein and a coinciding scarcity of animal protein supplements partially explained US farmers’ 1950s embrace of B₁₂-rich aureomycin fermentation wastes. This was not the case in Britain where the country’s highly organized fishing industry created an oversupply of animal protein and commercial compounders were legally required to add animal protein to feeds for young animals.⁵⁷ Even before restrictions on commercial feeds were relaxed in 1953,⁵⁸ British farmers had had access to relatively cheap animal protein via off-ration fish solubles. This access to cheap animal protein stripped early AGP/APF feeds of half their commercial appeal—especially since some commentators seemed to think that APF and AGPs were the same thing.⁵⁹ British antibiotic manufacturers explicitly referred to domestic B₁₂ supplies in their campaign to ward off US competition. Writing for Manufacturing Chemist in 1952, Distillers Company researcher J. A. Wakelam advocated using British procaine penicillin in animal feeds: procaine penicillin production was based on the full extraction of penicillin mold and did not result in viable APF wastes. For British farmers, this was allegedly an advantage since supplementing domestic feeds with pure penicillin would avoid inefficient US AGP/APF “’blunderbuss’ treatment[s].”⁶⁰ Other researchers soon countered that aureomycin was more able to resist the water and heat necessary for compounding feeds than penicillin.⁶¹

In view of varying feed trials, uncertainty about AGPs’ stability, and new experiments indicating no growth promotion in germ-free chickens,⁶² it is perhaps unsurprising that British farmers and their lobby, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), viewed antibiotic growth promotion very cautiously. Ahead of antibiotic feeds’ licensing by the 1953 Therapeutic Substances Act, the NFU was less concerned about pushing for the rapid licensing of AGPs than about securing guaranteed minimum antibiotic concentrations in feeds and official guidelines for safe and efficient antibiotic use.⁶³ Lacking internal antibiotics expertise, the NFU relied heavily on information supplied by the state. As a consequence, government experts played a crucial role in convincing initially cautious farm organizations to promote subtherapeutic antibiotic use. Following a 1953 meeting, the NFU representative thanked officials: “The subject was one about which he and many other farmers were relatively ignorant and he was grateful for the information and advice given. He was in general agreement …, but felt that caution in propaganda and in the use of antibiotics was necessary.”⁶⁴

Even after Britain’s Treasury and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) decided to license penicillin and aureomycin feeds with effect from September 1, 1953 (oxytetracycline AGPs were licensed in 1954), initial AGP sales were disappointing. At a symposium held shortly after AGPs’ licensing, it was noted that given “the tremendous amount of publicity and propaganda that originated largely in America, … it was thought that there would be a tremendous demand for them in this country.”⁶⁵ However, “the demand had been considerably less than … expected.”⁶⁶ Antibiotic uptake also varied between livestock sectors.

In the case of pig husbandry, AGPs’ popularity was diminished by ongoing uncertainty about feeds’ efficacy and farmers’ disappointment when weight gains turned out to be lower than advertised.⁶⁷ The prevalence of low-intensity outdoor systems may have been an additional factor. Following the slaughtering off of British pigs in 1940, postwar production gains had mostly been achieved by small-scale outdoor producers. Although individual officials and the Pig Industry Development Authority (PIDA) promoted more intensive husbandry systems during the 1950s, their efforts were only partially successful in the East of England. In other areas of the United Kingdom, inconsistent government support and overproduction led to a greater persistence of outdoor farming and a more piecemeal adoption of antibiotics than in the United States.⁶⁸

Pig husbandry manuals were also skeptical of AGPs. While contemporary US manuals routinely recommended AGPs for indoor and outdoor herds (chapter 3), early 1950s British manuals followed prewar traditions by advocating sunlight and cod-liver oil and fish meal supplements as “natural” preventatives. Antibiotics featured alongside serum therapy as prescribed therapeutics but not as nontherapeutic feed additives.⁶⁹ In 1945, Pigs: Their Breeding, Feeding, and Management had not mentioned therapeutic antibiotics or sulfonamides.⁷⁰ Eight years later, its revised edition discussed “experimental” AGP trials on runts but cautioned: “healthy pigs on a [non-vegetable] ration do not make an economical response to the use of antibiotics.”⁷¹ In 1956, a new version of the manual maintained that feeding antibiotics to healthy pigs on “good” standard British rations might be unprofitable.⁷² Similar concerns were voiced at British feedstuff conferences and in the first edition of Farm Animals in Health and Disease from 1954.⁷³

Pig farmers’ AGP skepticism was only gradually overcome by pharmaceutical marketing and expert endorsement. In 1957, the Rowett Institute averaged outcomes of recent experiments to estimate that feeding AGPs to “baconers” could result in a 5s. profit per pig. Although procaine penicillin was effective at lower doses, broad-spectrum AGPs produced more consistent results.⁷⁴ While these figures were bad news for British manufacturers, who tried to compete against US feeds by commissioning patriotic commercials,⁷⁵ American companies celebrated the success of their products in the farming press. In 1955, American Cyanamid’s British branch boasted: “Last year, 1 in every 10 pigs in the United Kingdom had AUROFAC 2A Feed Supplement throughout its life …. This year, 1 in every 7 pigs in the United Kingdom is being fed on AUROFAC 2A Feed Supplement from birth to slaughter.”⁷⁶ According to the manager of Pfizer’s oxytetracycline plant in Kent, AGPs not only enabled British farmers to market pigs three weeks sooner but also saved enough feed to free about 300,000 acres for other crops.⁷⁷ Similar views were expressed by commentators in Britain’s farming press. According to the popular magazine Farmers Weekly, antibiotics were changing the biological rhythms of British husbandry: instead of weaning piglets 56 days after birth, farmers were now advised to wean 24 to 28 hour old piglets with penicillin-enriched milk powder. This way, even runts would survive and piglets would already weigh about 40 pounds at their traditional weaning age.⁷⁸ Invoking an ideal of optimized nature, the magazine described antibiotics as a “boon to mankind.”⁷⁹ Another article, titled “Our Debt to the Chemist,”⁸⁰ listed antibiotics, hormones, pesticides and insecticides among the great triumphs of twentieth-century science. By 1958, veterinary researcher Herbert Williams Smith estimated: “about 50 percent of all the pigs in Britain are [fed AGPs] and that nearly all unweaned piglets have access to food containing tetracyclines.”⁸¹

