Climate Cattle: Metabolic Intervention in the Good Anthropocene

Abstract

Scientific measurement and prediction tools have highlighted the significant greenhouse gas contributions of farmed animals, particularly dairy and meat cows. Emergent analysis and associated political discourse have refigured narratives of blame for the contemporary climate crisis, influencing international policy and inspiring a range of technological and economic fixes to construct “climate cattle” as keystone species for a “good Anthropocene.” Interventions are centered on bovine metabolisms at different spatial and temporal scales; they include the use of feed supplements that inhibit methane production in bovine rumens during digestion, and selective breeding or genetic engineering for the breeding of future-ready low-methane cows. In these bovine “technofix” solutions, the global scale is invoked to drive metabolic interventions at multiple smaller scales including individual cows, their microbiomes, and their genomes. Research, however, suggests that these interventions do not neatly scale back up as invoked by those deploying them for climate-related ends. Rather, the global scale functions discursively to incentivize bovine metabolic intervention, influence agricultural policies, and draw investment into ecomodernist visions of “good cows for a good Anthropocene.” Through examining how cows figure as both problems and solutions through metabolic interventions, this article traces the importance of, and issues with, scale in contemporary environmental governance.

Good Cows for a Good Anthropocene

Industrial livestock agriculture—especially beef and dairy farming—is under increasing public, political, and media scrutiny for greenhouse gas emissions.¹ Amid other societal concerns regarding health and welfare, “the livestock industry faces mounting limits to business-as-usual.”² Cattle farming requires vast swathes of land, energy, and water, and its associated “ecological hoofprint” exacerbates climate breakdown through intensified carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) emissions.³ Despite the growing popularity of alternative proteins and diets, meat consumption is rising overall and per capita, without signs of slowing.⁴ Cows have become embroiled in myriad strands of planetary politics. They are Anthropocene animals par excellence.⁵

The 2021 Global Methane Pledge committed more than one hundred nation-states to a 30 percent methane reduction by 2030, moving cattle up the contemporary climate agenda.⁶ Political objectives and technocratic practices have imagined a new protagonist in the future of food: the climate cow, whose metabolism is directly modified to reduce emissions and, by implication, engineer the global climate.⁷ Climate cattle differ from their methane-intensive predecessors as they are subjects of myriad ecomodernist technofixes aiming to lower greenhouse gas emissions while increasing economic productivity, facilitating business as usual.⁸ Ecomodernist proponents of a “good Anthropocene” suggest the Anthropocene is not to be feared but rather embraced as “the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity.”⁹ Climate cows, under this framework, are assimilated into a growing discourse around more-than-human resilience on an “artificial earth.”¹⁰

Rebranded as “green” through metabolic intervention, climate cattle, the technologies that bring them into being, and the markets that facilitate their circulation are all championed as symbols of good Anthropocene futures.¹¹ Others are implicitly cast as climate villains that inhibit technocapitalist progress. While the disproportionately large ecological hoofprint of cows is now well known, their repositioning as solutions to this same problem is part of a novel agricultural discourse. Depending on the way they are framed through technology, science, and political economy, cows figure as both solutions and problems to the climate crisis.¹²

Our article mobilizes metabolism as both a conceptual frame and an empirical focus. Conceptually, metabolism attends to the changing materiality of bovine bodies as understood—and performed—within the backdrop of climate emergency. Empirically, it orients analysis to the specific materials, sites, and scales of technoscientific intervention associated with bovine metabolisms. Employing metabolic thinking—or, perhaps, metabolism-as-method—we attend to the performance of scale, a crucial aspect of our analysis, which we elaborate in the conclusion. “Metabolo-politics,” we suggest, constitutes a metabolic iteration of Foucauldian biopower intimately linked to the development of capitalism that does not act solely on populations (“bio-politics”) or bodies (“anatamo-politics”).¹³ Rather, acting as an “intermediary cluster of relations” between the analytical poles of biopower outlined by Foucault, metabolo-politics operates through milieus: the material sites of transformation, circulation, cycles, and shifts where bodies of various species and materials are enmeshed.¹⁴

Our article draws on thirteen online interviews conducted in 2021 with scientific and industry experts in the United States, the UK, and Switzerland.¹⁵ These included leading scientists working on bovine metabolism and climate change mitigation; farmers trialing feed supplements; and executives of a leading methanogenic-inhibitor cattle feed company, Mootral.¹⁶ Interviews are supplemented by ethnographic reflections from conferences attended by Adam Searle.¹⁷ We reviewed scientific literature on genomic approaches to methane reduction, largely published in either the Journal of Dairy Science or Animal. We examined scientific discourse through the archived conference proceedings of the quadrennial World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production and papers presented at their 2022 meeting in Rotterdam. We reviewed media coverage and the public consultation of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) on methane suppressing feed products.¹⁸ Our analysis was limited to publications and discourse in English.

