What the agriculture derivation does at the policy level is force three commitments and forbid three patterns. The commitments: animal-welfare protections must scale with what science currently knows about a species' capacity for suffering; agricultural systems must pay their own ecological and labor costs rather than dumping them on the public; and land, seed, and distribution cannot be concentrated to scales that extract from every link of the food chain. The forbiddings: factory-farming practices that current welfare science identifies as severe-suffering generators (battery cages, gestation crates, ice-slurry killing of fish, the killing of male chicks at the laying-industry interface); uniform indifference to animal welfare at industrial scale; and the substitution of growth-feed efficiency for species-typical maturity at end-of-life. What the framework does not derive is that anyone has to be vegan, that industrial agriculture as such must be dismantled, or that any particular farming model is the framework-compatible one: the constraint runs on the production system, and consumer choice within the protected production system is left to the consumer. The shift from conventional battery cages to enriched colony housing in the EU since 2012, and from killing male chicks at hatch to in-ovo sex determination in Germany from 2022 and France from 2023, are both framework-compatible production-side reforms: neither required any consumer to change diet, and each closed a welfare-science-identified suffering source at the production interface, the kind of structural change the [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) derivation predicts and the welfare-science literatures underwrite.

*Structural constraints.* The framework's account of food production as the political community's interface with the biosphere it depends on makes agricultural-system maintenance constitutive infrastructure on the same logic as healthcare and education, so the food-supply floor cannot be left to profit-extracting concentrations of land, seed, and distribution and the structural-extraction patterns at scale are precluded. The [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) derivation lands in the policy register as a welfare-scaling constraint: agricultural systems must scale animal-welfare protections with the empirical evidence on species' capacity for suffering, the framework precluding uniform indifference at industrial scale without requiring veganism or endorsing uniform-protection regimes that ignore species-specific evidence. Uninternalized agricultural externalities (greenhouse gases, watershed contamination, antimicrobial resistance, labor-condition externalities) are structural extraction at the population-and-ecosystem level, so agricultural-policy designs are constrained to internalize them through some mechanism (carbon pricing, watershed regulation, antibiotic-use restrictions, labor protection), the specific design underdetermined but the constraint holding. And agricultural concentration at scales that produce structural extraction at every link of the food chain is precluded, with specific anti-trust thresholds, land-tenure architectures, and seed-supply protections underdetermined but the structural preclusion holding at the design-pressure level.

The constitutive-infrastructure framing extends to subjects of experience graded by capacity (Bentham 1789; Singer, *Animal Liberation* 1975; Regan, *The Case for Animal Rights* 1983; Korsgaard, *Fellow Creatures* 2018), grounded in the same mutual-recognition structure developed across [§8.8.4](<8.8.4 What is Confirmed.md>), [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>), and [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and scaled to empirical capacity rather than flattened to a single threshold; the morally weighty variable is suffering, not consumption, and the empirical basis is welfare science (Fraser; Mellor's Five Domains; Broom; EFSA; WOAH) rather than sentiment. Current welfare evidence precludes a determinate set of practices, each developed case-by-case in [§9.6.2](<9.6.2 What is Required.md>): gestation crates, battery cages, routine debeaking / tail-docking / dehorning without anesthesia, long-distance live transport, ice-slurry fish killing, lifelong confinement preventing species-typical behavior, and the infant-killing practices that hinge on production economics rather than on how the animal has lived (conventional veal at 18–20 weeks; male dairy calves; male chick culling, banned in Germany 2022 and France 2023 with in-ovo sex determination as the framework-compatible alternative; suckling pig and milk-fed lamb specialty markets); the [§9.6.2](<9.6.2 What is Required.md>) architecture also derives a species-typical-maturity standard at end-of-life, at modest cost multiples consistent with traditional husbandry, none of it resting on a free-standing moral claim about the particular practices but tracking what welfare science currently shows and will track what it says next. The comprehensive humane-end-of-life constraint is developed at [§9.6.2](<9.6.2 What is Required.md>) (transport; lairage and handling per Grandin; stunning protocols verified to produce reliable loss of consciousness; killing only on confirmed-unconscious animals; avoidance of conspecific-distress effects; the US Humane Methods of Slaughter Act 1958 and EU Council Regulation 1099/2009 as regulatory referents), with the transition derived rather than imposed, sudden release of currently-confined animals would itself produce mass suffering, so transition involves [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) / [§9.15](<9.15 Installation.md>) infrastructure (retraining, alternative-system investment, gradual welfare-improvement scaled to industry capacity, structural support for rural communities), and bodily autonomy at the consumer level preserved throughout, the constraint running on production practices rather than dietary choices. Suppression of disease vectors and invasive species, where licensed, runs on the same net-suffering calculation [§9.6.2](<9.6.2 What is Required.md>) derives (Wolbachia / World Mosquito Program; Utarini et al. 2021 *NEJM* 77% dengue reduction in Yogyakarta; Sterile Insect Technique; cane toads; Burmese pythons), with methods that minimize per-individual suffering preferred (stunning; AQUI-S sedation; percussive); the framework derives the constraint and leaves the specific methodology to the relevant empirical literatures and the recognized direction.