The adoption of AGPs was more straightforward in Britain’s poultry sector. British poultry production intensified rapidly following the establishment of the first broiler chicken farm by Geoffrey Sykes in 1953 and Sainsbury’s marketing of frozen chickens in self-service supermarkets.⁸² Rapid intensification also occurred in turkey and game bird production.⁸³ Similar to the United States, the increasing size of flocks was enabled by cheap chemotherapeutics and in turn boosted antibiotic sales. British poultry farmers had trialed preventive and therapeutic sulfonamide treatments since 1947. By 1950, popular US products like sulfaquinoxaline were also being manufactured in Britain.⁸⁴ Four years later, R. F. Gordon from the Animal Health Trust estimated that about 35 percent of British poultry were housed intensively and routinely received therapeutic and nontherapeutic antibiotics.⁸⁵

Antibiotics’ popularity was reflected in British poultry manuals. In 1946, the third edition of Poultry World’s Practical Poultry Keeping still targeted small backyard producers when it recommended a mix of household remedies and hygiene for the prevention and treatment of disease.⁸⁶ By 1952, Poultry Keeping for Profit explicitly targeted farmers thinking about expanding production and recommended vaccinations and sulfonamide solutions to maintain birds’ health.⁸⁷ In 1955, the revised fifth edition of Practical Poultry Keeping contained a chapter on feeds with an entire section devoted to antibiotics. Indicating how popular AGPs had become, poultry producers were cautioned that antibiotics “cannot be considered as food, but their use does have an effect on the way chicks are able to utilise [feeds].”⁸⁸ The manual also warned: “[antibiotics] do not help egg production or breeding and as a rule should not be fed to adult birds, although some breeders claim that they help birds through the moult.”⁸⁹ Similar to the United States, many manuals’ joint advocacy of routine antibiotic growth promotion, prophylaxis, and treatment meant that legal boundaries between nontherapeutic and therapeutic antibiotic use quickly blurred in practice.⁹⁰

FIGURE 6.2

AGPs were presented as important parts of normal feed rations. Pfizer advertisement, Farmers Weekly, 1960.

FIGURE 6.3

Antibiotic feeds were also sold as disease insurance. Cyanamid advertisement, Farmers Weekly, 1964.

Producers’ increasing adoption of antibiotics led to a boom of British drug sales. In 1954, an estimated 69,439 tons of antibiotic supplemented feeds were sold to farmers. By 1959, the number had grown by over 600 percent to 445,706 tons.⁹¹ Feeds for growing animals could include up to 100 parts per million of penicillin, chlortetracycline, oxytetracycline, and bacitracin. In practice, about 25 parts per million of procaine penicillin or bacitracin were usually added to poultry feeds. In pig production, creep feeds normally contained up to 30 parts per million of broad-spectrum antibiotics while feeds for older growing pigs contained up to 10 parts per million of the same antibiotics.⁹² In contrast to their increasing public association with “factory farms” (chapter 5), antibiotics were popular in both intensive and nonintensive settings. In 1962, one observer noted that early weaning, a focus on pork production, and “rough and ready” housing had led to the “greatest employment [of dietary antibiotics] … in the feeding of [British] pigs.”⁹³ As indicated in manuals, AGPs were being used for both growth promotion and therapeutic purposes. In 1957, a former industry representative warned that farmers “frequently feed antibiotic-containing feeding-stuff supplements to their stock at levels so high as clearly to be exerting a therapeutic effect. Such action is taken deliberately, and it completely defeats one of the main objects of [the Therapeutic Substances Act], to say nothing of its effect on the incomes of veterinary surgeons.”⁹⁴ Pharmaceutical revenues grew accordingly. Between 1948 and 1963, adjusted UK veterinary medicines output grew from £2,305,000 to £19,585,000 in current money whereas the output in animal and poultry foods grew from £50.3 million to £466.7 million. Meanwhile, veterinary medicines’ share as a proportion of total UK pharmaceutical output increased from 3 percent to 8.3 percent.⁹⁵

FIGURE 6.4

Poultry producers rapidly adopted antibiotics. ICI advertisement, Farmers Weekly, 1951.

FIGURE 6.5

Antibiotics were said to increase efficiency. Cyanamid advertisement, Farmers Weekly, 1964.

Despite farmers’ initial hesitancy, uneven adoption of drugs, and ongoing recourse to other disease control strategies,⁹⁶ an antibiotic infrastructure of easy-to-use growth promoters, therapeutics, and prophylactics was becoming established on British farms. Similar to the United States, drug use would continue to rise over the next decade. In 1960, about 40,000 kilograms of pure antibiotics were annually estimated to be used in British pig and poultry husbandry (about 29 to 35 percent of total antibiotic consumption). By the mid-1960s, the percentage of total British antibiotic output devoted to animals had increased to about 41 to 44 percent.⁹⁷

Early Concerns

Antibiotics’ popularity did not mean that British agricultural commentators were unaware of negative side effects. Similar to the United States, the early 1950s saw farming magazines warn producers about penicillin residues’ effect on cheese production and mass-poisoning resulting from off-label sulfonamide use.⁹⁸ However, in contrast to the United States, AMR soon emerged as an equally prominent issue and divided opinions. Resulting agricultural debates centered on the risks and benefits of uncontrolled as opposed to “rational” veterinary antibiotic use. Whereas animal nutritionists and NFU representatives followed their US counterparts by presenting AMR as a problem of inefficient drug use, veterinarians and public health experts used AMR to assert control over antibiotics. At stake was not antibiotic use per se but antibiotic access.