Given our focus on how cows are enrolled into “good Anthropocene” discourses using technologies and practices predominantly available at elite institutions, our field sites and interlocutors are all located in the so-called Global North—a global minority. We do not generalize beyond this. Many other technofix solutions to climate change are underpinned by neocolonial imaginaries, whereby the climate is engineered in a monolithic, undemocratic fashion, necessarily implicating the lives of billions. Yet our case study, while global in its framing, tends to involve practices and technologies that themselves remain local and artisanal in scale and scope. We are thus primarily concerned with understanding how tackling climate change (at the planetary scale) becomes discursively powerful in practices that do not operate at this level, and how metabolism is mobilized by actors to "scale up." The following section outlines our theoretical framework in detail.

Bovine Metabolism and Methane

In industrialized agriculture, cows are valued primarily for their capacity to metabolize complex carbohydrates into palatable matter for human consumption. We focus on specific metabolic pathways associated with the construction of “good cows for a good Anthropocene” by examining how bovine metabolisms are governed via specific technoscientific practices implicated in a neoliberal capitalist political economy and broader discursive forces. Complex vegetal carbohydrates like the polysaccharide cellulose are largely metabolized in the rumen via enteric fermentation, producing enteric CH₄ as a “natural by-product of microbial fermentation of nutrients in the digestive tract of animals.”¹⁹ Enteric methane is the second-largest cause of greenhouse gas emissions related to the livestock industry, narrowly overshadowed by the production, processing, and transport of animal feed and agrochemicals.²⁰ Interventions in enteric fermentation characterize the majority of technoscientific efforts to mitigate emissions while sustaining livestock systems. We mobilize this contemporary experimental work in bovine metabolic science, inspired by what Hannah Landecker calls a “theoretical renewal” of metabolism in the environmental humanities.²¹

Critical scholarship on metabolism draws from nineteenth-century developments in the biological, chemical, and physical sciences and contemporaneous political economy, notably Marx’s writings on human-nature transformations.²² For John Bellamy Foster, among others, metabolism gestures toward how capitalist modes of production entail shifts in the way more-than-human worlds are transformed by anthropogenic activities.²³ More recently, metabolism has animated scholarship on both new and old materialisms, providing a fruitful dialogue between work focusing on agential materiality—notably work on eating—and the political economies of landscape transformation.²⁴ In its recent scholarly reemergence, metabolism is recast as intrinsically more than human.²⁵

Maan Barua and colleagues present metabolism as a multiscalar, plural concept.²⁶ Metabolic analysis illustrates the multisited nature of agricultural production across spatiotemporally distributed networks of material transformation.²⁷ The molecularization of cattle through the lens of metabolic intervention renders the bovine body into “a ceaselessly churning scene of incorporation and excretion,” recasting cows as metabolic subjects embroiled in a range of biogeochemical cycles (like nitrogen or carbon) at larger scales (like the ecosystem or planet).²⁸ As detailed by Hannah Landecker, twentieth-century metabolic science applied to rapidly industrializing agriculture “was framed by manufacturing and energy,” yet the contemporary post-industrial nature of how metabolism is understood, intervened in, and profited from “is suffused with environmental risk, regulation, and information.”²⁹ As such, the metabolic interventions discussed in this article are designed to make the metabolic labor of cows more climate friendly.³⁰ Metabolism acts as a dispositive that strategically responds to an urgent and emergent crisis—in this case, that of methane pollution and its consequences for climate breakdown—rearranging material practices, discourses, and more-than-human relations.³¹ Thinking with bovine bodies, we argue that this linear way of scaling the metabolic—from the rumen to the atmosphere—oversimplifies how cows are connected to planetary processes. Rather, the scales evoked by metabolic intervention are the effect of complex ecologies of practice.³² These scales are performed by specific epistemic practices and do not a priori exist in the world; they do not form a neatly organized hierarchy as commonly imagined.³³ Rather, transitions and translations between scales are laden with frictions and each does not map easily onto the next in a potted sense.³⁴