*Cross-domain couplings.* Agriculture couples to healthcare ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)), since antimicrobial resistance, nutrition-related chronic disease (diabetes, cardiovascular disease), and food-system contamination episodes are healthcare burdens partly downstream of agricultural-system structure, so healthcare-system and agricultural-system maintenance cannot be designed in isolation. It couples to environment ([§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>)): the framework's environmental constraints (intergenerational stewardship, externality internalization, biodiversity protection) apply to agricultural land use, water use, and ecosystem impact directly, making [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) and [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) the most tightly coupled of any pair of domain sections because agriculture is a primary site of those constraints. And it couples to economy ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)), agricultural-subsidy structures being an instance of the structural-extraction pattern [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) derives at the macro level, so subsidy reform under the framework is one application of the proportionate-to-stake constraint at agricultural political-economy specifically.

*Bounded field-engagement.* The framework does not require veganism, a point worth making directly: the animal-welfare-scaling constraint precludes uniform indifference at industrial scale but not consumption of animal products from welfare-aware production systems, which places the position in the field with welfare-improvement-without-veganism positions (Singer at certain readings; the welfare-reform tradition broadly) and against both factory-farming-as-business-as-usual and uniform-veganism-as-moral-requirement, the position being empirically-evidence-aware welfare scaling, full stop. Nor does it require de-industrialization of agriculture: industrial methods (mechanization, genetic engineering, precision agriculture, satellite-and-sensor-driven optimization) are not precluded, only the externality-and-extraction pattern current industrial configurations exhibit, so technologically-augmented sustainable agriculture satisfies the constraints and pre-industrial-only futures are not the framework's destination. And agricultural-labor protection is structurally derived rather than added as a contingent value commitment: the labor-condition externalities of industrial agriculture are structural-extraction patterns at the labor interface, so protection of agricultural labor (including migrant and undocumented agricultural labor, which the framework treats as participants in the political community that depends on their work) follows from the structural-extraction preclusion.

These implications are derived under engagement with the contested agricultural-tradition objections [§9.6.1](<9.6.1 What is Disputed.md>) names at premise, animal-rights abolitionism (Regan 1983; Francione 2000; Singer 1975), the agribusiness-productivity tradition (Borlaug's Green Revolution legacy; the contemporary 'feed the world' defense), and the cultural-tradition objection (Jewish shechitah and kashrut; Islamic halal; Indigenous foodways; regional culinary traditions), which [§9.6.1](<9.6.1 What is Disputed.md>) engages at section length, so that the implications stated here apply under that engagement.

What the framework leaves underdetermined is dietary recommendations for individuals beyond the welfare-scaling constraint at the production level, the farming-model preferences (organic versus conventional, small-farm versus large-farm, smallholder versus cooperative) where multiple models satisfy the constraints, the subsidy-architecture replacement designs, the anti-concentration thresholds and enforcement mechanisms, the genetic-engineering policy beyond the safety-and-externality-internalization constraints, the land-tenure reform paths in jurisdictions with currently-concentrated land ownership, and the calibration of welfare-scaling regulations across species and production systems. Where multiple designs satisfy the constraints, the framework leaves the choice to the design literatures, the empirical record, and the recognized direction of the population through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation).

In sum, the [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) argument across its five subsections rests on one thesis: agriculture is the political community's interface with the biosphere it depends on, and the structural obligations that follow apply simultaneously at the ecosystem level (externalities internalized, concentration precluded), the labor-and-economic interface (extraction at every link of the food chain precluded), and the welfare interface (suffering minimized in proportion to what welfare science currently shows each species' capacity to be). The confirmation record shows that each of these levels exhibits structural-extraction patterns wherever the political community has failed its maintenance obligation, and that framework-compatible alternatives (certified-humane production, sustainable-agriculture systems, in-ovo sex determination, and other welfare-science-derived interventions) have operating empirical records rather than merely theoretical standing. The institutional-design implications are accordingly integrated: the three levels of obligation cannot be addressed independently, because they are three faces of the same commitment to maintain the biosphere-interface on which the political community depends.


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← [9.6.4 What is Confirmed](<9.6.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [9.7 Economy](<9.7 Economy.md>) →
