Producing (extra)ordinary death on the farm: unruly encounters and contaminated calves

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2010, twenty-eight bovines on a Pennsylvania beef farm were exposed to a hydraulic fracturing wastewater leak on their grazing pasture. Over the following year, eleven out of seventeen calves born to the exposed animals died. The farmers framed the deaths as outside normal deathly production on the farm, while state institutions claimed the deaths resulted from the farmers’ negligence, framing them as ordinary. I draw on necropolitics to examine how death becomes a normalized mode of capital production in agri-food systems, investigating how the wastewater spill and calves’ deaths ruptured the everyday production of bovine death. The paper argues that death must occur in prescribed sites and at approved times to function as a site of value accumulation in capitalist agriculture. I examine how the spill and calf death events emerged through promiscuous entanglements between overlapping modes of capital extraction across and through the site of the farm. Using assemblages, I trace unruly, promiscuous encounters at this food-energy contact zone to consider how the calves’ deaths render visible the space-time boundaries used to manage more-than-human mortality as a metabolic process in livestock production, and highlight disparate power relations between diverse necropolitical actors and modes of governance.