Making livestock systems comparable: the HAPPINESS framework for comparative livestock sustainability research

1 Introduction

Our opportunities and solutions to the problems we encounter are found in a tangle of scientific disciplines and arts. We are a bit like the puppy who happily finds himself in the chicken house. There are so many interesting opportunities fluttering past our noses – we often find ourselves dashing back and forth among them having fun and going home at night exhausted, but not infrequently without a chicken to show for our efforts! (Stonaker, 1961, p. 145).

On November 24, 1961, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Animal Production in Chicago, society president H. H. Stonaker described animal husbandry as a field confronted by the abundance of its own possibilities. “Our opportunities and solutions to the problems we encounter are found in a tangle of scientific disciplines and arts,” he observed. We begin with Stonaker’s analogy to foreground a central tension in the historical development of North American animal science: expanding the field’s range of expertise did not necessarily provide a way to bring that expertise into meaningful relation. The puppy in Stonaker’s account does not suffer from a lack of possibilities, for it is surrounded by them. The problem is that movement among those possibilities does not culminate in an integrated result, and understanding this tension has contemporary methodological relevance.

Livestock sustainability is one of the defining societal, environmental, economic, and political challenges of the twenty-first century, shaping not only scientific research agendas but also global food systems, public health, environmental governance, and consumer trust. Questions once treated as largely technical (e.g., feed efficiency, reproductive performance, carcass quality, disease control, or genetic improvement) are intertwined with overlapping environmental, social, public health, and political challenges. Livestock systems have thus become more visible across multiple public-facing arenas not only as sites of food production, but also as social, ecological, and technical formations. Under Anthropocene conditions, in which human activity has become a planetary force shaping climate, ecosystems, and living systems, livestock systems can no longer be analyzed against a passive environmental background (Robertson, 2026). This also resonates with sociological approaches to food and agriculture that emphasize foodscapes and the multi-scalar food economy, treating food systems as socially organized across linked cultural, political, ecological, and economic terrains rather than as purely technical sectors (Carolan, 2022).

This expanded problem space creates a methodological paradox where livestock sustainability research increasingly compares systems across contexts, yet the conditions that make such comparisons meaningful are often left underexamined. Such comparisons often assume that what counts as efficiency, resilience, welfare, or sustainability in one setting can be readily applied or interpreted in another, as if a “one-size-fits-all” model were sufficient for inherently heterogeneous systems. In practice, however, livestock systems are assembled differently across ecological conditions, availability and quality of natural resources, policy environments, labor arrangements, veterinary infrastructures, cultural expectations, market logics, and historical trajectories. These differences, we argue, are constitutive of the systems being studied. Recent comparative livestock research makes this problem especially visible. Drawing on case studies across diverse production systems and agroecological settings, Kazanski et al. (2025) show that production-system type alone is insufficient to explain either current practices or opportunities for change; those possibilities are shaped by interacting ecological, economic, institutional, social, and cultural conditions. At the same time, growing attention to the social dimensions of livestock farming has underscored the importance of labor, legitimacy, and lived production conditions across diverse settings (Busch, 2023).

Livestock research has indeed developed increasingly sophisticated ways to compare production systems, including indicator frameworks spanning environmental, economic, and social sustainability (Lebacq et al., 2013), life-cycle comparisons of contrasting systems (de Vries et al., 2015), and multidimensional comparisons of conventional and organic production across productivity, animal welfare, public health, economic performance, and environmental impact (van Wagenberg et al., 2017). Yet this work also demonstrates that comparative conclusions depend on how systems, outcomes, and units of analysis are constructed. Farms classified within the same production-system type may remain highly heterogeneous in their management practices and input use (Ryschawy et al., 2012), while different evaluative frameworks can generate sharply different accounts of the same systems. Joly et al. (2024), for example, found that ruminant systems performed more favorably under ecosystem-services assessment, whereas monogastric systems performed more favorably when evaluated through product-based life-cycle assessment. Efforts to harmonize livestock life-cycle assessments respond to such variation by developing common methodological criteria (Goglio et al., 2023). HAPPINESS addresses a related but distinct methodological problem. Rather than proposing another indicator set or harmonization protocol, it applies comparative case study methodology to examine how livestock problems are produced relationally across sites, scales, and histories.

Food-systems governance scholarship reinforces the need for a shift in how livestock sustainability is conceptualized, evaluated, and compared across contexts. Food-system transformation is increasingly understood not as a purely technical process, but as a political, institutional, and contested one shaped by power, values, and uneven capacities for change (Béné and Abdulai, 2024). Similarly, critiques of agricultural science’s long-standing commitment to “feeding the world” show that productivity-oriented research agendas can obscure the social and political contexts through which food-system problems are defined and addressed (Tomlinson, 2013; Haring et al., 2023). Empirical work on livestock and livestock-adjacent systems makes this point even more concrete. The adoption of silvopastoral practices in Colombia, for example, depends not only on ecological promise or technical feasibility, but also on farm-level resources, institutional support, economic incentives, and perceived risk (Chamorro-Vargas et al., 2025). Likewise, women’s engagement in dairy value chains in Tanzania is shaped by local gender norms and locally specific understandings of empowerment, demonstrating that even widely used development categories do not travel unchanged across settings (Achandi et al., 2023). This also raises a question about the politics of comparative knowledge: which livestock systems, metrics, and production ideals become treated as generalizable, and which are marked as local, traditional, underdeveloped, or merely contextual? A comparative livestock systems methodology must therefore examine not only whether knowledge travels, but how some categories acquire the authority to travel as universal while others are treated as situated exceptions.

This article develops HAPPINESS, a livestock-specific, multi-scalar, and relational study-design framework grounded in socio-ecological-technical systems thinking and informed by comparative case study methodology. Rather than proposing another indicator set, harmonization protocol, or composite sustainability index, HAPPINESS treats comparability itself as an empirical question. It examines how livestock outcomes, metrics, technologies, and interventions are produced, measured, interpreted, governed, and contested under different institutional, ecological, economic, cultural, ethical, and political conditions.

