In the 20th century, agrarian change was dominated by the industrial ideal, in which both farms and farmers were made Modern—rational, efficient, technologically-sophisticated—spurred by ideologies of productivism and progress. These transformations were buttressed by a constellation of collaboration between research scientists, extension agents, policy makers, and agricultural corporations. As a result, the predominant institutions of knowledge production were “captured,” orienting research problems and technological solutions towards agribusiness and large farm interests (Buttel 2005, Fitzgerald 2003, Kloppenburg 1988). This also led to the "academicization of agriculture" in which abstract scientific knowledge flows top-down from specialists to farmers increasingly dependent on expert authority (Cleveland and Soleri 2002, 2007). While the 21st century brings with it novel academy/industry relations and new formations of biocapital (Jasanoff 2005, Helmreich 2008), it also sees the emergence of alternative agricultural practices supported by alternative ways of knowing. Situating these recent changes within their historical context, this paper focuses on an alternative mode of agricultural production known as biodynamics and examines its foundation in Goethean science. I argue that this model of working with and knowing nature promises to cultivate a more holistic understanding of ecologies of people and plants, but that such approaches are marginalized by dominant reductionist knowledge regimes. At the intersection of feminist science studies and the anthropology of science and technology, this paper shares stories in service of an emerging “successor science” (Harding 1986) with deep historical roots.

In this paper I use an example from my ethnographic fieldwork on the the Dutch dairy sector to challenge some troubling claims made by those attempting to historicize contemporary capitalism. Or, to put it another way, what can livestock agriculture tell us about post-Fordist forms of capitalism that increasingly rely on information, data, affect, etc., to reproduce themselves and produce value? In Cognitive Capitalism, the French economist, Yann Moulier-Boutang writes that knowledge rather than labor power is increasingly becoming the source of value within global capitalism. I do not take issue with this diagnosis, however, I would like to problematize the assumption that “knowledge-goods” and “information goods” have what Moulier-Boutang calls an “immaterial nature” (2004). In General Intellects, Mackenzie Wark, an Australian cultural critic, reminds us to “hang on to the materiality of information-based sciences and technologies” (2017). In my research I bring the materiality of the body (both human and non-human) into an analysis of knowledge based value extraction in an increasingly digitized dairy sector. Specifically, I examine the “caring labor” (Hardt 1999) of bodily and/or haptic practices taught to veterinarians, feed advisors, and other agricultural professionals by a Dutch dairy consultant. These practices cultivate knowledge and information about animal wellbeing and health in order to increase efficiency, milk production, and farm income and profit. Thus, we see profit, knowledge, information, and bodies (both human and cattle) entangled within the agricultural production process.

In microbial worlds, resistance is the response to selective pressures such as antibiotic environments. To understand microbial resistance scientists are acting as multispecies ethnographers seeking to narrate microbial worlds and tell the story of how and why microbial communities emerge as resistant. Microbial resistance as an object of study is called the resistome- the collection of genes within any given community of biota that encodes various abilities to resist and their mobilization potential within and across habitats. As a metaphor for understanding this process resistome scientists are thinking with the Black Queen Hypothesis (Morris et al, 2012), a reductive evolutionary theory premised on the card game Hearts to unpack mechanisms and practices used by microbial communities. While this knowledge is key in devising “next-generation” antibiotics for human consumption it also travels from the lab to do work in other spaces, such as in agricultural biotechnology where resistance has productive capacities. In this paper I follow the theories used by scientists to understand microbial evolution and the methods used to make microbial interactions knowable to tell the story of antimicrobial resistance as a microbial technology. Drawing on the work of resistome scientists, I will describe how “living with resistance” becomes an entangled pathway of queens, genes, and future imaginaries in complex ecological and agricultural systems.