The assumption that metabolic intervention at the individual, corporeal scale will have predictable and manageable implications for communal, planetary processes is, in turn, mobilized for various political economic ends. We therefore trouble how scientific, technological, and economic apparatuses mobilize the impression of a smooth transition (what Latour calls the “zoom effect”) between scales of metabolic change, and explore how the climate is evoked through interventions in bovine bodies and populations.³⁵ These scales are not continuous and there is no transitivity between the scales of intervention.³⁶ Bovine metabolism is reworked at each distinct scale and differently brought into being by a particular epistemic community and technoscientific apparatus, mobilized within a specific political economy. In the empirical research below, we focus on scientists and companies who are either developing novel feeds to inhibit methanogenic reactions or seeking to rewrite the bovine genome to decrease methane production. We examine how scale is imagined in these interventions and focus on the performative capacities of globalism in localized contexts.

Jim Ormond outlines the scientific construction of “super low carbon cows” as a form of everyday, mundane geoengineering that casts the polluting cow as a carbon villain and the reconfigured climate cow as a carbon savior.³⁷ Within this ecomodernist shift in livestock agriculture, the issue is “not the cow, it’s the how.”³⁸ As a result, metabolic interventions with environmental aims take multiple forms. Short-term emission mitigations have emerged in the form of feed additives or alternatives that inhibit or limit enteric CH₄ production, while more permanent metabolic interventions in the bovine germ line explore selective breeding favoring cattle with a greater genetic disposition to reduced enteric fermentation.³⁹ Other management practices on the farm, such as choreographed “mob grazing” patterns, also seek to partially mitigate the effects of bovine CH₄ by increasing soil organic carbon sequestration, or even employ more direct methods such as methane capture from manure stores.⁴⁰ Climate cows are thus a source of multiple epistemic frictions. In seeking to secure good cows for a good Anthropocene, bovine bodies are fractured and politicized through the lenses of science, technology, and capital.

Isabelle Stengers argues that “good Anthropocene” aspirations have unleashed “engineering dreams of control and command” that render “geoengineering the logical scenario.”⁴¹ Stengers warns that placing trust in the capacities of technoscience to reverse climatic damage, while functioning within the same capitalist systems of production and consumption that created this damage, precludes any alternative to business as usual. In relation to climate cattle, a plethora of human actors—scientists, farmers, governments, and by implication, consumers—are supposedly able to affect the climate by altering the bovine metabolic processes that produce greenhouse gases. Such practices align with technocratic, ecomodernist, and accelerationist visions for livestock futures that offer consumers “lean, efficient, ‘clean cattle’ optimised for environmentally friendly farming.”⁴² In this new bovine metabolo-political regime, processes of cattle metabolism in the cell, gut, and farm are scaled up and extrapolated to the climate, reimagined as sites of global atmospheric governance.⁴³

It is the ecomodernist, technocratic narrative of climate cattle and their business-as-usual promise that is under critique in this article. The construction of climate cows simultaneously depends on metabolism-altering technologies; scientific practices rendering such alterations knowable, measurable, and ultimately governable; and political economies making these practices viable or evoking planetary implications. These empirical practices occur across and construct a range of scales and sites of intervention. Here, we are indebted to the pathbreaking work of Andrew McGregor and colleagues on bovine governance, which draws attention to how methane interventions require multiple scales of analysis (they identify microbial-scale technologies, body-scale technologies, herd-scale technologies, farm-scale populations, and global-scale populations).⁴⁴ For us, bovine metabolism therefore serves as an entry point into broader debates concerning socioecological relations with modern technology, science, and markets.

Metabolic Microbiomania: Methanogenic Inhibitors

In the early 2010s, less than 15 percent of the bovine microbiome was classified by microbiologists, but recent techniques in metagenomic and metabolomic sampling have brought greater scientific understanding of microbes that cannot be cultured in laboratories.⁴⁵ Amplified scientific and public attention to the microbiome—what Stefan Helmreich terms “an emergent microbiomania”—has driven new research initiatives, public grants, and the emergence of novel markets.⁴⁶ Microbiomania has found its way through food systems concerning the guts of humans and livestock alike, not least “due to the growing demand for microbiome-based technologies that provide added-value solutions.”⁴⁷ Technoscientific interventions in rumen metabolisms recast bovine guts as “microbiopolitical objects” in which the ordering and governance of life—and in this case, the global climate by implication—are centered on microbial ecologies.⁴⁸ The actors in these contestations of this Anthropocene are therefore “good” or “bad” microbes, reframed by technological mediations, scientific models, and an emergent political economy where cows are undergoing green rebranding.⁴⁹