HAPPINESS is intended to complement rather than replace experimental rigor, biological precision, and applied problem solving by clarifying the conditions under which findings can be meaningfully compared, interpreted, adapted, or transferred across livestock systems. The article develops this argument through historical interpretive document analysis of presidential addresses and selected non-presidential interventions associated with the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS). These texts are examined as moments of institutional self-definition, self-critique, and horizon-setting within an influential U.S.-centered formation of animal science rather than as representative of animal science as such.¹ Later conceptual and ethical scholarship is used to contextualize the historical findings and inform the framework’s contemporary methodological development.

The central claim of this article is therefore historical as well as methodological. American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse repeatedly articulated that livestock problems exceeded narrow technical frames, but this recognition was not consolidated within the corpus into an explicit comparative methodology adequate to the heterogeneity of livestock systems. HAPPINESS responds to this unresolved tension by translating comparative case study methodology and socio-ecological-technical thinking into a livestock-specific framework for examining how findings, metrics, interventions, and technologies become meaningful, transferable, adaptable, or contested across different production settings. The study addresses two research questions:

• How did American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse construct the expanding object, public responsibilities, and comparative challenges of animal science between 1909 and 2004?
• How can these historical tensions inform a livestock-specific framework for comparative research?

The article proceeds in three steps. First, it examines historical shifts and recurrent tensions in how American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) presidential addresses and selected non-presidential interventions constructed animal science’s object of inquiry and public responsibilities. Second, it identifies the unresolved methodological problem made visible by this expansion: how findings, metrics, technologies, and interventions can be meaningfully compared or transferred across heterogeneous livestock systems. Finally, it develops HAPPINESS as a practical study design framework that brings comparative case study methodology into conversation with socio-ecological-technical thinking.

2 Methodological approach

This study uses historical interpretive document analysis informed by reflexive thematic analysis to examine presidential addresses and selected non-presidential interventions associated with the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) (N = 70 documents) published between 1909 and 2004.² Presidential addresses constitute recurring occasions in which Society leaders formally reflected on the field's priorities, responsibilities, and future directions. The second group comprises selected non-presidential interventions delivered in prominent annual-meeting contexts, including plenary, general-session, and keynote settings. These interventions are analytically important because invited speakers were similarly given society-wide platforms from which to frame major scientific, institutional, political, or ethical questions confronting animal science. The genres were therefore not assumed to be interchangeable or treated as equivalent observations; rather, both were analyzed as institutionally prominent forms of horizon-setting discourse, with differences in speaker position, occasion, and genre retained as interpretive context.

The analysis does not attempt to provide an exhaustive history of animal science. Instead, it interprets recurrent patterns, tensions, and shifts in how this influential institutional formation narrated its objects of inquiry, scientific responsibilities, and relationships with producers, publics, policymakers, and animals.

Consistent with historical interpretive document analysis, the study treats documents as socially situated institutional productions rather than as neutral repositories of information (Bowen, 2009; Prior, 2003; Trouillot and Carby, 2015). Presidential addresses and selected non-presidential interventions were analyzed as strategic moments of institutional self-presentation through which animal science publicly narrated its priorities, responsibilities, tensions, boundaries, and imagined futures. The analysis therefore considered not only what topics appeared in the addresses, but also how problems, publics, forms of expertise, and legitimate scientific responsibilities were constructed within them.

Analysis proceeded through repeated reading, initial coding, and iterative development and revision of interpretive patterns across the corpus, following a reflexive thematic approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Initial codes were developed through engagement with the documents rather than through the mechanical application of a predetermined codebook (see Supplementary Materials for the final codebook). Codes were subsequently compared, grouped, revised, and interpreted in relation to the study’s questions about disciplinary scope, specialization, comparability, institutional authority, public legitimacy, and knowledge circulation.

This archive has clear limits. As scholars of historical methods emphasize, archives are selective and institutionally mediated rather than neutral repositories of the past (Trouillot and Carby, 2015). Presidential and selected non-presidential interventions are strategic, elite forms of institutional self-presentation; they do not capture the full diversity of debate, dissent, or practice within animal science in the U.S., nor the full range of actors who shape livestock systems. Accordingly, silence in this corpus is not evidence that a concern or method was absent from animal science more broadly. Claims about an unresolved comparative problem are restricted to this institutional discourse.

The 2004 endpoint also constitutes a temporal limitation. The corpus cannot establish how American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse itself developed in response to subsequent changes in animal agriculture, including the expansion of precision livestock technologies, digital data infrastructures, and artificial intelligence. References to these post-2004 developments therefore constitute contemporary methodological extensions of the historical argument, informed by later scholarship, rather than findings derived from the archival corpus.

The archive is also geographically and institutionally situated in the U.S. This is a limitation, but also part of its analytical significance. Following scholarship on academic dependency and the unequal global circulation of knowledge, this article does not treat U.S. animal science as a universal account of animal science. Rather, it examines how a powerful disciplinary formation has narrated livestock problems, scientific responsibility, and the conditions of comparability over time. This matters because U.S. animal science, land-grant expertise, production models, technologies, metrics, and development practices have often circulated internationally and have at times been treated as broadly applicable or globally relevant. The American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) archive is therefore analyzed as a situated case with transnational significance, not as a neutral or universal standpoint.

