DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 26Climate change poses significant challenges tothis mode of productivity, as there is a need to reduce emissions significantly, at odds with continuedgrowth.28Agriculture occupies 77 per cent of land inthe UK and land use makes up 12 per cent of emissions.29Emissions are seen as a big issue in this sector,especially since there has been little reduction sincethe 1990s, mainly due to ineffective voluntary schemes.30There has been more success in areas suchas energy and transport that are seen as easier toaddress with technological advances. Emissions fromagriculture are harder to pinpoint and come from arange of livestock and land management practices.31One of the major sources of emissions from agriculture is methane that is produced by cows. How methane is measured and the significance of the role itplays in climate change is contested within the farming community. There are many proposed measures of how the amount of methane produced by cowscan be reduced.In Francis Ray White’s paper“Fat, Queer, Dead:‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive”, discussed earlier,they examine the strategies employed in the government’s Change4Life programme that sought to tackle the“obesity epidemic” by promoting the benefitsof a healthy lifestyle. White believes that the strategy“employ[s] clinical measurements, namely BMI, inorder to subjugate parents’(specifically mothers’)knowledges and impose a rational and disembodiedregime of regulation”32. The Body Mass Index(BMI) isa measure that uses height and weight to determineif someone’s weight is“healthy”. The BMI is a highlycontested measure, and has been demonstrated tobe extremely unreliable.33Julie Guthman explainsthe way that social influences are entangled with“scientific facts” by examining how calculations about growth in body size are influenced by prevailingsocial assumptions about size and health.34It can be argued that a similar move is taking place inthe dairy industry as some milk suppliers have invented their own carbon footprint measurements, to becompleted by dairy farmers that supply milk to them.In so doing, the tacit knowledges of dairy farmers aresubsumed by the outcomes of the carbon footprintwhich imposes a new epistemological playing field.In these carbon footprints, like the BMI, the ways inwhich emissions figures are displayed and therefore what is deemed important and what is not are allat play. With the emphasis on carbon footprints thatcan be produced easily through readily available figures, components like biodiversity do not commonlyappear in these measures, and it is often measures ofproductivity that feature centrally.It is possible that milk suppliers may decide the futureof contracts with farms based on carbon footprints,so the results and recommendations of carbon footprints have a lot of sway in how farmers will changetheir businesses. This is completely in line with reproductive futurism.By making these footprints such importantcurrency and enabling industries to havesuch a fundamental say in their creation, itlimits possibilities of doing things differently,which often means that the same logic of28See Oxford Net Zero,“What Is Net Zero?”, https://netzeroclimate.org/what-is-net-zero(accessed 26 May 2023).29See Climate Change Committee,Land use: Reducing emissions and preparing for climate change(London, 2018),https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/land-use-reducing-emissions-and-preparing-for-climate-change/(accessed 3 July 2023).30See ibid.31See Neil Ward, Net Zero,Food and Farming: Climate Change and the UK Agri-Food System(Abingdon and New York, 2023).32White,“Fat, Queer, Dead”, 11(see n. 7).33See Bethan Evans and Rachel Colls,“Measuring Fatness, Governing Bodies: The Spatialities of the Body Mass Index(BMI)Anti-Obesity Politics”,Antipode, 41/5(2014), 1051–1083.34See Julie Guthman,“Fatuous measures: the artifactual construction of the obesity epidemic”,Critical Public Health, 23/3(2013),263–273.