As the rumen microbiome has become more scientifically tangible, certain practices reframe cows not as individual animals but as a discrete ecological unit composed of a host (the cow) and multiple symbiotic species (i.e., specific methanogenic microbes). Andreas Folkers and Sven Opitz call microbiome-oriented metabolic intervention “symbiotic engineering,” which “in contrast to other biotechnological interventions like genetic engineering . . . does not address individual bodies but rather holobionts, and more generally the relation between interlaced sets of living things.”⁵⁰ The scientists we interviewed generally agreed that “the rumen is basically where almost everything happens,” relocating the milieu of metabolo-political governance to cattle guts within which technopolitical work is undertaken.⁵¹ “Attention goes to feeding cows, but really, this is about feeding the rumen microbes: the protozoa, bacteria, and archaea that produce methane,” explained one scientist.⁵² Through directly intervening in cattle microbiomes with the aim of methanogenic inhibition, good cows for a good Anthropocene are imagined and contested through the material transformations their bodies participate in.

By adding Asparagopsis armata seaweed into cattle feed, enteric methane can be reduced by 50 percent, while simultaneously decreasing the total feed required for cattle growth.⁵³ Improving cattle feed efficiency means farmers can generate more surplus value while charging a premium for these goods, rebranded as climate friendly. According to Defra, whose researchers “are committed to working with industry to stimulate the market and encourage uptake of these products,” “methane suppressing feed products are an essential tool to decarbonise the agricultural sector.”⁵⁴ For McGregor and colleagues, governmental policies designed to stimulate farmer uptake of novel technologies are “biopolitical strategies.”⁵⁵ Yet in this instance, environmental governance focuses on metabolism as both the object of intervention and method for climatic engineering, linking together the anatomo-politics of the body and the biopolitics of the population. Defra’s intervention, we suggest, constitutes a “metabolo-political” strategy of environmental governance. Out of those surveyed by Defra, 12 percent of British farmers routinely use feed additives.⁵⁶ The majority (57 percent) were not planning on trialing these feed additives, and the perception of these products was varied. Reducing emissions was an important factor for 61 percent of those using additives, only surpassed by animal health and welfare (76 percent).⁵⁷

Feed supplementation has generated hype in its ability to inspire governmental policies, headlines,⁵⁸ advertising campaigns,⁵⁹ and start-up seed funding.⁶⁰ Mootral is a leading British-Swiss agro-technology business founded in 2018 whose founding mission was to “save the climate, one cow at a time.”⁶¹ It manufactures cattle feed pellets with added garlic and citrus extract to alter bovine metabolism. A scientist at Mootral explained that this contributes to an average 20–25 percent reduction in enteric methane emissions, although emissions also depend on husbandry practices and environmental factors (e.g., local climate, grazing space, breed, etc.). Methanogenic inhibitors generally improve feed efficiency while decreasing CH₄ emissions, increasing both economic and carbon efficiency.⁶² For interviewees, this double benefit was essential to convince farmers and governments of the value of methanogenic inhibitors. Marking a shift from twentieth-century strategic interventions in bovine bodies that aimed to construct highly productive “turbo-cows” without concern for the environment, contemporary bovine interventions that aim to produce commercially competitive products are now increasingly marketed as climate-friendly, like Mootral’s milk marketed specifically to baristas.⁶³ One farmer using Mootral’s product explained that this shift to climate-friendly product narratives “actually give farmers an opportunity to build a premium back into the milk. People now care so much about the ways it’s produced in respect to the environment.”⁶⁴

Farmers we interviewed felt they receive an unfair proportion of blame for agriculture’s ecological hoofprint, while simultaneously being pushed into particular methods of production by governmental quotas, supermarket pressure, or macroeconomic forces. For example, certain breeds of cow deemed “carbon inefficient”—like Holstein—become less likely to be farmed.⁶⁵ This then pushes farmers, who are often intergenerationally and culturally tied to specific breeds, into unconventional farming practices. Climate heroes and villains are thus constructed—and blame is apportioned—according to unequal economic pressures and demands. Ultimately it is market logic that drives metabolic interventions, meaning heroism and villainy in the ecomodernist Anthropocene are shaped by political economy. At the family farm, climate cows emerge as a saving grace for economic rather than wholly ecological reasons, in an economic system that leaves little room for nonindustrialized livestock agriculture.