The asymmetry at issue is not simply that knowledge originates in different places, but that its place of origin is marked unevenly. Knowledge produced within institutionally dominant centers can circulate as animal science without a geographical adjective, whereas knowledge produced elsewhere is more readily classified as local, Indigenous, traditional, or context-specific. This resembles the global division of intellectual labor identified by Alatas (2003, 2006), where some sites supply concepts and generalizations, while others appear primarily as sources of data or as environments in which externally formulated knowledge is applied. Within animal biosciences, John and John (2023) show how Indigenous perspectives were largely absent from leading animal science journals, while the few relevant studies were concentrated in bounded areas such as human-animal bonds, genetic testing, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Baquero et al. (2021) describe a related division in global health, whereby the Global North is positioned as the producer of epistemology and the Global South as its recipient or field of application. Reading the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) archive as situated therefore refuses the unmarked universality historically available to powerful disciplinary formations.

Treating the archive as situated also requires situating our own interpretive positions and the interdisciplinary commitments through which both the historical analysis and HAPPINESS were developed. Importantly, the HAPPINESS framework emerges from our shared commitment to advancing positive welfare for large and food-producing animals and from our conviction that this work requires comparative inquiry capable of bringing distinct disciplinary traditions into sustained and generative relation. Our collaboration spans sociology, comparative education, international development, animal science, animal nutrition, and veterinary medicine. These locations carry different epistemic assumptions, vocabularies, standards of evidence, and methodological practices, ranging from qualitative and interpretive inquiry to epidemiologic, diagnostic, and experimental research. We do not regard these differences as obstacles to be erased. Instead, we approach them as sites of learning that call upon us to listen across disciplinary boundaries, question the limits of our own training, and remain accountable to the animals and human communities implicated in our work. HAPPINESS is therefore both a product of and a commitment to this ongoing collaboration: an effort to honor what becomes possible when disciplinary differences are engaged critically, carefully, and relationally, and an invitation to future scholars to create further spaces in which diverse forms of knowledge can be brought into meaningful conversation around the shared work of understanding and improving animal lives.

3 Results

The analysis identifies four recurring patterns in American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse: expansion of the disciplinary object; tension between specialization and synthesis; widening global scope without a corresponding method for assessing comparability across heterogeneous livestock systems; and the growing importance of public, policy, and ethical legitimacy. These patterns overlapped and did not unfold linearly. Technically bounded and professionally inward-looking orientations persisted alongside broader systems framings, while calls for synthesis often remained organized around production rather than a redistribution of epistemic authority. The sections that follow trace changes in emphasis while attending to these continuities and tensions.

3.1 From nutrition to production: the early expansion of the object

One of the most important themes in the early archive is the widening of the object of inquiry. In the first decades of the twentieth century, animal science was already being articulated in relation to broad questions of food supply, permanence, and agricultural futurity. Henry P. Armsby, the first president of what would become the American Society of Animal Science, framed animal production not simply as a matter of immediate technical gain but as a societal problem concerned with how to sustain food production under conditions of finite resources and social obligation (Armsby, 1909, 1910). This early concern with permanence and food supply created the conditions for a broader disciplinary shift whereby animal nutrition increasingly had to be understood as part of the larger organization of animal production.

Evvard’s 1918 address is especially revealing because it registers and elaborates a transition already institutionalized in the Society’s 1915 name change. Founded as the American Society of Animal Nutrition, the Society adopted the name American Society of Animal Production in 1915 and its present name, the American Society of Animal Science, in 1961 (Armsby, 1909; Forbes, 1915; Phillips, 1962). These successive name changes can be read as institutional traces of an expanding epistemic object from a relatively bounded concern with nutrition, to a broader concern with production, and eventually to a more encompassing scientific field organized around the animal, its environments, and the multiple biological and managerial processes through which livestock systems are made knowable. Evvard’s 1918 address thus marks a moment in which the object of inquiry was no longer reducible to feed chemistry or ration formulation alone. Production required attention to the animal as a biological organism, but also to management, breeding, environmental conditions, and the organization of agricultural practice.

This early broadening is significant for two reasons. First, it shows that animal science’s trajectory repeatedly expands what counts as relevant knowledge. Second, it reframes the field’s enduring challenge as one of understanding relationships among variables, systems, and contexts. Once the Society moved rhetorically from nutrition to production, livestock outcomes could no longer be narrated as the sum of isolated inputs. Yet these addresses did not specify how evidence about animals, environments, institutions, and production settings should be brought into comparative relation.

3.2 Complexity recognized: interdependence, land use, and the limits of narrow inquiry

By the 1930s and 1940s, American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) presidential discourse becomes markedly more explicit about systemic complexity. The addresses from this period begin to reframe livestock production as an interdependent problem that cannot be adequately understood through narrowly bounded disciplinary or experimental lenses. Across discussions of disease, land use, feeding, and research organization, the archive increasingly treats biological outcomes as inseparable from management, economics, cropping systems, and broader agricultural structure (McCampbell, 1932; Kildee, 1935; Brown, 1937).

This shift is especially visible in how disease and feeding are discussed. Rather than treating animal disease as a strictly pathological matter, McCampbell (1932) links it to feeding, management, and farm economics, suggesting that biological events cannot be isolated from the wider conditions of production. Kildee (1935), in turn, situates animal production within changing physical, economic, and social structures of agriculture, explicitly tying livestock research to local, state, regional, and national land-use planning. Animal production is being conceptualized here as embedded in arrangements of land allocation, cropping systems, public institutions, and resource governance.

Brown’s (1937) address furthers this line of critique by questioning the narrowing tendencies of technical experimentation. His concern is that feeding trials organized around immediate market or crop-surplus problems could obscure the broader agricultural systems in which livestock are embedded. In contemporary terms, Brown is warning against system misalignment, where the problem optimized within the experiment may not be the problem that matters in the larger system. Williams (1938) states the problem more explicitly:

We are properly becoming better informed with respect to details of reproduction, nutrition, physiology, etc., but we must guard against a tendency to lose the grasp of the relationship of the scientific detail to the whole picture. (Williams, 1938, p. 9).

