DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 26 Climate change poses significant challenges to this mode of productivity, as there is a need to re­duce emissions significantly, at odds with continued growth. 28 Agriculture occupies 77 per cent of land in the UK and land use makes up 12 per cent of emissi­ons. 29 Emissions are seen as a big issue in this sector, especially since there has been little reduction since the 1990s, mainly due to ineffective voluntary sche­mes. 30 There has been more success in areas such as energy and transport that are seen as easier to address with technological advances. Emissions from agriculture are harder to pinpoint and come from a range of livestock and land management practices. 31 One 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 it plays in climate change is contested within the far­ming community. There are many proposed measu­res of how the amount of methane produced by cows can 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 benefits of a healthy lifestyle. White believes that the strate­gy“employ[s] clinical measurements, namely BMI, in order to subjugate parents’(specifically mothers’) knowledges and impose a rational and disembodied regime of regulation” 32 . The Body Mass Index(BMI) is a measure that uses height and weight to determine if someone’s weight is“healthy”. The BMI is a highly contested measure, and has been demonstrated to be extremely unreliable. 33 Julie Guthman explains the way that social influences are entangled with “scientific facts” by examining how calculations ab­out growth in body size are influenced by prevailing social assumptions about size and health. 34 It can be argued that a similar move is taking place in the dairy industry as some milk suppliers have inven­ted their own carbon footprint measurements, to be completed by dairy farmers that supply milk to them. In so doing, the tacit knowledges of dairy farmers are subsumed by the outcomes of the carbon footprint which imposes a new epistemological playing field. In these carbon footprints, like the BMI, the ways in which emissions figures are displayed and therefo­re what is deemed important and what is not are all at play. With the emphasis on carbon footprints that can be produced easily through readily available fi­gures, components like biodiversity do not commonly appear in these measures, and it is often measures of productivity that feature centrally. It is possible that milk suppliers may decide the future of contracts with farms based on carbon footprints, so the results and recommendations of carbon foot­prints have a lot of sway in how farmers will change their businesses. This is completely in line with repro­ductive futurism. By making these footprints such important currency and enabling industries to have such a fundamental say in their creation, it limits possibilities of doing things differently, which often means that the same logic of 28 See Oxford Net Zero,“What Is Net Zero?”, https://netzeroclimate.org/what-is-net-zero(accessed 26 May 2023). 29 See 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). 30 See ibid. 31 See Neil Ward, Net Zero, Food and Farming: Climate Change and the UK Agri-Food System (Abingdon and New York, 2023). 32 White,“Fat, Queer, Dead”, 11(see n. 7). 33 See 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. 34 See Julie Guthman,“Fatuous measures: the artifactual construction of the obesity epidemic”, Critical Public Health , 23/3(2013), 263–273.