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Presentation short abstract

In biodynamic winegrowing, the cow is vital to imaginaries of farm health, yet clashes with low-emission and rewilding futures. Using multispecies ethnography in the Southern Hemisphere, I show how cows highlight conflicts over value, legitimacy, and belonging in post-Anthropocene agriculture.

Presentation long abstract

When visiting a wine estate, one might expect vines to be the heart of the farm. Yet for biodynamic producers, the cow sits at the centre of agricultural practice, anthroposophical cosmologies, and imaginaries of regenerative farming futures. This paper reports on participant observation in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, producer interviews, auto-ethnography, and an extensive review of biodynamic literature to explore bovine relations in biodynamic winegrowing.

In biodynamics, cows are essentialised as beings whose digestive, microbial, and energetic capacities vitalise soils and landscapes. Cows function as ecological and ethereal engineers within biodynamic ontologies. Simultaneously, domesticated herbivores are being proposed as surrogates or proxies for lost megafauna, “reverse-engineering” ecological pasts and potential futures. Yet this valorisation sits uneasily alongside environmental commitments to low-methane agriculture, and conservation agendas that seek to restore or remake landscapes in which cattle are non-native. Biodynamics therefore offers a lens on wider debates in which the cow’s place in future agroecologies is increasingly uncertain.

I argue that the contested role of cows reflects ongoing negotiations over legitimacy, belonging and what counts as ecological care in regenerative agriculture. These tensions make clear that appeals to a stable or recoverable past often fall apart in practice, and that farms are always in the process of being (re)made. I further suggest that cows help illustrate how agricultural decisions are shaped through multiple forms of valuing, including ecological, energetic, economic and moral considerations, and how these values come together in the futures that farmers imagine and pursue.