Williams’s warning is significant because it identifies a mismatch that would recur throughout the archive, namely, that the field’s increasing capacity to produce specialized knowledge was not matched by an equivalent capacity to reassemble that knowledge around livestock problems as wholes. Bethke’s (1943) call for “synthesis, as well as analysis” (p. 88) and Weaver’s (1945) emphasis on coordination suggest that fragmentation was not an unrecognized consequence of disciplinary development, for it was repeatedly diagnosed from within. Still, synthesis remained an aspiration invoked against specialization rather than a clearly articulated methodology for determining how different forms of evidence, scales of analysis, or production conditions should be brought into relation.

The practical stakes of this unresolved problem became especially visible under wartime conditions. Writing in 1943, amid the intensified production demands and material shortages of World War II, Maynard framed livestock not simply as a technical field of animal improvement but as part of a national food-security system:

The principal over-all job of the livestock industry is to provide food for man. It has met the stepped-up demands of the war emergency in a remarkable manner despite shortages of labor, machinery, and of certain critical feed ingredients. These shortages are likely to become more acute. Disease problems also increase as the animal industry is pushed for maximum production. (Maynard, 1943, p. 88).

During the 1940s, American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse was not simply evolving through internal disciplinary reflection; it was being reorganized under the pressure of wartime emergency, disrupted supply chains, labor shortages, and the intensified political demand to secure food. Peters’s (1942) address explicitly situates animal production within a “present national emergency,” noting that normal research trajectories would be interrupted even as the field was asked to sustain production under altered conditions. Maynard’s (1943) address goes further, framing the problem as one of “interrelated” (p. 88) pressures linking livestock numbers, feed scarcity, disease, and human nutrition in wartime. Thus, the archive suggests that animal science’s recurrent turn toward synthesis was a historically situated response to moments in which livestock production became newly visible as a strategic, interdependent, and politically consequential assemblage.

3.3 Broadening scope: global horizons and the non-universality of livestock systems

In the 1960s and 1970s, questions of global scope become more explicit and institutionally visible in the archive. During this period, presidential discourse increasingly invokes “world animal production,” global population pressures, and the uneven conditions under which animal products are produced and consumed. This matters because once the field begins to imagine livestock production on a world scale, the assumption that one production model can serve as a universal benchmark becomes far more difficult to sustain. Phillips’s (1962) address is particularly significant in this regard. He makes the comparative problem explicit by refusing to treat North American dietary arrangements as universal:

We who live in the United States, and in Canada, accept as the norm a dietary pattern built around meat and other animal products. We share this pattern with a minority of the people of the world. For the majority, the normal diet is built around plant products, and often around the produce of a single plant such as rice, wheat or cassava. (Phillips, 1962, p. 251).

This passage is methodologically and politically significant. On the one hand, it rhetorically provincializes the North American diet by identifying it as the pattern of a global minority rather than as an unmarked norm. On the other, Phillips’s purpose is not to establish different dietary systems as equally legitimate alternatives. The comparison remains organized around a “we” located in the United States and Canada, from whose dietary position the predominantly plant-based diets of the world’s majority become visible as scarcity and developmental difference. Across the address, low availability of animal products is treated primarily as a nutritional and production problem to be ameliorated through scientific knowledge, improved management, and increased productive efficiency. Although Phillips recognizes ecological constraints, plant-protein alternatives, and the possibility that high-consuming countries may not maintain existing levels indefinitely, animal-product abundance remains the normative horizon of the analysis.

Read against the grain, this comparison also risks presenting differences in production and consumption as differences in technical capacity rather than as historically produced relations. Phillips acknowledges population density, land availability, trade restrictions, agricultural organization, and uneven scientific capacity, but does not systematically examine how colonial histories, capital investment, state support, feed-grain infrastructures, and international trade helped produce those inequalities. Consequently, systems with high animal productivity can appear as technically advanced models, while others are rendered deficient, traditional, or situated along a “long road” (p. 261) toward efficiency. Phillips’s address therefore broadened animal science’s geographical horizon without fully historicizing the standards through which differently situated livestock systems were compared.

What follows in the later 1960s and early 1970s is less a singular conceptual breakthrough than a gradual institutionalization of this broader horizon. Oldfield’s (1967) “The Broadening Scope of Animal Science” and the meeting theme on “world animal production” suggest that the Society was no longer only expanding across internal subdisciplines; it was increasingly situating itself within an international field of uneven production systems, resource conditions, and developmental possibilities. Sessions on production systems, waste management, environmental influences on nutrient requirements, and Lofgreen’s (1971) keynote on “The Politics of Animal Science” indicate that by the early 1970s, the field was already operating in political, environmental, and institutional registers that exceeded narrow technical concerns.

Once the object became global, knowledge produced in one setting could no longer be assumed to apply unchanged elsewhere. Livestock systems are differently assembled socio-ecological-technical formations, so comparison must ask which relationships travel, which remain system-specific, and how particular systems or metrics acquire authority as standards.

3.4 Publics, policy, and ethics: the late twentieth-century transformation

The late twentieth century did not simply add publics, policy, and ethics to an already expanding disciplinary agenda, but altered the position of publics relative to scientific authority. Earlier addresses had largely imagined publics as populations to be supplied, markets to be organized, or audiences to be instructed. By the 1980s, publics increasingly appeared as skeptical consumers, ethical claimants, political adversaries, and actors capable of withdrawing legitimacy from animal agriculture. The change was therefore relational, and animal science was being compelled to reconsider not only the range of problems within its jurisdiction, but the terms on which its authority could be exercised.

