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Paper short abstract

I examine ClassyFarm, Italy’s digital livestock governance system, as an infrastructure through which industrial farming is reconfigured from within. I show how metrics, checklists, and audit tools enact change from within the sector, recalibrating rather than replacing industrial production models.

Paper long abstract

Industrial livestock farming is frequently framed as operating under conditions of crisis, yet also under the pervasive sense that no meaningful alternative is possible. This contribution analyses the Italian digital governance ecosystem ClassyFarm as a key site where attempts to make industrial livestock farming “otherwise” are articulated and operationalised from within the sector itself. Introduced as an innovation aimed at improving animal welfare, antimicrobial stewardship, transparency, and equity, ClassyFarm aggregates farm-level data into databases, risk scores, checklists, and thresholds that structure inspections, antibiotic monitoring, and the allocation of public subsidies.

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among private and official veterinarians, farmers, policymakers, and system designers in Italy, the contribution examines how ClassyFarm performs change through metric-based evaluation and infrastructural redesign. I approach its checklists as socio-material devices that redistribute responsibility, redefine professional discretion, and reshape what counts as “good farming.” By embedding care within indicators and risk categories, ClassyFarm extends the veterinary gaze while also constraining it, privileging comparability and auditability over situational judgement, and orienting farms toward a future of “improved” industrial production.

At the same time, the promise of being “otherwise” is unevenly realised. While the system can support structured self-assessment in large farms, its checklist logic often struggles to translate smaller or heterogeneous contexts, generating frictions that veterinarians must mediate. Rather than replacing industrial production, ClassyFarm recalibrates it, folding animal welfare, antimicrobial reduction, and transparency into existing economic pressures. Alternatives thus emerge less as rupture than as adaptive continuities enacted through metrics, infrastructures, and professional mediation.