Coinciding with veterinary debates about “rational” drug use, initial AMR concerns centered on the overuse of therapeutic mastitis treatments.⁹⁹ Around 1950, British veterinarians began to warn farmers about a “changing ‘clinical picture’ which might follow the extensive use of penicillin.”¹⁰⁰ Observed changes were due to the replacement of sensitive Streptococcus agalactiae with resistant hemolytic Staphylococci. Having analyzed 500 udder isolates between 1951 and 1953, researchers from the Boots Pure Drugs Division reported an increase of infections caused by resistant Staphylococci but noted that organisms remained sensitive to high doses of penicillin.¹⁰¹ According to Farmers Weekly, the percentage of mastitis outbreaks caused by Staphylococci rose from 10 to 30 percent between 1944 and 1955.¹⁰² A further increase of penicillin resistance from 9 to 37 percent was detected in Staphylococci isolated from herd milk between 1954 and 1957.¹⁰³ In reaction, British veterinarians attempted to shore up antibiotic control by lambasting what they saw as “indiscriminate” US-style drug use “without any veterinary supervision.”¹⁰⁴

Although most agricultural commentators initially agreed that a certain degree of veterinary supervision was necessary to control AMR in the case of therapeutic antibiotic use, opinions were more divided when it came to non-therapeutic AGPs. Ahead of AGPs’ licensing in 1953, British veterinarians wondered whether they should agree to exempt low-dosed feeds from prescription requirements. In 1953, a letter in the Veterinary Record cited Starr and Reynold’s 1951 study (chapter 3) to warn about feeds’ selection for AMR on farms.¹⁰⁵ However, other commentators argued that antibiotic dosages and blood stream adsorption were too low to exert selection pressure: “We are assured by bacteriologists [that AMR] is not likely because the action of these antibiotics appears to be a local one in the gut on the microflora there, and … the bacterial population is being constantly expelled by normal bowel evacuation and being replaced by a [susceptible] fresh one, …. Secondly, should the organism actually become resistant … it would be a simple matter to attack these supposedly resistant organisms by switching to another antibiotic.”¹⁰⁶ The threshold-influenced distinction between higher therapeutic and lower nontherapeutic dosages initially reconciled many British veterinarians with AGPs.

This reconciliation was short lived. By the mid-1950s, new AMR data, booming AGP sales, and farmers’ therapeutic and preventive use of increasingly higher-dosed feeds to substitute expensive veterinary health care led to clashes within Britain’s agricultural community. The BVA’s 1956 Conference on Supplements and Additives in Animal Feedingstuffs exposed nascent tensions. Although most speakers praised AGPs, AMR assessments varied significantly between industry representatives, pharmacists, and nutritionists on the one side and veterinary bacteriologists on the other side. According to Reading-based nutritionist Marie E. Coates, who had recently discovered the absence of antibiotic growth promotion in germ-free chickens, AMR fears were “groundless.”¹⁰⁷ This view was seconded by British-born American Cyanamid biochemist Robert White-Stevens. Promoting higher-dosed AGPs, White-Stevens claimed that antibiotics were a natural companion of intensifying food production: “it was impossible to keep contagion down [in large intensive poultry flocks], even by the best methods of management; furthermore, the best sanitary management cost a lot of money, generally more than a comparable result from use of antibiotics.”¹⁰⁸ Britain’s leading AGP expert, nutritionist Raphael Braude, expressed irritation at contemporary veterinary AMR warnings. In a sign of growing professional tensions over antibiotic control, Braude “refrained from drawing analogies involving veterinary prescriptions, but as far as feed additives are concerned, … the sole criterion as to whether they should be freely allowed on the market should be … that if judiciously used they are harmless to the health of the animal.”¹⁰⁹ Market forces would do the rest: farmers would phase out AGPs if AMR diminished their efficacy.

Veterinary bacteriologists begged to differ. Using sensitivity tests and a technology called bacteriophage-typing to differentiate between bacteria strains (chapter 7), the Animal Health Trust’s Herbert Williams Smith had analyzed the microbial effects of antibiotic use on farms. His findings were worrying. Responding to a paper on AGPs in pig nutrition, Williams Smith noted that E. coli causing calf scours (diarrhea) had become resistant after antibiotic exposure. In the case of pigs, feeding AGPs had caused a sharp rise of tetracycline resistance in E. coli isolates. Resistant strains could spread to humans: 36 percent of E. coli isolates from pigs entering a bacon factory had been tetracycline resistant.¹¹⁰