The rise of metabolo-political governance through carbon calculators, offsetting, and measuring is linked to the rise of market approaches to climate change adaptation.⁶⁶ The farm, then, is conditioned by forms of knowledge that underpin climate change markets.⁶⁷ However, symbiotic engineering to intervene in the climate “only has planetary effects when these interventions become scalable, when they become global.”⁶⁸ It is difficult to imagine the small-scale experimental farmers we spoke to, who produce niche direct-to-market products, achieving (or aiming to achieve) global-scale reach, despite their products being marketed with slogans concerning “lower-carbon milk,” gesturing toward their climate potential. Such interventions need not be judged only on their ability to “go global.” Nevertheless, it is the discourse of the global—that is, the urgency of planetary climate change—that motivates many of these interventions and products in the first instance, despite there being little hope, in reality, for such interventions to achieve material impacts at scale.

Technofix solutions are alluring to businesses, to whom they present opportunities, not only solutions, to socioecological problems, by attracting public funding and private investment. For scientists, the funding is lucrative and research receives widespread political support. Several research labs involved in the production of climate-friendly cattle have deep ties with the meat industry and receive funding for this speculative work. Political economist Jan Dutkiewicz has thus suggested these interventions constitute the active production of a “red herring” by the meat industry, enabling the continuation of business-as-usual without fundamentally altering the practices of intensive agriculture that drive climate change.⁶⁹ As McGregor and colleagues note, rather than confronting the destructiveness of livestock agriculture as a “political problem,” businesses, governments, and researchers “have sought to turn it into a technical one that can be resolved by improving cattle bodies, herds, farmers and consumers.”⁷⁰

The longevity of mitigation through feed supplementation remains unclear, as inhibition effects could be transient after microbes adapt to new feeds.⁷¹ Some studies argue that methane emissions gradually increase following initial reductions from metabolic intervention as alternative metabolic pathways emerge.⁷² For example, one study using chloroform found that despite an initial reduction of 95 percent in CH₄ emissions in the first week, CH₄ emissions were comparable with control groups after fifty days. The authors speculate that this gradual increase in CH₄ could be due to multiple factors including “adaptation by the methanogens or by increased metabolism and transformation of chloroform in the rumen by other microorganisms.”⁷³ By focusing on one community of microbes, then, metabolic interventions may run the risk of overlooking other microbial agents within this rumen ecosystem. Unanticipated outcomes tied to biological control, like the development of alternative metabolic pathways, epitomize what Hannah Landecker calls the aftermath of anthropogenic biology: living things “flourish in the blind spots” of scientific knowledge frameworks which routinely “overestimate the comprehensiveness or durability” of biological governance.⁷⁴ Methanogenetic inhibitors are thus often considered short-term fixes in a longer-term transition to climate cattle. Permanent and additive metabolic interventions, however, are being imagined in bovine genomes.

Metabolic Futures: Genomics and Genetic Engineering

Imaginaries of the Anthropocene often conjure imagery of landscape-scale or planetary ecological change. Yet the Anthropocene can be imagined, encountered, or contested in the cell.⁷⁵ Genomic science allows for a more environmentally friendly cow to be discursively constructed from genetic makeup alone, while cellular technologies such as assisted reproductive technologies, selective breeding, and—where commercially and legally available—genome editing allow for permanent, heritable changes to be made to bovine bodies. Through the linkages of industry, science, and technology, these future-orientated promises are big business.

The commercial viability of genomic tools has revolutionized livestock farming in the twenty-first century. Although livestock breeding has a long and varied history, the emergence of genetics as a scientific discipline provided a new lens for scrutinizing—and a new language for contesting—how societal values are translated into bovine bodies, exemplified in the work of Carol Morris and Lewis Holloway.⁷⁶ They write, “from the perspective of critical social science, genetics also implies new interventions in animal life based on new ways of knowing and evaluating the bodies of livestock animals.”⁷⁷ While turbo-cows in the early twentieth century were almost exclusively bred to increase their meat or dairy productivity, contemporary breeding focuses on multiple trait selection, reflecting broader concerns about welfare, health, and the environment.⁷⁸ Selective breeding therefore shows how farmers respond to “changes in the broader field of agriculture’s political economic structures.”⁷⁹ It follows, then, that contemporary genomic infrastructures are becoming implicated in climate governance and its political economy.