Evvard’s (1918) address is an early example. Marking the Society’s transition from animal nutrition to animal production, he argued that a “new era” required attention to “marketing, transportation, distribution, and organization” (p. 55). Coffey’s (1923) address similarly situated animal husbandry within farmer debt, rural credit, transportation costs, consumer demand, urban food provisioning, and advertising. McCampbell’s (1932) address called for American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) to expand its scope to disease control and economics, linking animal husbandry to veterinary cooperation and the economic conditions of livestock production. Kildee’s (1935) address placed animal husbandry within land-use planning, soil conservation, and coordinated local, state, regional, and federal governance, insisting that wise land use should concern “every person living in America regardless of his or her location, vocation, or politics” (p. 9). Briggs’s (1952) made public communication an explicit scientific responsibility, arguing that research was incomplete until scientists could “tell and show the public” how to use their findings (p. 226). These earlier interventions suggest that public and institutional questions were present well before the 1980s, even if they were framed primarily through producer viability, disease control, market organization, land-use planning, agricultural education, public accountability, and research communication rather than animal rights, welfare ethics, or social legitimacy.

The 1970s further intensified this movement by placing agricultural research in a more explicitly public and political arena. Acker’s (1978) keynote, “Agricultural Research in the Public Market Place,” framed agricultural research as competing for public dollars in an environment shaped by legislators, taxpayers, administrators, competitive grants, and shifting expectations for accountability. His warning that “the last thing a successful merchant would do is stand behind the counter and wait for the business to walk in the front door” (p. 1357) recast agricultural research as something whose public value had to be actively demonstrated in competition for funding, political attention, and institutional support. This means that scientists could no longer presume that useful knowledge would move automatically from the laboratory into policy or practice. Nor could they assume that the authority or social value of agricultural research would remain self-evident. Public engagement was becoming a condition of institutional survival.

By the mid-1980s, substantively different controversies were being assembled within American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse as a common challenge to animal agriculture. Garrett (1984) juxtaposed animal-rights activism, critiques of animal experimentation, and popular warnings about red meat and cholesterol. In dismissing some of these claims as “based on emotion and moral conclusions, not facts” (p. 1685), Garrett located credible judgment within farm experience and biological training, rendering affect and moral concern as epistemic deficits rather than as possible ways of knowing and apprehending harm (Jaggar, 1989; Million, 2009).

Omtvedt (1985) grouped diet and health, antibiotic use, food safety, animal welfare, consumer demand, and the threatened image of red meat among the issues requiring disciplinary response. Fontenot (1986) similarly identified animal care, regulation, government relations, industry liaison, and red-meat consumption as matters of professional concern. Their conjunction is analytically important. Questions about animal suffering, human health, scientific uncertainty, regulation, and market demand were not identical, yet they could be consolidated into a more general crisis of confidence in animal agriculture.

This consolidation expanded the Society’s responsibilities, but it could also render political and ethical conflict as a more administratively manageable problem of communication, coordination, and representation. Preston’s observation that “producers have problems and scientists have disciplines” (Preston, 1987, p. 1415) named a genuine mismatch between the organization of expertise and the organization of lived problems. Yet his warnings about anti-science and back-to-nature movements also positioned at least some public criticism outside legitimate scientific reason. The resulting tension remains consequential, for public contestation could be treated as evidence that animal science needed to reconsider its objects, assumptions, and practices, or it could be interpreted primarily as a failure of publics to understand scientific knowledge and modern production.

American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) responded not only discursively but organizationally. The creation of an Executive Vice President position, the establishment of a Washington-area presence, and engagement with Congressional staff, federal agencies, commodity organizations, and other professional societies placed the Society more directly within the infrastructures through which agricultural knowledge entered law, funding, and regulation (Theurer, 1988). Moser (1989) described this activity as “plowing new ground,” presenting American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) as a resource for actors making decisions about animal agriculture. These developments institutionalized legitimacy work by building an organizational capacity to place animal science expertise within sites of political decision-making.

The ethical interventions of the early 2000s introduced a more fundamental possibility. Rollin (2004) did not treat public concern for animals merely as an image problem or communication deficit. By locating the “loss of husbandry to industry” within a changing social ethic, he argued that professional autonomy depended upon responsiveness to moral expectations that science could not settle by technical evidence alone. Schillo (2003), in a different register, called attention to the discourses and practices through which animal agriculture was socially constituted and contested. These interventions opened a distinction between managing legitimacy and undertaking disciplinary transformation. The first seeks to preserve authority by improving communication and institutional representation; the second asks whether public contestation reveals limitations in the field’s categories, practices, and underlying relations with animals.

Publics, policy, and ethics should therefore not be understood as additional topics appended to an originally biological discipline. They altered the conditions under which animal science knowledge could claim authority, attract resources, enter policy, and define legitimate animal production. The historical movement traced here is a movement from scientific authority exercised largely through production and instruction toward authority that had increasingly to be negotiated within contested institutional and ethical worlds. Seen in this light, the expansion concerned not only which problems animal science addressed, but which forms of judgment it was prepared to recognize as knowledge.

4 Discussion: the unresolved methodological problem

Across the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) archive examined here, animal science leaders repeatedly recognized complexity, interdependence, and the limitations of narrow specialization. Yet these recognitions were not consolidated within this discourse into an explicit method for determining when findings, metrics, technologies, or interventions produced in one livestock system could be meaningfully compared with or transferred to another. The unresolved problem concerns forms of comparison that remain single-level, metric-driven, or insufficiently attentive to the historical, institutional, and social conditions that make outcomes appear commensurable.

The archive’s calls for broader scope and synthesis have contemporary counterparts in food-systems scholarship, including holistic frameworks for transformation, multi-scale sustainability assessment, and governance-oriented analyses of agri-food transitions (Béné and Abdulai, 2024; Binder et al., 2010; Candel and Pereira, 2017; Lopez-Merino et al., 2026; Grohmann et al., 2023). Yet the proliferation of broader frameworks does not by itself resolve the livestock-specific comparative problem made visible through the archive: how can biological precision and experimental rigor be retained while treating comparability as an empirical question? What is being compared, according to whose objectives, through which categories and metrics, and under what conditions can a finding travel?

