Center Care in More-than-Human Agricultural Communities

In 2012–13, a major drought swept across the United States causing—among other things—a crisis among farmers who relied on purchased feed. Dairy farmers in the Midwest, where I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork at the time, struggled to pay for the feed they needed for their cows. Some sold farms that had been in their families for up to four generations and others sold their cows and took off-farm jobs. Many told me that they “paid to produce milk,” meaning that they spent more money to produce milk than they made from selling milk, going deep in debt or in many cases into bankruptcy in order to keep their farms. This puzzling response, considering how midwestern farmers are often imagined as highly rationalized commodity producers, resembles the situation that grounds James Ferguson’s analysis of the “bovine mystique,” or the cultural factors that shape cattle herders’ refusal to sell cattle in Lesotho even when those cattle will most likely die in the midst of a severe drought, an irrational decision when conceived only through market logics.1 While midwestern farmers exemplify rationalized commodity producers both in agrarian political economy literature and in the ways that farmers describe themselves, their obstinate commitments to their farms and their cows demonstrate that profitability is not the only and maybe not even the primary value for them in farming. Some farmers I interviewed justified going into debt by describing market fluctuations and expectations for future profits, but many told me that they held onto their farms because they deeply cared about farming and about their cows.

Care animates more-than-human relations in agricultural landscapes. In commodity production, care practices are multiple in that they take different material and affective forms and they generate various forms of relation. Sometimes care means mutual affection and social interaction.2 Sometimes care means killing to relieve pain or to protect.3 Care might mean feeding animals or treating animals for illness.4 Yet these different care practices are largely oriented toward production. Care facilitates the production of agricultural goods.5 Acknowledging that care can be both violent and instrumental, centering care in more-than-human agricultural relations means that care must always be understood in relation to production. Even within this care-production nexus, centering care means decentering logics of growth so that values besides profit might take root and thrive.

While production and care are mutually constituted in this formulation, growth undermines the practices of care that animate more-than-human relations in agriculture. The kind of growth that erodes care is akin to “spectacular accumulation,” or investments that operate in relation to a speculative future of profit that depends on frontier-imaginaries.6 This growth is future and profit oriented. It is infused with imaginations of boundless future profits. The pursuit of these imagined profits on an ever-receding frontier lays waste to ecologies, bodies, and lively webs of connection.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Botswana, Julie Livingston develops the concept of “self-devouring growth” in light of how economic development of mining and beef industries have devastated Botswana’s water systems and contributed to widespread health problems.7 Self-devouring growth is a model of growth that “became a logical means of constructing healthy, robust societies, such that there is something intractable about this thinking—grow the economy, grow a business, grow a market, grow, grow, GROW! is a mantra so powerful that it obscures the destruction it portends.”8 This drive for growth has become an unquestioned and unquestionable imperative in numerous contexts of development and business. Agriculture is no exception. American farmers have long been subject to national and regional, public and private projects aimed at developing U.S. agriculture through turning farmers into managers and farms into factory-like production units.9 Growth has come to be the goal and the measure of agricultural success. These logics reshape the bodies of cows and everyday practices on dairy farms in the midwestern United States.10 As a discourse of improvement, dairying has become more productive and efficient through interventions into the feeding, breeding, and management of dairy cows, particularly since the increased application of scientific principles to agricultural practices and the emergence of powerful research institutions to support the application of these principles.11

Scientific breeding continues to be a key means to achieve production goals, by making farm animals more productive at the individual and herd levels.12 Through the development of new reproductive technologies and collection of data, breeders at agricultural universities, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on farms, and at private companies have contributed to what many refer to as the “athlete-cow,” a modern cow capable of enormous feats of milk production.13 Athlete-cows of today frequently set new records in milk production, a phenomenon frequently described with the language and imaginaries of frontier-making. Holsteins, which are the most common breed of dairy cow in the United States, renowned for their capacities for production, currently produce more than five times that of their counterparts in the early twentieth century. Yet these astounding increases in production are merely a step toward a future of limitless growth. As one university geneticist put it, “the sky might be the limit.”14 Yet these feats of milk production take their toll on cows who suffer from “production diseases,” a host of metabolic and physiological ailments that are particularly prevalent among high-producing cows.