In a preview of conflicts to come, Williams Smith’s intervention led to an acrimonious discussion. Nutritionist Raphael Braude responded by explicitly accusing veterinarians of using AMR to regain control over antibiotics: “the fact that the resistant bacteria existed was meaningless, unless it could be proved that the resistant bacteria present, and possibly growing, were pathogenic organisms, which would cause disease …. Speaking bluntly, he thought it was high time that the authorities of the veterinary profession should accept the fact that there was plenty of work to be done without worrying how the antibiotics acted.”¹¹¹ Attempting to keep the peace, Animal Health Trust founder W. R. Wooldridge warned that Braude “had raised a controversial point by implying that the veterinary profession was endeavoring to stop the use of antibiotics in feeding-stuffs.”¹¹² Wooldridge upheld veterinarians’ duty to protect animals and the public from resistant strains like Staphylococcus 80/81 (chapter 2) but maintained that it was up to agriculturalists how to use antibiotics on a daily basis. Attending officials followed a similar compromise strategy. Speaking for Britain’s Ministry of Health, Senior Medical Officer John Marshall Ross warned about AMR in human medicine but shied away from linking it to agricultural antibiotic use. Instead, he focused on drug residues and antibiotic preservatives’ potential selection for AMR among food-borne pathogens.¹¹³ By contrast, Royal Veterinary College microbiologist Reginald Lovell doubted that there was any difference between the risks of therapeutic and nontherapeutic antibiotic use on farms: “We condemn [antibiotics’] indiscriminate use as therapeutic agents and subject them to some control, if we are logical, ought we not to condemn their use as dietary supplements whereby they extend their influence to a wider sphere?”¹¹⁴

Within three years of being legalized, AGPs had turned into a divisive issue for Britain’s agricultural community. Keenly aware of AMR on farms and in medicine, all sides advocated “rational” antibiotic use for therapeutic purposes but were divided when it came to reinstating medical control over nontherapeutic AGPs. Ironically, the low doses that had made AGPs seem harmless in 1953 were increasingly viewed as particularly dangerous because they allowed bacteria to survive and adapt to antibiotic exposure. This allegation gained additional weight when veterinary bacteriologist Herbert Williams Smith and his collaborator W. E. Crabb published their AMR data shortly after the 1956 BVA conference. Studying E. coli in pig and chicken feces, the authors reported a strong correlation between antibiotic use and AMR rates. AMR selection in animals “would undoubtedly have an impact on the treatment of bact. Coli infection in those animals and possibly other species, including man, with which they come in contact. It is apparent that considerations of this nature should be given very serious thought before any chemotherapeutic agent is permitted to be used in such a widespread manner as the tetracyclines have been used in pig nutrition.”¹¹⁵

Battles for Control

The emerging inner-agricultural conflict over antibiotic control would escalate over the next decade. During the 1960s, AMR concerns, the international cost-price squeeze, and an increasingly aggressive veterinary drive for preventive health care led to a wider revaluation of British agricultural antibiotic use and access.

Economically, the 1960s undermined many postwar promises of rural prosperity. With overall agricultural employment and government price guarantees falling, those staying in agriculture tended to work on fewer and larger farms.¹¹⁶ In livestock production, developments once again varied between different sectors. While UK cattle production stagnated, poultry production increased. Pig production also increased and became more intensive during the second half of the decade.¹¹⁷

The direction of agricultural development was not uncontroversial among British farmers. Although many commentators continued to propagate expansion,¹¹⁸ a growing number of articles in the farming press warned that many smaller producers would not survive the cost-price squeeze.¹¹⁹ Pointing to parallel trajectories in the United States, a 1962 article in Farmers Weekly predicted an “end in sight for the family farms.”¹²⁰ Two years later, delegates at the NFU’s annual meeting clashed over a resolution to limit the size of farms. Mirroring public attacks on factory farms, the resolution called on the NFU to “ensur[e] that production of agricultural commodities remains with the farming industry” and “draw a line between [agricultural factories] and what is traditional agriculture.”¹²¹ However, opponents argued that “the resolution was in direct opposition to progress. Hens did not need green fields to run in these days. It was important that some products be produced intensively.”¹²² After a heated discussion, what would have been a small revolution for British farming was defeated by 174 to 128 votes.

Similar to the United States, economic pressure for increased and more efficient production coincided with controversies over rising antibiotic use on British farms. In 1960, the ARC’s decision to review AGPs in view of AMR warnings took many agricultural observers by surprise. According to Farmers Weekly, the review “condemns those willing to take risks for what it admits can be considerable gains.”¹²³ Closely integrated into government decision-making, British farmers could, however, be confident that their perspective would be taken into account—especially since the antibiotic review would be headed by former NFU president Jim Turner, now Lord Netherthorpe. While it was unlikely that antibiotic use per se would be challenged, the Netherthorpe review fanned inner-agricultural battles over control of antibiotic access.

Intensifying antibiotic conflicts took place against a backdrop of veterinary campaigns for government subsidized preventive animal health care schemes. Described by historian Abigail Woods, organizations like the BVA were becoming concerned that successful disease eradication, productivity-oriented notions of animal health, and easy drug access were eroding traditional sources of veterinary income. By lobbying for official veterinary preventive care schemes, they hoped to convert “fire brigade approaches” in which veterinarians were only called to treat acute disease into a system of subsidized health checks and management advice for farmers. The added benefits of establishing “rational” medical oversight of on-farm antibiotic use and curbing AMR selection became a central theme of veterinary campaigning.¹²⁴

British veterinarians’ push for greater antibiotic control coincided with a push by livestock producers for unrestricted on-farm access to penicillin and other prescription-only medicines (chapter 7). Confident in their ability to diagnose and use drugs appropriately, a growing number of producers were turning to feed merchants rather than veterinarians for advice. In 1960, Farmers Weekly advised a farmer facing resistant coccidiosis to “complain to your feed merchants of the poor results you are getting and perhaps change to some other kind of medicated food.”¹²⁵ By contrast, the BVA’s Veterinary Record criticized “unthinking demands” for unsupervised access to “drugs and vaccines, many of them dangerous except in skilled hands and most of them too expensive to be used wastefully.”¹²⁶ Instead of giving into farmers’ antibiotic demands for fear of losing their custom, veterinarians should encourage “enlightened farmers”¹²⁷ to seek preventive health advice. Producers disagreed. Doubting the necessity of paying veterinarians to treat diseases that skilled farmers could also handle with appropriate therapeutics, the NFU’s Gloucestershire section repeated demands for expanded access to prescription-only medicine in 1962.¹²⁸