The contemporary stakes of this unresolved historical problem become concrete in livestock research. Sumberg’s (2002) analysis of livestock nutrition research in Africa shows that a nutritional “constraint” depends on the objective against which system performance is judged. Prioritizing biological productivity per animal can obscure producer objectives such as income smoothing, manure, draught power, herd recovery after drought, or reliability under variable conditions. Chung (2024) identifies a related problem when emissions intensity per unit of animal product makes productivity the organizing reference for comparison. This functional unit can make high-yield industrial systems appear efficient while recoding dispossession, inadequate public support, or constrained pastoral mobility as low productivity or biological inefficiency.

Chenais and Fischer’s (2018) study of veterinary epidemiology among Basongora pastoralists in Uganda reveals another manifestation of the same difficulty. Local descriptions of cattle disease did not map neatly onto textbook nomenclature, while co-infections, land-use pressures, wildlife contact, treatment costs, and limited veterinary infrastructure shaped how disease was experienced and prioritized. Comparative analysis therefore requires more than adding contextual variables to an otherwise stable technical problem; it must examine how livestock systems produce the categories, objectives, and measurement infrastructures through which comparison becomes possible.

Read back through the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) archive, these contemporary cases sharpen the significance of its recurrent calls for the “whole picture,” synthesis, coordination, and broader disciplinary responsibility. They demonstrate that these calls were not merely historical expressions of concern but early formulations of a problem that remains methodologically consequential. Four links connect the historical findings to the proposed framework. Expansion beyond nutrition supports defining problems across interacting domains; recurrent fragmentation requires researchers to specify relations among forms of evidence and scales; global comparison makes commensurability and transferability empirical questions; and public contestation requires ethical, political, and institutional judgments to be treated as constitutive of system evaluation. The archive supplies this comparative problem logic, not the nine domains by itself. Their substantive content is synthesized from contemporary socio-ecological-technical, livestock-sustainability, welfare, and food-systems scholarship.

5 The HAPPINESS framework

HAPPINESS gives these four commitments practical form by integrating two complementary foundations: (1) Comparative case study methodology provides a logic for examining how problems, categories, and findings are produced across sites, scales, and histories (Vavrus and Bartlett, 2006; Bartlett and Vavrus, 2014, 2017); and (2) Socio-ecological-technical thinking specifies the interacting conditions through which livestock outcomes are constituted. HAPPINESS is therefore offered as a study design heuristic and comparative protocol, not as a validated sustainability index or a method for producing a single composite score. Its contribution lies in specifying how researchers interrogate relations, commensurability, scale, power, and transferability across them.

Accordingly, HAPPINESS does not presume that the appropriate unit of comparison is a bounded farm, herd, species, region, or production system. It instead compares a livestock problem as it is produced across interacting conditions. Analysis moves horizontally across sites, systems, and species; vertically across micro, meso, and macro scales; and transversally through the historical processes that produce present conditions. Micro refers to everyday practices, interactions, and embodied animal or human outcomes; meso to organizational and infrastructural arrangements such as farms, supply chains, veterinary networks, and extension institutions; and macro to policy regimes, markets, trade relations, regulatory environments, and public discourse. Figure 1 depicts this comparative architecture.

The importance of scale is visible in nutrient cycling, whereby the same metric, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, or carbon balance, may support different interpretations depending on whether it is assessed at the field, farm, watershed, regional, or national scale (Sharara et al., 2022). At the same time, scale should be distinguished from metric tradeoffs. This means that an intervention may improve nutrient balance at a given scale while producing consequences for land use, biodiversity, labor, animal welfare, or producer viability.

Comparative inquiry must therefore move across levels rather than collapsing evaluation into a single preferred metric. A comparative livestock systems approach asks not only which metric is being used, but at what scale, in relation to which other metrics, and for what sustainability purpose. In this way, the HAPPINESS framework also provides a way to analyze tradeoffs, synergies, and unintended consequences across domains. Rather than resolving these tensions prematurely, it encourages their explicit identification and comparative analysis across contexts.

Most importantly, the HAPPINESS framework treats comparability as an empirical question. Before comparing feed efficiency, emissions, welfare scores, or antimicrobial use across sites, researchers must ask whether the categories, metrics, and conditions of measurement are sufficiently aligned to support meaningful comparison. When alignment is limited, the task becomes examining how categories differ, how metrics travel, and what those differences mean for interpretation.

This is one reason the HAPPINESS framework resists reducing livestock sustainability to any single domain of analysis. Biological performance, ecological footprint, animal welfare, producer livelihood, labor conditions, food quality, public health, and social legitimacy are often mutually constitutive rather than analytically separable in practice. A comparative livestock systems approach therefore seeks cross-domain integration not in the sense of total comprehensiveness, but in the sense of greater transparency about which domains are foregrounded, how they are related, and what remains outside the frame. In this respect, the HAPPINESS framework also resonates with broader integrative frameworks such as One Welfare, which connect animal wellbeing, human wellbeing, and environmental conditions rather than treating them as separate spheres of concern (García Pinillos et al., 2016). Recent work on embedding animal welfare in life cycle assessment similarly argues that welfare should be treated as a core dimension of sustainability assessment rather than as an optional or peripheral concern, especially because welfare is linked to environmental performance, human health, socio-economic outcomes, resilience, and societal acceptance (Kyriazakis and Wangui, 2026).

5.1 The nine domains of HAPPINESS

Table 1 specifies the nine domains and examples of the system conditions each can bring into comparative analysis:

Table 1. HAPPINESS domains and examples of system conditions relevant to comparative livestock systems analysis.

The domains are intentionally non-exclusive analytic entry points rather than mutually bounded categories or independent variables. A study may begin with those domains most salient to the problem under investigation and then trace how processes operating through them reshape conditions in others. The domains therefore need not receive equal analytical weight; identifying which become more or less consequential, and through what relationships, is itself part of the comparative analysis.