The logic of self-devouring growth has drastically reshaped cow bodies. American farmers are under enormous pressure to produce more with less, to intensify their production, and to increase the scale of production. Consumers want bountiful food at cheap prices. Banks often give loans only if farmers agree to increase herd sizes or build more expensive barns and milking parlors, keeping farmers in cycles of debt. Researchers, advisors, and politicians urge farmers to produce more milk and to push cows toward ever-increasing production in the name of national economic security and improvement.15 Furthermore, farmers frequently describe a moral responsibility to “feed the world” and to grow their output to meet the demand of future populations, which are predicted to vastly exceed current food production.

These drives for growth have contributed to a key irony of U.S. agrifood systems: Farmers are continuously pushed to increase yields, but their success in this endeavor means that overproduction becomes a problem in itself.16 Overproduction is so pernicious a problem that it undermines the very producers themselves, particularly in the face of volatile international markets.17 Returning to Wisconsin, dairy farmers today are often cast as “disappearing” or as a “vanishing breed” by newspapers. Farmers echo these claims in light of the mass exit from dairy farming currently taking place.18 The endless pursuit of increased production, or self-devouring growth, contributes to the degradation of farmer livelihoods.

However, there could be cause for hope. Robust and lively more-than-human communities could be prioritized over productivism and growth in policy, research, and among farmers themselves by focusing on how care animates human and nonhuman communities. This kind of paradigm shift—one that centers care-as-animation—would mean reorienting economic evaluations of “good” farming practices so that these communities and the role of farms in generating them become the source of value rather than a by-product of value production.19

Care-as-animation describes the lively connections key to the “resurgence” of multispecies communities, including humans.20 Farms hold the possibility of being habitats, places of thick interspecies relations, and spaces that generate communities of humans and nonhumans as co-carers. Life is key here. Centering care means valuing farms as places that generate life and connection. Care-as-animation forges connections that arise out of mutual attunement and that foster living-with in ways that sustain connection even when killing is involved. This is not the generation of life at all costs. Unlike the mass production of pigs, enacted as biomass through statistical and managerial techniques that eschew the individual,21 care-as-animation forges connections that are specific and situated in a particular web of multispecies life.

For example, when Tracy and I milked cows in her seventy-five-stall barn in southern Wisconsin, we discussed one of the cows in the herd who was sick with toxic mastitis. The previous day Tulip had “gone down” after the morning milking, meaning that Tulip collapsed and could not stand up. Tracy and her employee moved Tulip outside where Tracy’s daughters had stacked hay bales to protect Tulip from the cold spring winds. Tracy’s daughter Kelly had given Tulip water through a tube, placed tempting feeds nearby, and spent time after school petting and talking to Tulip. The veterinarian came with antibiotics, but the long-term prognosis for cows with toxic mastitis is not usually positive. Often these cows do not return to the herd. Tracy told me that it was not cost-effective to spend so much time and money on medications and treatments for Tulip, but Tulip was a special cow to Tracy’s daughters, and therefore they would do as much as possible to help Tulip recover.

This kind of attentive and personal care demonstrates the flexible labor and affectionate interspecies relations that take place on many small- and medium-scale farms in Wisconsin, a state that continues to claim the title of “America’s Dairyland.”22 This kind of care—care that goes beyond the budget sheet or that is outside of strict economic reason and supports human and nonhuman life through shared intimacy—is possible on Tracy’s farm because the farm is a place where her family spends time and because they want to care well for their cows.

This example demonstrates how care animates relations. Kelly’s attentive care for Tulip was motivated by a moral responsibility to care well for cows and also by mutual affection. During my previous visits to the farm, I often saw Kelly sprawled across Tulip as Tulip lay in the barn or outside in a pen. During lulls in chores Kelly and Tulip showed mutual affection: through hugging, patting, and gentle talking on Kelly’s part and through nuzzling and licking on Tulip’s part. While Kelly and Tulip had a special relationship, I frequently observed similar kinds of affectionate touching and expressions of love for cows on dairy farms, which are crucial to dairy production.