Selective breeding provides “the potential for long-term CH₄ emission reductions that are sustained and accumulated over generations.”⁸⁰ Although the estimated emissions figures vary, scientists claim that selective breeding can reduce CH₄ by up to 24 percent within three decades to exploit “natural variation in methane emissions” and act as “an additional mitigation solution that is cost-effective, permanent, and cumulative.”⁸¹ But there are many factors at play occurring at different sites of metabolism, and linking methane emissions to specific genetic markers is complex. Considerable information is translated at every site of measurement and intervention to produce low-CH₄ breeding solutions, however.

To link CH₄ to specific genetic markers, an emissions phenotype must be established as a common matter of concern, and disagreements remain regarding the most appropriate metric.⁸² The simplest measurement would be total methane emitted per day (g CH₄/day), yet this is difficult to link to the bovine genome due to its “high correlation with feed intake and therefore the production trait of interest,” meaning meat or dairy output.⁸³ To account for this, CH₄ is measured relative to the cows’ feed supply (g CH₄/kg dry matter intake/day), or most commonly as CH₄ intensity relative to the agricultural commodity produced (g CH₄/kg of meat or dairy produced/day).⁸⁴ The quantification of CH₄ phenotypes, however, is also limited by direct measurement costs of enteric emissions testing.⁸⁵

Respiration chambers, where individual cattle are measured in an enclosed system, are commonly considered the gold standard of emissions testing, yet they are labor and research intensive.⁸⁶ Population-scale studies now routinely employ the “sniffer” method of CH₄ analysis, where air samples are taken during milking and feeding, facilitating business-as-usual on farms.⁸⁷ Data obtained using sniffers, though, must be calibrated with more accurate data acquired in respiration chambers for large-scale statistical analysis.⁸⁸ A plethora of tools and techniques are required to scale these data from individuals to populations, raising “concerns over the accuracy, repeatability, and precision of the data obtained” through the sniffer method.⁸⁹ Once all measurements have been made and methane emissions phenotyped, these phenotypes are mapped onto the bovine genome, itself a complex task.

Most cows provided by a breeding company come complete with their genomic data, presented by private firms “as a technological fix for the future challenges of dairy production.”⁹⁰ As methane-related phenotypes are highly polygenic—the result of many genes with weak phenotypic influence interacting with each other—scientists are tasked with performing statistical tests to look for correlated genotypes across the whole genome.⁹¹ Genomic sequencing is where genetic science meets big data, posing questions regarding data acquisition, storage, and analysis; as argued by Stephens and colleagues, it is of note that the total amount of genomic data available throughout the world doubles roughly every seven months.⁹² In order for their genomic data to be initially known, a sample of the individual cow’s corporeal tissue must be read by a device called a single nucleotide polymorphism chip, which reads for genetic variation at thousands of sites in DNA. Sabina Leonelli argues that this big data approach allows for genomic information itself to be commodified, in turn obliging new “methods, infrastructures, technologies, skills, and knowledge” to interpret, handle, and ultimately profit from these data.⁹³

Climate cows’ heroism at the genomic scale, then, is fragile: its salvific capacity is not granted but a partial quality, subject to situated epistemic perspectives and constant reevaluation. Once genetic criteria for low-emissions cattle are established, selective breeding must be implemented for changes in emissions to be realized as bovine phenotypes, taking considerable time and numerous generations to effect.⁹⁴ With the development of genome editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, which enables precise genomic rewriting, shock waves have been sent throughout the biosciences and agriculture and the biosciences.⁹⁵ Changes that traditionally took generations of trial and error in selective breeding to ensure incremental and cumulative effect can now be realized in one generation.⁹⁶ In cattle, CRISPR-Cas9 has been applied to breed individuals with greater genetic resistance to bovine tuberculosis; without horns (“polled”) for improved welfare; and even to dilute coat colorings for lowered thermal retention, designed to reduce heat stress in a warming world.⁹⁷ In many cases of genome editing, scientists “knock out” specific gene functions—for instance those coding for horn growth or black coat coloring—to produce their desired phenotype.