Although Table 1 identifies descriptive domains, each is also a domain of power. Knowledge plurality therefore cannot be confined to the sociocultural domain as an additional variable. Indigenous animals, breeds, or genetic resources may be studied without centering Indigenous values, sovereignty, or authority over data (John and John, 2023). An “ecology of knowledge” instead treats scientific knowledge as one constituent of a plural epistemic field whose hierarchies are context-dependent rather than universal (Baquero et al., 2021). The question of whose knowledge defines the animal, system, problem, indicator, and desired outcome must run transversally across all nine domains.

Policy, networks, economics, sociocultural norms, and technologies likewise shape whose labor and knowledge count, how risks are distributed, and which definitions of sustainability become authoritative. Gender-transformative work in Ethiopia shows that livestock interventions must engage structures organizing participation and benefit rather than treat gender as additive (Kinati et al., 2023); dairy value-chain research in Tanzania similarly demonstrates that empowerment, labor, and market participation are mediated by local norms and meanings (Achandi et al., 2023). HAPPINESS thus treats power, meaning, and institutional location as internal to comparison.

Biophysical indicators such as productivity, fertility, morbidity, mortality, feed efficiency, emissions, and nutrient cycling remain indispensable, but they are treated as system outcomes rather than self-sufficient measures. Their interpretation depends on ecological conditions and on institutional infrastructures such as staffing, veterinary access, extension capacity, processing systems, and knowledgeable caretakers. These arrangements shape productivity, disease response, antimicrobial stewardship, welfare oversight, and the practical enactment of care (Rollin, 2004). Ignoring them risks attributing outcomes to technical choices alone.

Researchers should therefore justify which domains are included, foregrounded, or left aside. This flexibility provides interdisciplinary teams with a shared language and clarifies why interviews, institutional and archival analysis, discourse analysis, comparative ethnography, and biophysical measurement may each be necessary to understand how a livestock problem is produced.

5.2 Applying HAPPINESS: diagnostic questions for research, practice, and policy

HAPPINESS is intended to guide inquiry rather than prescribe a fixed sequence of steps. The nine domains help identify conditions that may be relevant to a livestock problem, while the horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes direct attention to how that problem takes shape across places, scales, and over time. The six questions in Table 2 provide a practical way to examine the assumptions that make comparison possible. They ask researchers to consider how a problem is understood, what conditions shape it, whose perspectives matter, what is being compared, and whether findings or practices can meaningfully travel across settings.

Table 2. Practical guide to applying HAPPINESS through six diagnostic questions.

The questions are not meant to function as a checklist, nor will each carry the same weight in every study. Their purpose is to make comparative choices explicit: what is being foregrounded, how different dimensions of the problem are related, and what remains outside the scope of the analysis.

These questions encourage researchers to treat comparison as something to be examined rather than assumed. They direct attention to differences between cases, as well as how the cases themselves are constituted through particular social, institutional, ecological, and historical conditions. The questions can be revisited throughout a study as the comparative problem becomes clearer and new relationships or differences emerge.

We illustrate this approach through an ongoing multi-sited qualitative study of labor precarity and livestock sustainability in Minnesota swine production. In this study, HAPPINESS informs how we define the problem, select points of comparison, and trace relationships across sites, scales, and historical processes. One strand examines California Proposition 12 (Prop 12) (CDFA, 2018), which establishes minimum confinement standards for breeding pigs and restricts the sale in California of covered pork produced under noncompliant confinement conditions. Consistent with established criteria for rigor in qualitative inquiry, the study strengthens credibility through triangulation across on-farm observations, interviews with differently positioned farm, veterinary, and animal-welfare actors, and policy and documentary sources, alongside comparison across farms differently situated in relation to Prop 12 (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016).

Rather than treating the policy as a bounded welfare intervention, HAPPINESS prompted us to trace how a problem entering initially through policy and spatio-environmental domains becomes connected to economics, infrastructure, feeding, husbandry, labor, human-animal and animal-animal interactions, and animal health and affective welfare. Horizontally, the study examines which relationships persist or vary across farm settings; vertically, how regulatory and market expectations are translated through farm-level decisions into everyday work and care; and transversally, how policy development and implementation have accumulated over time to shape present production conditions. The study therefore provides an empirical application of HAPPINESS, while the credibility of its interpretations rests on the qualitative design and triangulation described above.

The Minnesota study represents one empirical application of HAPPINESS rather than a template for its use across livestock systems. Application across smallholder, pastoral, cooperative, and commercial livestock systems, for instance, should not begin by asking how HAPPINESS can be transferred unchanged from one setting to another. It should begin with how locally situated actors define the problem, the relationships and forms of knowledge they consider consequential, and the historical and institutional conditions through which those concerns have been produced. The nine domains can then serve as provisional points of inquiry rather than externally imposed categories, allowing comparison to trace how apparently similar livestock problems are constituted differently across sites, scales, and histories.

This also requires caution against translating limited veterinary access, land insecurity, labor arrangements, market exclusion, or technological capacity into technical constraints alone; such conditions may reflect broader political-economic relations that are themselves part of the livestock system under study. Comparative application should therefore allow knowledge generated in differently situated livestock systems to revise, rather than merely populate, the framework’s categories, assumptions, and definitions of desirable outcomes.

6 Future research directions

The framework developed here points toward several directions for future research. First, future work could extend the archive through horizontal and transnational comparison. One related archive would be presidential, policy, and professional discourse from veterinary medicine, especially the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), which could show how animal science and veterinary medicine have differently constructed livestock systems as objects of knowledge, care, regulation, and professional responsibility. Horizontal comparisons across animal science professional societies in other regions of the world would also be valuable, since they could reveal how livestock systems, sustainability problems, public responsibilities, and disciplinary priorities have been narrated differently across ecological, institutional, political-economic, and cultural contexts. Such work would also help unsettle the tendency for U.S. and Western animal-science categories to appear general or globally transferable, while other livestock knowledge traditions are treated as local, contextual, or supplementary.

