This chapter develops a metabolic and historical-geographical analysis of industrial livestock production, arguing that Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are best understood not as isolated technical sites but as nodal formations within a planet-spanning socioecological system: the Global Industrial Feedlot Matrix (GIFM). Rather than treating pollution, disease risk, labor precarity, and land degradation as localized externalities, the chapter shows how industrial meat production depends on the territorial displacement and scalar redistribution of socioenvironmental burdens across far-flung regions, on a planetary scale.

The argument is situated in relation to ongoing Urban Theory Lab work on planetary urbanization by conceptualizing the GIFM as a constellation of operational landscapes linked through logistics, grain and soy frontiers, fossil energy systems, finance, state regulation, and labor regimes. In this reading, industrial livestock production appears as a paradigmatic expression of the process of extended urbanization: a system in which agro-industrial extraction, infrastructural integration, and geometabolic escalation are organized across multiple territories well beyond the bounded city, yet remain constitutive of the contemporary urban fabric.

Historically, the chapter traces the emergence of this “metabolic monstrosity” from nineteenth-century slaughter infrastructures and stockyard complexes to postwar vertically integrated poultry systems and, more recently, neoliberal transcontinental supply chains connecting South American soy zones and East Asian meat production. Its central claim is that the apparent cheapness and efficiency of industrial meat rest on recurrently unstable, hugely destructive strategies of socioenvironmental externalization, making the GIFM a key operational landscape of contemporary capitalist urbanization.