Despite legal and definitional ambiguity, many states do not generally consider gene-edited cattle to be genetically modified organisms as they do not contain foreign DNA.⁹⁸ A synthetic biologist working on livestock gene editing reflected: “I just don’t understand why genetic engineering, which is precise, is not allowed, when breeding, which is just a shot in the dark, is fine?”⁹⁹ Scientists in favor of genome editing often position CRISPR-Cas9 as a natural extension of domestication branded as “Livestock 2.0,” an active and precise form of domestication with immediate results.¹⁰⁰ This framing reflects a broader sentiment of ecomodernism regarding gene editing in livestock and its potential for climatic salvation, and casts those wanting to slow down biotechnological innovation as villains, while technology itself is imagined as a benevolent good to “be embraced or rejected by the public.”¹⁰¹

These discourses embracing technology are popular within both agricultural science and the scientific media. Take, for instance, the April 2019 cover story of Wired magazine, which depicts a hornless bull bred by the US biotechnology company Recombinetics in 2016 in the hope that genetic dehorning would replace the practice of physical dehorning of bulls.¹⁰² The text on the magazine’s cover reads “CRISPR could give us a more humane world. Will humans let that happen?” Despite Recombinetics insisting that genetic dehorning was simply a form of precision breeding using technology to speed up on-farm practice, it was revealed months later that this genomic rewriting had unintended effects of introducing a gene conferring antibiotic resistance.¹⁰³ Such an unforeseen consequence through genetic engineering highlights what Hannah Landecker calls the tendency of anthropogenic biological control to “mistake some control of the living for complete knowledge of the living.”¹⁰⁴ Interventions that intend to make cows more climate friendly thus may have unforeseen consequences related to biosecurity and more-than-human health, meaning the boundaries within which heroes and villains are constructed are never stable.

Despite being positioned for many as the logical future-oriented solution, bovine genetics is only part of the picture. But by linking metabolic processes to genetic traits like CH₄ intensity, bovine bodies are valued and scrutinized before individuals are even born. The subsequent commercialization of the genome—for instance, the marketing of low-emissions breed varieties—subject cattle to novel forms of biopower transcending distinctions of individual/population, or even life/death.¹⁰⁵ Difficulties in linking CH₄-related phenotypes to genes are not only caused by the polygenicity of CH₄ intensity and the genetic variability of individual cattle, however. The aforementioned ruminal microbiome is a multifaceted prokaryotic ecosystem, and methane is mostly produced by methanogenic microorganisms in the bovine rumen.¹⁰⁶ In other words, gene editing faces challenges not only in the identification of multiple genetic traits but also the complexity of the rumen as a complicated system that cannot be precisely intervened in. Although a subset of the rumen microbiome is associated with the bovine genome and thus heritable,¹⁰⁷ “the majority of variation in relative abundance of rumen bacteria and archaea is due to non-genetic factors,” and the bovine genome is “largely independent” of the rumen microbiome.¹⁰⁸ Metabolic intervention through genetic and symbiotic engineering, then, works at contrasting spatial and temporal scales.

Conclusion: Heroes, Villains, and Climate Metabolisms

We extended the same final question to each participant in interviews: do you see alternatives to the continued growth of cattle farming, and interventions therein? Although answers varied, there was a clear and resounding response: no. The cow was always the ultimate solution, both villain and hero. Recent political representations of cattle have positioned them at the forefront of the Anthropocene as keystone species with planet-altering capacities.¹⁰⁹ The cattle of agricultural industrialization—the turbo-cow refined through innumerable generations of domestication into a metabolic machine—is a prominent villain in this narrative. But new, climate-friendly cattle—tweaked quickly, but intensely—are positioned as potential heroes. Technoscientific processes of defining and fixing climate problems are thus imbricated with the biopolitics of blame, salvation, and environmental governance.

We have shown that ecomodernist intervention into bovine bodies has produced a reimagined, fragmented cow—one whose metabolic labor is still enlisted to produce human-palatable proteins but simultaneously mobilized for climate engineering. This is the essence of metabolo-politics, in which the object of governance and biopower is not limited to the anatomo-politics of bodies (cows) or the biopolitics of populations (herds) alone, but instead is multiple and in motion (the milieu). Metabolic interventions thus function as intermediaries that draw together a range of practices, scales, bodies, and populations, linking the analytical poles of biopower. Metabolism, therefore, draws our attention to novel approaches to governing life that, while operative through individual bodies, are not solely concerned with them and instead operate across spatiotemporal scales, material transformations, and circulations.¹¹⁰