Second, future research could examine U.S. technical assistance and international agricultural development as related archives. Although American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse increasingly invoked world animal production, global population pressure, and uneven dietary patterns, the corpus analyzed here does not fully capture the institutions through which U.S. agricultural knowledge, livestock expertise, and production models circulated internationally. U.S. technical assistance, land-grant internationalization, development agencies, and trade policy would provide important sites for examining how animal science categories, technologies, and production ideals traveled across geopolitical contexts. Such work should also attend to Indigenous land relations, sovereignty, and animal-human-environmental knowledge systems, which remain largely outside the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) corpus but are central to any critical account of livestock systems, land use, and agricultural development (Todd, 2014; Whyte, 2018). Attention to these knowledge systems would also require asking how livestock knowledge traditions outside dominant Euro-American animal science might generate concepts, methods, and theories of sustainability rather than merely supplying contextual variation for frameworks developed elsewhere. It would also build on critical development scholarship showing how development institutions translate social, political, and economic problems into technical fields of knowledge, intervention, and administration (Escobar, 2012; Ferguson, 1994).

Third, future work could examine American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) accreditation standards, curriculum requirements, and program learning outcomes as contemporary sites of disciplinary translation. If presidential and selected non-presidential discourse reveals how animal science has historically narrated its problems and responsibilities, accreditation materials may show how those narratives are institutionalized into educational expectations for the next generation of animal scientists (ASAS, 2026). Such work would help assess whether long-standing calls for synthesis, broader scope, public engagement, and methodological adequacy have become part of formal animal science training.

7 Conclusion

The American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse examined here shows an influential U.S. institution repeatedly widening its narrated object of inquiry from nutrition to production, from production to systems, from systems to land use and global food futures, and from technical performance to public and ethical legitimacy. Yet this widening was not matched within the corpus by an explicit method for establishing comparability. As a result, livestock sustainability research often risks treating heterogeneous systems as if they were straightforwardly comparable when the meanings of sustainability, efficiency, welfare, resilience, and legitimacy are shaped by system-specific ecological, institutional, historical, and social conditions.

This is why a comparative livestock systems framework grounded in socio-ecological-technical thinking is needed, and why HAPPINESS is proposed as one such framework. The central contribution of HAPPINESS is to change what is being compared: not only outputs, interventions, or performance indicators, but the conditions under which those outcomes are produced, measured, interpreted, governed, and contested. In this sense, the framework contributes to current food-systems governance debates by specifying what comparison requires in livestock systems: attention to animal bodies and biological outcomes, but also to the institutional arrangements, labor relations, public meanings, ethical commitments, and power structures that shape whether knowledge can travel responsibly. This matters because sustainability interventions can travel poorly, fail, or generate unintended tradeoffs when they are applied without attention to the ecological, institutional, social, technical, and historical conditions that made them effective in the first place. The framework therefore strengthens rather than replaces experimental rigor, biological precision, and applied problem solving by clarifying when findings are transferable, when they require adaptation, and when they remain system-specific.

For researchers working across animal science, veterinary medicine, the social sciences, and adjacent interdisciplinary fields, HAPPINESS provides a practical language for designing studies that treat context not as background, but as constitutive. It helps interdisciplinary teams ask not only whether a practice or intervention works, but where, for whom, under what conditions, with what tradeoffs, and with what implications for animal welfare, environmental stewardship, producer viability, and public trust. The framework clarifies what kinds of knowledge contemporary livestock sustainability research increasingly requires.

The archive cannot establish how American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) discourse itself evolved after 2004. The post-2004 developments considered here should instead be understood as contemporary contexts in which the comparative problem identified through the historical analysis remains methodologically relevant. Precision livestock farming, digital monitoring, predictive analytics, and AI-driven decision support make questions of comparability especially consequential. Research on precision livestock farming in extensive systems documents persistent challenges in integrating disparate data streams, including differences in formats, metadata, communication protocols, and spatial and temporal scales (Bahlo et al., 2019). Related questions arise at the level of validation. For example, a recent review of wearable sensors for dairy cattle behavior found substantial inconsistency in whether studies assessed and reported precision, bias, and reproducibility, including whether devices had been validated across different production environments (Lee et al., 2025). Standardized outputs may therefore appear commensurable even when the conditions under which data are generated and validated differ. HAPPINESS treats such standardization not as evidence that a metric or model travels unchanged, but as an empirical question about the conditions under which its categories and outputs were produced, validated, and made meaningful.

If livestock sustainability is to be studied in ways adequate to contemporary challenges, comparative research cannot remain implicit. By making the basis of comparison explicit, HAPPINESS can support more context-sensitive interventions, more transparent decision-making, and more responsible translation of scientific findings into practice. In doing so, it offers animal science a way to contribute more effectively to livestock systems that are productive, resilient, legitimate, and sustainable across diverse global contexts.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1974030/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Pashupati Chaudhary, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy

Reviewed by: Fotarisman Zaluchu, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Indonesia

Diego Pierotti Procópio, Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil

Footnotes

Throughout this article, animal science refers in its broadest sense to a heterogeneous and transnational field. Claims derived from the ASAS archive concern a historically influential U.S.-centered institutional formation within that field; they should not be read as representing animal science globally, or as exhausting the diversity of animal-science research and practice within the United States. Where the historical analysis refers more generally to “the field,” it refers to this delimited formation unless otherwise indicated.

This period represents the years for which a coherent and accessible corpus of presidential addresses and selected non-presidential interventions was identified for the study. Searches of available journal and American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) archives and an inquiry to the Society yielded no comparable post-2004 corpus. The endpoint reflects source availability, not an assumption that such addresses ceased.