Dairy has been slower to industrialize than pork and poultry production partly due to the high needs of dairy cows and therefore the need for flexible and intensive care-labor.23 Historically, Wisconsin dairy farms have met the high needs of dairy cows through flexible and extensive family labor, maintaining a base in small- and medium-sized farms from the late nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. During my fieldwork in Wisconsin dairy worlds, it was common for extended family and neighbors to support farms through labor and to participate in informal forms of exchange. On Tracy’s farm, for example, a neighbor who retired from dairying stopped by daily to feed calves and clean stalls. Tracy gave him several bull calves to raise and sell for meat since he would not accept monetary reimbursement. Even while this kind of labor is crucial to the continuity of small and medium dairy farms, it is often unpaid or informally reimbursed and is largely unaccounted for in economic analysis of the dairy industry; dairy farming commonly relies on affective relations between farmers, their communities, and their charges to motivate labor-as-care.

Dairy farming in Wisconsin, despite several political-economic and demographic factors that have supported the maintenance of small- and medium-scale dairying,24 is currently in a period of massive change. This is due to the many pressures to “grow, grow, GROW!” As farms have increased in size, they have increasingly come to depend on immigrant labor, shifting on-farm choreographies of care. The intensities of care work are often shifted to largely Latinx wage laborers, while farm owners’ family members and white workers tend to fill management positions. Much more research is needed in this area, considering the potential for double exploitation and shared suffering among farmworkers and farmed animals.25

As farms grow and as farm decision-makers leave the barn for the office, where the cows are known more through statistical measures than material-affective interactions, the shape and possibilities for animating care relations change. For example, Keith, a semen salesperson in Wisconsin described his observations about how farm-scale changed approaches to breeding one day in 2014. According to Keith, personality used to be a key factor in breeding on farms. Farmers would make breeding decisions about cows based on affection for specific cows as well as the ease with which the farmer and the cow worked together. When the breeding decisions are made by someone sitting in an office rather than the person who works with cows on a daily basis, Keith observed that the decision tended to be more informed by statistical measures of production and health. This shift demonstrates how growth potentially undermines the valuation of care between human workers and dairy cows.

When the 2012–13 drought ended, farmers continued to face pressures to increase their herds and increase their profits. This push toward ever-increasing production and growth in dairy at multiple scales erodes the ability of farmers to care well for cows, land, and communities. Self-devouring growth exacerbates the current challenges that farmers face including domestic competition, price instability, contingent lending on the part of banks, monopolistic processors, rising input costs, and the demands of working with living creatures. Much like Corn Belt farmers, who struggle with the “pragmatic challenge of reconciling production-oriented goals, which demand profitability on a yearly basis, with longer-term goals for soil preservation and enhancement,”26 Wisconsin dairy farmers grapple with short-term goals for profit and long-term farm sustainability. Attending to the cows and soil in care-ful ways necessitates time and a willingness to do so. This kind of care-time is not supported by growth paradigms in agriculture, which put pressure on farmers’ ability to observe and care for cows and soil.27 When farmers are pushed to produce ever-increasing yields, this is to the detriment of their abilities to care for cows, land, and communities. Reorienting toward farming communities of care-as-facilitation means that the long term takes precedence over short-term profits and that farm practices are oriented toward promoting flourishing agro-ecologies built on an animating intimacy between humans and nonhumans.

Farms have the potential to generate more-than-human communities of care. Farms can provide important habitats and corridors for wildlife, they can be places where humans and cows engage in affectionate and culturally important interactions through a focus on promoting intimacy and mutual animation, and farms can support wider communities of humans. Policy at the local, state, and federal level—as well as agricultural research—needs to be reoriented toward caring for the farmer but not the farmer as individual; instead, we need to conceptualize the farmer as part of a more-than-human community that includes farm families, farmworkers, farm human communities that are connected to the farms, as well as cows, and earth others that live on and in relation to farms. These interspecies relations thrive through careful facilitation of sustainable lifeways.