Good cows for a good Anthropocene invite technoscientific interventions on bovine bodies that contest imaginaries of future livestock production. While rooted in such a framework, climate cows symbolize an all-too-familiar refrain of contemporary society’s inability to imagine a world beyond the current capitalist systems of production and consumption that produce socioecological crises. Climate cow technofixes are being sought within the same regimes of production that led to contemporary socioecological crises in the first place, presenting little hope from the perspectives of those critical scholars who understand that only in transforming regimes of production will there be genuine, long-lasting climate solutions. In this sense, there are no heroes and villains of the Anthropocene with climate cows, only spectacular stories that obscure the reality of socioecological conditions and the lives of cows themselves. We are thus in agreement with McGregor and colleagues, who suggest that “attempts to address cattle emissions emerge from molecular ways of thinking that are having limited impact on their stated aim of reducing emissions, but are creating rationales for expanding modern agricultural systems to climate ‘inefficient’ farming communities.”¹¹¹ Perhaps, then, the search for heroes and villains in climate cattle is itself a distraction from wider structural and political issues, and we should “prioritise justice, rather than efficiency, as the core principle to steer a radical transition towards low emissions food systems.”¹¹²

Bovine bodies are fragmented and problematized by a range of human practices in technology, science, and political economy. Emergent knowledge practices produce differential and partial perspectives on cattle. Bovine bodies are interrogated as multiple objects of concern through several scientific vernaculars: (1) genomics, which looks for the heritability of CH₄ intensity; (2) synthetic biology, which engineers bovine genomes; (3) rumen microbiology, which reimagines the polluting cow as a holobiont; (4) biochemistry, which illuminates bovine metabolic processes; (5) nutrition, which explores individual animal growth and the production of protein; and (6) bio-geochemistry, which positions cows in the global carbon cycle. There are certainly others not attended to here. Different technologies that seek to disrupt bovine metabolisms to engineer climates include the prevalent spectacular interventions like genomic engineering as well as mundane practices of cattle feed alteration, breeding, or farm management.

Several epistemological and political challenges arose due to our interest in multiple scales and scalability. While beyond the scope of this article, these challenges are not dissimilar to those that climate fixes and politics have to deal with themselves. Yet our interest was not in finding a scalable solution nor in reaffirming the existence of these scales, but rather to highlight how the very notion of the global scale suffuses interventions made at different (localized) scales without the promise of mapping back up, and to show how this global imaginary functions as a “glorified form of provincialism.”¹¹³ What we identify, then, is how scale comes to serve a discursive function in the climate crisis. Indeed, the invocation of the global—rather than any ambitions to affect the planetary scale—is the imagined stage on which metabolic interventions are carried out.

It is precisely for its ability to complicate notions of scale that we have employed metabolic thinking throughout this article. Methodologically, metabolism prompts us to interrogate how scales are performed and brought into being by particular practices or apparatuses. The invocation of the planetary scale by certain actors is far from a neutral gesture. Rather, while itself performed through specific practices, the planetary scale works to imbue particular interventions, objects, and subjects with a certain urgency and grandeur. To invoke the global in climate cattle is to position cattle as a keystone species and thus a mega-agent and object of intervention. In other words, scale is performative. And the global scale carries with it a kind of placeless importance; to intervene here is to intervene everywhere, implicating people and planet.

Throughout this article, we have looked to how these scientific vernaculars work on and with cows as milieus of simultaneous Anthropocenic heroism and villainy. Technoscientific constructions of climate cows occlude both the knowledge-power practices that underpin climate change mitigation interventions and the possibility of engaging with living, breathing creatures as anything other than climate problems or climate solutions. As such, the cow is not the ultimate solution, but instead a recurring problem onto which hopes, fears, failures, and solutions to the climate crisis are imposed.

Acknowledgments

We are incredibly grateful for the insight, time, and patience shared with us by participants throughout the research process. Our argument has been improved following feedback given by attendees of initial presentations of this work at the Heroes and Villains of the Anthropocene lecture series at Brunel University London (July 2021) and the follow-up workshop at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge (September 2022), in addition to the Metabolic Life workshop hosted by the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge (January 2023). Liana Chua and Viola Schreer have provided constructive and supportive feedback throughout this time, in particular as acting editors of this Environmental Humanities special section. In addition, our paper has been improved significantly by the careful and diligent readings of anonymous reviewers. Special thanks also go to George Cusworth for comments on an earlier draft. The ethnographic research shaping this paper was funded by the European Research Council, under the project The Body Societal: Unfolding Genomics Infrastructure in Cattle Livestock Selection and Reproduction (grant number 949577).

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