Beef, hay, and non-nomadic pastoralism

Abstract

Pastoralism has outgrown the basic perception as simply a mode of livestock farming based on pasture grazing to now embody strong values rooted in community identity and community governance. These values have forged a new construct – pastorality, understood to mean the quality of and values tied to something pastoral. Local-territory-scale actors consider pastoralism and pastorality as a resource that they mobilize to build wider local-territory-scale resources – typically protected designation of origin indications (‘AOP’). As the bulk of the literature has looked at AOP cheeses, we elected to focus our analysis on beef, specifically AOP Fin Gras du Mezenc. This AOP offers a standout case – built on a territory typically more suited to grassland systems than pastoral farming, it is grounded in pastoral resources such upland pastures and remote marginal landscapes but also non-pastoral resources like hay. This paper shows how the local actors articulate pastoral and non-pastoral resources in tandem to build the wider territorial resource Fin Gras du Mezenc.