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Paper short abstract

The year 2022 was marked not only by an escalated war against Ukraine but also by a prolonged drought. Offering insights into smallholders' coping with the coinciding effects of drought, war and a general decline in pastoralism, this paper discusses more-than-human care amid multiple crises.

Paper long abstract

Cows and other grazing animals have long shaped the landscape of the Ukrainian Carpathians. Most of them have been kept by smallholders who organized the care for their animals in collective herding systems. In recent years, however, herds and herding systems have largely disappeared from the landscape. Finding themselves in times of multiple crises, smallholders who continue to keep a cow must manage on their own. In addition to the uncertainties caused by the outbreak of the full-scale war against Ukraine, the Europe-wide drought in the summer of the same year led to a 90 per cent loss of hay harvests for some farmers. This loss coincided with military mobilisation, a devaluation of the national currency, and an absence of government aid. As hay, an essential “matter of care” (Bellacasa 2017) and crucial metabolic link between households and landscape, became a scarce resource, many farmers had to sell or slaughter their cattle. Others, who kept their cows, substituted hay by foraging topinambur (Jerusalem artichoke), a potentially invasive neophyte that thrives in disturbed ecosystems, on roadsides and riverbanks. To feed their cows, smallholders thus engaged in a new metabolic connection with a landscape that the very loss of herding practices had produced. Offering insights into smallholders’ coping with the coinciding effects of the 2022 drought, the war and a general decline in pastoralism, this paper examines adaptive and tinkering (Mol et al. 2010) aspects of more-than-human care amid multiple crises.