In the midst of battles over drug control, hardly anybody considered reducing overall antibiotic use. Throughout the early 1960s most agricultural commentators and manuals remained confident that AMR hazards were an acceptable price to pay for the many benefits of “rational” antibiotic use and continued to advocate it. Although British publications mentioned hazards much more frequently than contemporary US publications (chapter 3), they also mostly presented AMR as a management problem, which could be overcome by improving hygiene and using different drugs and drug combinations.¹²⁹ The 1962 Netherthorpe report strengthened this view. Shaped by fierce struggles between veterinarians, public health officials, and farming representatives, the corporatist report marked a victory for farmers and nutritionists by endorsing existing AGP regulations and calling for a legalization of AGPs for calves. However, it also strengthened British veterinarians by calling for an automatic restriction of future medically relevant antibiotics (chapter 7).

The hard-won Netherthorpe compromise on antibiotic access stood in contrast to rising public criticism of modern farming’s overall use of agricultural chemicals. Although they quickly endorsed residue controls for milk in the wake of the 1963 penicillin scandal (chapter 5),¹³⁰ British farming and veterinary representatives faced increasing pressure from environmentalists and animal welfare activists throughout the 1960s.

Strategies of responding to criticism varied. In the case of rising environmentalist concerns about chemical use, British agricultural commentators frequently downplayed domestic criticism by pointing to more extensive American chemical use and blaming consumer tastes for driving intensive farming.¹³¹ In 1963, Farmers Weekly reacted to the British publication of Silent Spring by claiming that Carson’s warnings were valid but had few implications for British agriculture.¹³² Deflecting attention to the US was not possible in the case of home-grown animal welfare criticism. British activists and farmers had two opposing concepts of welfare: while most farmers defined welfare in terms of thrift or physical productivity, campaigners extended definitions of welfare to encompass animals’ mental well-being.¹³³ Since around 1960, British agricultural commentators had reacted to growing public welfare criticism by portraying campaigners as irrational.¹³⁴ In comparison to the “pot-bellied” prewar animals “with staring coats, housed in filthy hovels,”¹³⁵ scientifically designed modern intensive systems offered animals a much better life. Tensions increased significantly following the publication of Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines in 1964 (chapter 5). Reacting to Harrison’s Observer articles, the NFU’s British Farmer complained that the newspaper had joined the “anti-land lobby” by presenting a “grossly distorted picture of British agriculture.”¹³⁶ Farmers Weekly bemoaned the Nazi imagery of welfare criticism: “Townspeople … have been given a horrifying picture of the ‘animal factories’ …. They are given a chilling picture of broiler house concentration camps and packing station Ausschwitzen [sic], of pig ‘sweat-boxes’; of darkened torture-chambers for calves, and of animals going blind in intensive beef lots.”¹³⁷ If animals were truly suffering, they would not produce income.

However, Britain’s agricultural community soon found that frontal opposition would not sway domestic welfare criticism. According to Andrew Godley and Bridget Williams, “agriculture was pursuing intensification more energetically in Britain than anywhere else outside North America”¹³⁸ but had much less public and economic significance. Failing to prevent the official installation of the 1964 Brambell committee on animal welfare, both the NFU and the farming press chose not to jeopardize corporatist ties with Whitehall and Westminster and began to moderate their rhetoric. Stressing the necessity of an “informed climate,”¹³⁹ agricultural documentaries titled “Press Button Farms”¹⁴⁰ and “Look to the Land”¹⁴¹ instead began to stress the quality, ethical soundness, and safety of intensive food production in Britain.

With initial outrage cooling, farming magazines even began to print occasional criticism of modern production methods’ effects on animals and the hazards of technologies like antibiotics.¹⁴² In the Countryman, Herbert Sinclair, director of Oxford’s Laboratory of Human Nutrition, acknowledged allegations that AGPs were illegally being fed to laying poultry.¹⁴³ Although he complained about limited urbanite farming knowledge based on “comics of jolly pigs in trousers,”¹⁴⁴ the chairman of the NFU’s Lincolnshire branch similarly cautioned that much still had to be learned about safe drug use while Farmers Weekly referenced diseased carcasses “sodden with antibiotics”¹⁴⁵ in abattoirs.

Infective Resistance

While self-criticism in the farming press mostly centered on illegal antibiotic use and resulting residue problems, British veterinarians used public concerns about welfare and AMR to reignite the battle for antibiotic control. Giving evidence to the Brambell committee in June 1964, the BVA called for further limitations on non-nutritive feed additives.¹⁴⁶ These calls were soon significantly strengthened by high-profile warnings of “infective resistance” spreading on farms by Britain’s PHLS (chapter 5).

In contrast to the United States, the new horizontal AMR scenarios had an immediate impact on British public and agricultural debate. Whereas most British commentators had previously presented AMR as a spatially limited risk, which could be overcome by better management, hygiene, and drug combinations, horizontal gene transfer challenged the entire rhetoric of sustainable antibiotic use. Because every dose could select for uncontainable AMR genes, producers and practitioners had to ask themselves whether they were squandering precious antibiotic resources. Answers differed. While most British farming manuals and articles continued to endorse “rational” therapeutic and nontherapeutic antibiotic use,¹⁴⁷ commentators also acknowledged the need for some kind of reform. In 1965, the NFU’s British Farmer warned: “Too many doctors and farmers are dosing human beings, pigs, calves and poultry with antibiotics for minor illnesses or as animal food additives …. This can mean that human beings and livestock are less easily treated for more serious epidemics, including typhoid in human beings. In short, the use of antibiotics has been overdone.”¹⁴⁸ Ahead of the publication of the second Netherthorpe report (chapter 7), Farmers Weekly printed long reports on drug overuse, transferable AMR in calves and humans, alternative therapies, and improved management. The overall agricultural message was clear: AMR was serious and British farmers should self-limit antibiotic use.¹⁴⁹

