Presentation short abstract

Through multispecies ethnography, this paper explores how metabolic optimization and “green” transitions reshape dairy life and labour in the Azores, exposing extractive relations embedded in dairy’s ecological promise.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines contemporary transformations of dairy production in the Azores through a political ecology of metabolism and multispecies labour. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how technological and biopolitical interventions reorganize bovine life, labour, and ecological processes to sustain dairy productivity in a peripheral island context. The Azores are currently framed as a laboratory for sustainable intensification, promoting a “green” transition in which cattle metabolisms—at microbial, bodily, and ecological scales—become the primary terrain of optimization. These interventions position dairy cows as lively commodities and labouring bodies, central to the maintenance of a desirable “Good Anthropocene”, reinforced through narratives of insular bucolic landscapes and harmonious human–nature relations (Hamilton, 2016; Searle et al., 2024).

Approaching these dynamics with critical animal studies and feminist political ecology allows me to conceptualize dairy production as an extractive regime that reorganizes bodies and territories through techniques of control, care, and enclosure. Maintaining and developing farming is enacted not only through new technologies and infrastructures, but through forms of extraction that move across scales—from animal microbiomes and reproductive capacities to land-use patterns and labour relations on the islands. This perspective foregrounds how metabolic optimization also recomposes persistent hierarchies: gendered divisions of farm work, dairy cows’ subjugation, and forms of ecological imperialism embedded in the colonial history of the archipelago.

Emerging insights from this fieldwork point toward methodological and conceptual avenues for rethinking animals’ positions in value chains and possibly opening alternative ways of analysing human–animal relations beyond agrarian modernization and commodifying framings.