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Short abstract

This article investigates how Sweden’s legal cattle grazing obligations shape agricultural imaginaries and materialities of human-bovine land use. By contesting this law, stakeholders renegotiate visions of welfarist intensification and definitions of what makes land and animals agricultural.

Long abstract

Sweden’s globally unique ‘right to graze’ law guarantees cattle annual access to pasture, significantly shaping Swedish agricultural imaginaries and materialities as well as multispecies relationships between human and bovine land users. Farmers, livestock vets, and other stakeholders are continuously challenging the notion that grazing is an ideal practice to care for both animals and the land in an agricultural sector facing pressure to increase intensification to stay domestically and internationally competitive. Arguments for bovine welfare benefits of being outdoors or for the efficiency of keeping cattle indoors both aim at organising Swedish cattle farming according to different ideals of what agricultural land is, how it should be used and by whom. At stake are also imaginaries and material realities of Swedish agricultural landscapes being visually used and thus maintained by cattle grazing outdoors, while questioning grazing obligations also open debates on how different stakeholders know (themselves in) Swedish agricultural contexts. By contesting grazing practices, stakeholders question relations between cattle and land, but also the public and its images of Swedish agricultural identity. Using the Swedish ‘right to graze’ as a frontier in intensification, I investigate shifting negotiations of productivity and care in an agricultural sector that is reimagining its vision of welfarist modernisation and of what makes landscapes agricultural. Through ethnographic fieldwork with livestock veterinarians and farmers, I explore how grazing organises agricultural intensification and care in Swedish human and cattle land use practices.