Whether certain products should be banned was another question. Having already abandoned the 1962 Netherthorpe compromise on AGP access, British veterinarians pressed for sweeping AGP restrictions. In 1965, the Veterinary Record devoted two lead articles to “infective resistance”: “No reasonable person would now doubt the need for [a reexamination of agricultural antibiotic use]. They can justly point out to both the medical profession and the agricultural industry that they have always been publicly opposed to the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics in our livestock population.”¹⁵⁰ Veterinarians’ cause was strengthened when Herbert Williams Smith and Sheila Halls published a study of AMR in E. coli in the Veterinary Record in 1966. Well over half of fecal isolates from humans, calves, pigs, and fowls were resistant to at least one antibiotic with many displaying multiple resistance.¹⁵¹ In the case of multiple resistance, the complete AMR pattern was often transferable between nonpathogenic and pathogenic E. coli strains and several Salmonella serovars. The authors had also transferred AMR from freshly isolated strains and deep-frozen nonpathogenic E. coli from 1956 to human pathogens. In most cases, transferred AMR was stably integrated into recipient strains. According to the authors, “infective resistance is probably the most common form of drug resistance among the E. coli that inhabit the alimentary tract of human beings, calves, pigs, and fowls in Britain.”¹⁵² Findings also indicated that the emergence of new infective AMR was not rare. The authors concluded that their study “greatly strengthened”¹⁵³ the case against drug overuse.

Some veterinarians also saw their own profession as partially responsible for AMR problems. According to veterinary pharmacologist Peter Eyre, AMR “in strictly ‘veterinary pathogens’ can no longer be regarded as a purely veterinary problem!”¹⁵⁴ As a consequence, Eyre endorsed medical calls for a complete review of both therapeutic and nontherapeutic antibiotic use: “the veterinary profession may have felt disquiet about the use of antibiotics as food additives and growth stimulants, but perhaps has never had enough scientific evidence. This new situation suggests that the time may well have arrived for joint action by the veterinary and medical professions immediately. There must be common responsibility to instigate radical changes in the total use of antibacterial agents in treating and preventing all aspects of human and animal disease.”¹⁵⁵ While many vets were comfortable with restricting AGPs, Eyre’s suggestion of also subjecting veterinary antibiotic use to medical review proved controversial. According to veterinarian John R. Walton, it was not overall antibiotic use but specific aspects like low-dosed AGPs in combination with animal transports and bad hygiene that were driving AMR in rural settings. Containing AMR therefore required an expansion and not a review and potential reduction of veterinary antibiotic oversight.¹⁵⁶

“Infective resistance” concerns also affected Britain’s pharmaceutical market. In the farming media and advice leaflets, US manufacturers continued to promote their products for growth promotion, prophylaxis, and animal welfare.¹⁵⁷ Titled “Have Aureomycin—Will Travel,”¹⁵⁸ a series of Cyanamid advertisements from 1965 depicted calves and pigs in front of small crates and praised aureomycin for reducing transport-induced scouring and mortality. While American manufacturers tried to shore up trust in their popular products, their European competitors tried to profit from public concerns and reports of penicillin and tetracycline AMR by marketing “safe” ersatz products. Risk was always opportunity. In 1963, Glaxo had already reacted to contemporary residues scandals (chapter 5) by printing full-page ads in Farmers Weekly for its “residue-safe” Q(uick).R(elease). mastitis treatments.¹⁵⁹ Mirroring what Christoph Gradmann has shown for Bayer’s antibiotic strategy in human medicine,¹⁶⁰ concerns about agricultural AMR selection also boosted sales of allegedly medically irrelevant AGPs and of “resistance-proof” semi-synthetic antibiotics for therapeutic purposes. During the meetings of the first Netherthorpe committee, Bayer had already promoted its nontherapeutic virginiamycin as a safe ersatz for existing AGPs.¹⁶¹ Sold as Eskalin by Beecham in Britain, virginiamycin was subsequently praised by British Farmer for answering “criticisms that continuous low level feeding of an antibiotic … can induce bacterial resistance.”¹⁶² Beecham also used concerns about resistant staphylococci to market its semi-synthetic Orbenin (cloxacillin). Company brochures praised Orbenin’s efficacy against resistant mastitis: “Orbenin meets the demand, it kills penicillin resistant and sensitive staphylococci and all streptococci.”¹⁶³ Glaxo also used AMR concerns to market combination treatments of novobiocin and penicillin G against mastitis.¹⁶⁴ For the mostly European producers of semi-synthetic and nontherapeutic antibiotics, the message was clear: AMR did not mean that antibiotic use had to be restrained. It simply meant that older (American) products had to be substituted with newer (European) ones.

