Paper short abstract:

This paper is about sheep jumping fences in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico, and explores how these everyday transgressions shape practices of boundary-making and local attitudes about sustainable farming.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about sheep jumping fences in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico, and explores how these everyday transgressions shape practices of boundary-making and local attitudes about sustainable farming. In this work, I understand sheep as serial border-crossers in multiple spatial-temporal scales, from their introduction during the Spanish conquest and the new ecological relationships that emerged from this first encounter, to their daily movements from one pasture area to another, constrained by strict rotational grazing plans. I discuss the emergence of various strategies for sheep containment - including electrical fences and "green barriers" - and how these containment strategies came to stand for different understandings of sheep-environment interactions. When sheep challenge or break through physical boundaries farmers set for them, they not only establish themselves as agential beings, but also inscribe themselves against farmers' conceptions about what it means to pursue "sustainable" agricultural practices. Additionally, this research attends to how parasites, plants, soil, birds and insects relate with each other and with sheep communities in these locales, and further, how these shifting multispecies relationalities work to influence the way sheep move through and experience agricultural spaces. Drawing from ethnographic experience working with sheep herds in biodynamic farms in Veracruz, this paper takes the act of fence-hopping as a mode of resistance to planned rotational grazing patterns, and explores how this resistance works to transform ranchers' "ways of knowing" about landscape management and local ecologies.