Open Up and Say “Baa”: Examining the Stomachs of Ruminant Livestock and the Real Subsumption of Nature

ABSTRACT

This article examines the stomachs of ruminant livestock as a site of biotechnological intervention and analyzes efforts to reengineer ruminant digestion as a case of the real subsumption of nature. The livestock industry’s capacity to increase production is constrained by available grazing land and concern about environmental consequences of ever-increasing livestock numbers. Ruminants are also a significant source of greenhouse gases and the mitigation of methane is a recognized priority within the global climate framework. The pursuit of “sustainable intensification” and new technological fixes have been identified as preferred responses to these constraints. The case of ruminant methane calls into question assumptions about the primacy of accumulation, rather than regulation, in driving the real subsumption of nature. The pursuit of technological fixes within biologically based industries may be motivated by a need to stabilize the conditions of production, and regulation itself can provide an impetus for the real subsumption of nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Biotechnology
• climate change
• livestock
• methane
• sustainable intensification
• technological fix

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Wim Carton, Erik Jönsson, and Beatriz Bustos for their work developing this special issue and shepherding it to completion. I also thank Jake Fleming, Matt Turner, Morgan Robertson, Leila Harris, Joan Fujimura, Jamie Peck, and Brent Kaup for their comments and suggestions during the development and revision of this article.

Notes

My use of the term “technological fix” retains its traditional use, as employed by Alvin Weinberg, to indicate a technological solution to a social or environmental problem, but adjoins the Marxist or regulationist sense of “fix” as a means to quell contradictions or resolve crises in social regulation, production, or accumulation. While the concepts spatial fix, institutional fix, scalar fix, environmental fix, ecological fix, and territorial fix are well established within geography (as found respectively in Harvey 1981; Peck and Tickell 1992; Brenner 1998; Castree 2003; Bakker 2003; and Christophers 2014), the term technological fix has not, to my knowledge, been employed in this manner.

The concentration of atmospheric methane reached 1,813 ppb in 2013. Between 1000 and 1700 AD concentrations were relatively stable at 693 ± 10 ppb. Over the past 450,000 years and four glacial cycles the atmospheric concentration of methane had not exceeded 780 ppb.

Second-order processes include emissions from fuel and fertilizer used to grow crops for livestock feed and emissions arising from processing and transportation of livestock products.

To date, the intensification of ruminant livestock production has occurred via the “feed and breed” approach: Stock are fed increasing volumes of energy-dense and rapidly digestible provender, and commercial stock improvement increases the efficiency and productivity of livestock animals. The “dilution of maintenance” concept is central to this effort. Animal scientists consider maintenance the fixed “cost” of resources (land, feed, water, energy, waste, emissions) to sustain the vital functions and health of an animal. Because the maintenance requirement of an individual animal is relatively constant, producing more meat or milk per animal within the same period of time increases the proportion of product yield to the maintenance requirement, thereby improving the efficiency of production (Capper and Bauman 2013, 469–72). The dilution of maintenance concept is effectively the livestock production equivalent of Marx’s concept of the real subsumption of labor: Surplus value is the amount value created by workers/animals in excess of their labor/metabolic cost, which is then appropriated by the owner of the means of production.

Similarly, Capper and Bauman (2013, 479–80) state that “If environmental sustainability were the only consideration, the FAO data could provoke the conclusion that all regions should adopt North American– and Western European–style production systems, or that dairying should be focused in these areas and discouraged in less productive regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.”