While pharmaceutical manufacturers and large parts of Britain’s agricultural establishment continued to endorse routine antibiotic use on farms despite disagreeing on issues of access and antibiotic type, a small minority of producers opposed antibiotic use per se. This hard core of antibiotic critics were often members of the organic Soil Association. Founded in 1946, the Soil Association was initially headed by Eve Balfour (niece of former Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour) and had an often elite membership interested in the health-giving properties of food produced on “living soil.” The organization’s early outlook was right-wing. Editing the Soil Association’s journal Mother Earth until his death in 1963, Jorian Jenks had formerly been the agricultural advisor of Edward Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.¹⁶⁵ Although its member- and readership remained small compared to the US Rodale Press, the Soil Association’s ability to draw on influential supporters often gave it a voice that was out of proportion to its actual size.¹⁶⁶

The Soil Association had been critical of nontherapeutic antibiotic use from the beginning. Ahead of the 1953 Therapeutic Substances Act, Mother Earth printed a long article on antibiotics in animal husbandry. Acknowledging their potential to increase productivity, the article wondered whether antibiotics’ popularity was not rather “a measure of deficiencies” in existing production: “there is a grave danger that antibiotic feed supplements will be used, as so many other discoveries have been, to make bad husbandry possible and profitable instead of making good husbandry still more efficient.”¹⁶⁷ While artificial rearing might be tolerated for animals “on the grounds that death will intervene before any cumulative consequences become serious,” there remained the “subtle question” of its “ultimate effect on ourselves as consumers of [animals’] flesh.”¹⁶⁸ Published in 1957, Hugh Corley’s Organic Farming repeated warnings about “unnatural” all-meal diets and antibiotic additives: “The more varied a pig’s diet is, the happier and healthier he will be. To try to provide this variety by putting penicillin in his pigmeal is about as reasonable as feeding people on white bread plus laxatives to cancel the effects of the white bread.”¹⁶⁹ However, Corley did not consider all antibiotics bad. Similar to contemporary opinion in the US Rodale Press (chapter 3), Corley claimed that a pig eating normal swill “probably gets all the antibiotics known to science and several that are unknown, for Penicilliums (of various species) are among the commonest mildews on stale food.”¹⁷⁰ Corley also endorsed using penicillin and other antibiotics as “quick, harmless and easy”¹⁷¹ treatments for mastitis.

British organic assessments of agricultural antibiotic use grew less ambiguous during the 1960s. With prominent activists like Ruth Harrison joining its board, the Soil Association became more welfarist and environmentalist in its outlook and more out spoken about agricultural antibiotics.¹⁷² In 1968, Mother Earth reported on food poisoning in fifty-nine people in Sussex caused by the now notorious resistant farm-associated S. typhimurium Type 29 (chapter 5). In another case, a farmer had allegedly been killed by resistant pathogens carried by his animals. According to Mother Earth, restricting antibiotics would not only protect consumers from dangerous resistant strains but also incentivize more “natural” farming practices.¹⁷³ Another article cited “the complex and obscure problem of infectious drug resistance”¹⁷⁴ as an example of conventional experts’ neglect of new ecological threats. Although the Soil Association continued to endorse antibiotic treatments of sick individual animals,¹⁷⁵ it was clear that industry attempts to protect production systems by switching to new or nontherapeutic antibiotics would not satisfy Britain’s organic community.¹⁷⁶

Following the 1967 Netherthorpe report’s unexpected call for a wider antibiotic review that would also encompass therapeutic antibiotics (chapter 7), it seemed as though some form of official antibiotic restriction might actually occur. The question was whether Britain’s third antibiotic review within a decade would challenge agriculture’s growing antibiotic infrastructure or try to fix it. Agricultural opinions varied.

Unsurprisingly, British veterinary organizations intensified campaigning for bans of prescription-free antibiotic access. Presenting evidence to the new Swann committee, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons called for stricter AGP controls, the Veterinarians’ Union advocated a ban of all antibiotic feed supplements, and the BVA supported a ban of chloramphenicol, tylosin, and broad-spectrum AGPs.¹⁷⁷ Repeating demands from the early 1960s, organizations linked campaigning for enhanced control over antibiotic access with calls for a subsidized preventive health service. In October 1969, outgoing BVA president Peter Storie-Pugh looked forward to a time “when his profession could offer farmers an advisory service which could cost far less than a shelffull of drugs.”¹⁷⁸ Such implicit criticism of “irrational” antibiotic use by farmers was, however, seldom self-reflexive. Concerned about a loss of status, British veterinarians staunchly resisted any attempt to control their own prescription practices. In 1969, incoming BVA president John Parsons did not mention regulation of veterinary prescription practices when he endorsed more state control over pharmaceuticals and AGPs.¹⁷⁹

In contrast to veterinarians, most feedstuff and pharmaceutical companies were extremely wary about pending regulatory encroachment on Britain’s antibiotic market. Trying to shore up public and agricultural support against restrictions, manufacturers repeated old claims according to which AGPs’ ongoing efficacy proved that AMR was merely a theoretical hazard.¹⁸⁰ Ahead of the 1969 Swann report, the industry-sponsored Office of Health Economics (OHE) published a skillful defense of antibiotic use. Picturing quaint pastoral scenes on its cover, the OHE’s booklet not only stressed antibiotics’ economic benefits but also cited studies downplaying agriculture’s contribution to AMR. Hastily banning valuable antibiotics without commissioning more research was reckless. In the case of some disease outbreaks, more aggressive antibiotic use might have prevented harm: “The pharmaceutical manufacturers in particular would welcome the results of studies on these matters, and would willingly cooperate with them. Nothing is more frustrating than being permitted under existing regulations to do something and then being criticised by sincere scientists as being irresponsible for doing it.”¹⁸¹ According to the OHE, there remained “a lack of balanced scientific appraisal” regarding AMR: “this situation can and should be corrected over a period of time, within a framework of flexible regulations intelligently applied.”¹⁸²

Similar to 1960, most farming representatives also opposed ceding antibiotic access to officials and veterinarians. Although Farmers Weekly cautioned that “confident guesses rule out many antibiotics now used”¹⁸³ in October 1969, another article staunchly defended AGPs: if preventing the spread of resistant bacteria to consumers was the main concern, then bacterial transmission via meat and eggs was the problem—and not AMR selection on farms. Better hygiene would be far more useful than AGP bans.¹⁸⁴ After “inspired leaks”¹⁸⁵ about proposed AGP bans emerged in November 1969, commentators complained that the “talk of a ‘new peril in food’ is an exaggeration of the scientific problems presented by the increased use of these generally beneficial substances.”¹⁸⁶ Farmers felt “harassed a bit too much” about methods “which have not yet been proved to be seriously at fault.”¹⁸⁷ Concurring, the NFU’s British Farmer claimed that potential bans were based on “little convincing evidence”¹⁸⁸ and might cost farmers up to £10 million. Referring to the Manchester and Teesside outbreaks of resistant gastroenteritis, another article reaffirmed that there was no evidence linking the respective bacterial strains to farms.¹⁸⁹

