Summary
This article reviews if regenerative farming practices is the solution to the environmental issues caused by cow farming. The two main aspects surrounding regenerative farming are analyzed: ruminant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sequestration in soil. Some people argue that a stable number of cows do not contribute to GHG levels because methane is a short-lived gas. Advocates for cow farming have claimed that cows are vital components to managing the environment as when they graze, they contribute to soil health and biodiversity.
Additionally, the authors conducted a thematic analysis of three political strategies for rebranding cow farming that criticizes alternatives (i.e., “clean cow” strategies and plant-based options) and promotes naturalizing regenerative methods.Three themes emerged: post-pastoral storytelling, political ecological baselining, and a probiotic mode of biopolitics.
Post-pastoral storytelling is the movement of retaining the allure of craft and nature while also embracing technological advancements. People and cows make up part of nature’s carbon cycle and the methane released by cows is natural whereas that released by fossil fuels is not.
Political ecological baselining is the politicization of arguments pertaining to cows and their production of methane and their impact on the environment. Resource managers do not consider past impacts of human activity when creating targets for the natural ecology of a space. The authors use the example of the ideology that cows are part of the natural environment, and they benefit the carbon cycle.
In the probiotic mode of biopolitics, lives of cows and farmers are governed through the knowledge of the farming practice. Cows are identified by farmers as ‘keystone species’, meaning they have the ability to control and change the carbon levels depending on their actions. Cows are referred to as ‘animal laborers’, as their actions are considered labor under political ideologies.
To conclude, the arguments promoting farming of cows for beef and dairy continue to dominate discourse, providing misinformation to the public through three key political strategies.
Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are driving sustained discussions about the place of beef and dairy farming in a sustainable food system. Proposed solutions range from ‘clean-cow’ sustainable intensification to ‘no-cow’, animal free futures, both of which encourage a disruptive break with past practice. This paper reviews the alternative proposition of regenerative agriculture that naturalises beef and dairy production by invoking the past to justify future, nature-based solutions. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK, it first introduces two of the most prominent strands to this green rebranding of cattle: the naturalisation of ruminant methane emissions and the optimisation of soil carbon sequestration via the use of ruminant grazing animals. Subsequent thematic analysis outlines the three political strategies of post-pastoral storytelling, political ecological baselining and a probiotic model of bovine biopolitics that perform this naturalisation. The conclusion assesses the potential and the risks of this approach to grounding the geographies and the temporalities of agricultural transition in the Anthropocene: an epoch in which time is out of joint and natures are multiple and non-analogue, such that they provide slippery and contested grounds for political solutions.