This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Burgers begin here: the Coronado Feeders feedlot in Texas.
Feedlots are high-tech, high-intensity cattle farms. "Every inch has been calculated for the meat yield for each carcass, whether it's the size of the runoff channels or the number of animals in each pen," says Mishka Henner, the Manchester-based photographer behind these images, which have been shortlisted for the Prix Pictet and are on show at the V&A in London from May 22. The red lagoon is "piss and shit, basically," says Henner, 38, "and chemicals used to break down animal waste."
In 2010, Henner set out to find secret military bases for a project, "using data from WikiLeaks, military forums and geotagged photos on [US] Department of Defense image libraries," he says. "The caption would say 'This is a secret base', but the metadata would reveal the location." It was while hunting for oil fields in the US that he stumbled across the feedlots. "They were another manifestation of the idea that we've turned our landscape into a giant circuit board. After researching the feedlots, I started to understand how advanced the circuitry for meat production is."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