Significantly, however, British agricultural complaints about “purely circumstantial evidence”¹⁹⁰ and pronounced tensions over antibiotic control did not escalate into a wider questioning of the Swann committee’s overall authority to propose new regulations. The reasons for this were twofold. First, in contrast to the United States, there was widespread agricultural AMR awareness as a result of sustained reporting in the national, agricultural, and veterinary press. As a consequence, most discussions in Britain’s agricultural sphere centered on the degree of threat posed by AMR and not on whether a threat actually existed. Second, the agricultural community’s close corporatist integration into expert and political decision-making created greater trust in the soundness of resulting verdicts. British farmers and veterinarians were well aware that the Swann committee’s nine members had been carefully chosen to represent a balance between medical, veterinary, and agricultural interests and could be confident that officials would “impose a reasonable measure of control”¹⁹¹ rather than sweeping bans. Although British Farmer warned that the Swann report might also influence the pending regulation of other embattled substances like DDT,¹⁹² agricultural representatives knew that favorable compromise solutions were more likely to occur in discreet corporatist committees than during polarizing public hearings and debates as had recently occurred in the wake of Animal Machines and would soon occur in the US (chapter 8). There was also the danger that overly aggressive attacks on corporatist compromise solutions could lead to a political exclusion from future decision-making.

Following its publication in November 1969, British agricultural commentators were thus relieved to find little radicalism in the Swann report.¹⁹³ Experts and officials had seemingly mastered the feet of satisfying nearly all sides: restricting penicillin and tetracycline AGPs fulfilled a key public health demand as well as veterinary aspirations for greater control over the animal health market. However, the report also legitimized the wider existing antibiotic infrastructure by leaving prescription-only therapeutic antibiotic use unaddressed and enabling farmers to switch to allegedly nontherapeutic prescription-free ersatz AGPs like virginiamycin (chapter 7).¹⁹⁴

The respective communities reacted accordingly. Emphasizing the Swann report’s calls for preventive health care, the BVA welcomed the additional responsibility vested in British veterinarians and predicted an increase of the “veterinary profession’s contribution to productivity in the farming industry.”¹⁹⁵ The Swann committee’s alleged inability to find evidence of veterinary malpractice also meant that veterinarians “need not, then, be ashamed of [their] record in using antibiotics.”¹⁹⁶ The farming press also reported on veterinarians’ increased control over antibiotics. While British Farmer joked that the “rows of bottles on some farm office shelves will be seriously depleted,”¹⁹⁷ Farmers Weekly printed a comment by farmer G. Armstrong, who drily observed: “My vet seems more pleased to sell products himself. I feel it is not in farmers’ best interests for a ‘closed shop’ to develop.”¹⁹⁸ However, nobody questioned the overall wisdom of the Swann report. Even though it lobbied for financial compensation, Farmers Weekly admitted, “no sensible farmer would wish to [continue] using a drug which … could be a later risk to public health.”¹⁹⁹ Others concurred: “By mass use of low-dose antibiotics in farm animals we are creating a reservoir of drug-resistant bacteria …. The range of useful antibiotics is limited: we cannot afford to devalue them.”²⁰⁰ Rapidly adapting to the new rules, British livestock organizations soon tried to turn the Swann report into a sales advantage by marketing British poultry and other meat products as “the best and safest in the world.”²⁰¹ With the exception of US broad-spectrum producers (chapters 7 and 13), most pharmaceutical manufacturers also endorsed the Swann report. In December 1969, the development committee of Wellcome-owned chemical manufacturer Cooper, McDougall and Robertson noted that “the recommendations and conclusions of the Swann committee could not be faulted and were as expected.”²⁰² In the long term, the Swann report might even be a sales advantage for British products. For most parties, it was clear that the specific drugs used on farms would change but that the overall antibiotic infrastructure aiding disease management and animal productivity would remain intact.

The 1969 Swann report marked the end of the pioneering phase of British agricultural antibiotic use. During the early postwar years, structural and economic constraints had led to a comparatively slow adoption of antibiotics on farms. However, by the late 1950s, the drugs had become common in both intensive and nonintensive settings. Although UK and US antibiotic infrastructures gradually converged, agricultural risk perceptions diverged. Influenced by the AMR-centered British risk episteme and concerns about veterinary incomes, agricultural factions fought fierce battles over antibiotic control: while livestock producers and nutritionists pushed for drug access to increase productivity and sidestep veterinary fees, veterinarians used AMR concerns to call for “rational” oversight of both therapeutic and nontherapeutic antibiotic use. Following a brief détente after the 1962 Netherthorpe report, battles for control were reignited by mid-1960s concerns about animal welfare and “infective” AMR. Once again, Britain’s corporatist system of decision-making played an important role in making resulting reforms acceptable to agricultural parties. Staffed by medical, veterinary, and agricultural interests, the Swann committee’s 1969 call for a precautionary ban of therapeutic AGPs boosted veterinary control over the lucrative antibiotic market but also legitimized ongoing unsupervised access to nontherapeutic AGPs. It also weakened American and strengthened European drug manufacturers. Satisfied by the Swann compromise, nearly all agricultural camps in Britain believed that antibiotic use on farms was now reformed and safe.