Freedom Rangers™ and landscapes that move people

“I come from a race of drivers of cattle and milkers of cows. I first opened my eyes and hope to close them on a pastoral country.”—John Burroughs (Barrus, 1925) ¹

The russet-colored chickens before me are called “Freedom Rangers™.” Named and sold in Pennsylvania since the early 2000s by a family of Mennonite missionaries, this variety quickly became popular among small-scale, artisanal animal farmers who raise them primarily for meat. Unlike the itinerant bearers of freedom who bred and marketed them in Pennsylvania, these Freedom Rangers™ live all but their first days in an eight by ten square foot structure made of wire mesh surrounding a wooden frame.

Confinement is a liberal punishment. Those held are alive but contained, their captors “humane” but coercive. The liberalism of the wire mesh, which admits air and light while preventing escape, is more than incidental. Made up of individual strands of galvanized wire woven into a honeycomb pattern and known as “chicken wire” or “poultry netting,” the wire mesh's invention in 19^th century England was inspired by the industrial looms that wove cloth, a suggestive link between British industrial technologies, the world of empire and plantations that enabled them, and the emergence of modern animal agriculture.

Unlike hens kept for egg laying, the lives of these “broilers” (the term farmers use for chickens raised for meat) last only about nine weeks. They escape the confinement of the cage only on the day of their slaughter. Their freedom and ranging utterly circumscribed, these social birds make lives together under duress.

What do you do if your interlocutors just want you to leave?

I sit motionless in the grass near the center of a large forest-ringed field. A dozen paces away is one of five wire mesh enclosures in which a group of 70 Freedom Ranger™ chickens endures my lingering presence. There are undeniable visual cues of unease: their bodies cluster as far away from me as the constrained quarters allow, at the far end of their “house” intended to hold only 40 birds. Although I orient my body away from them, careful to only ever glance out of the corner of my eye, I can tell that the stares never come off me. Their breathing deepens visibly whenever our eyes temporarily lock. But it is the aural experience that slices into me and alters my research plans. After the first moment, what escapes the open-air confines are no longer “alarm calls,” those singular, emphatic warnings issued when a hawk is spotted overhead. Rather, I am immersed in unabated articulations of nervousness that border on desperation. The chickens’ staccato chatter replaced with clucks that are elongated and ascending, each note containing a pause that postpones closure, waiting instead with trepidation for what might happen next. Subject to a situation they had no say in, their bodies and voices exude wariness. The tension saturates the summer air. I put my notebook back in my bag and leave.

When does an interest in multispecies methods become an exercise in “extractive ethnography,” research possible only through the unrelenting force of confinement? While this was neither the first nor the last time I would visit the chickens during their brief two and a half months of life, it did not take long to convince me that my initial goal of extended ethnographic fieldwork with them in the absence of the farmers was not worth the stress it generated for any of us. While they were without question major players in my research on small-scale animal farms, their ready expression of skittishness, vulnerability, and, if the farmers or I got too close, terror seemed more ethnographically significant than the details I had initially sought to accumulate about their social lives. There was nothing exceptional about this farm or the broiler techniques practiced there. Sources of stress were unremarkable but unremitting, whether simply the residential crowding or the danger presented by our daily chores of dragging the enclosures to new parts of the field and entering their crowded houses to replenish the grain supply. These banal tasks constituted “caring” for the chickens, as they were essential to their survival. That such care was also a daily experience of fright and hazard for the chickens evidences a paradox at the heart of this kind of small, artisanal animal farm: deprived of mobility by the wire limits of their hold, they were rendered perilously dependent on the farmers, literally the architects and builders of the cages themselves.

The owner-operators of this farm—and others at which I conducted similar fieldwork in the Hudson Valley of New York state—took pride in positioning their farms as the antithesis of the industrial concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that have become somewhat ignominious in the past two decades in the US. My farmer interlocutors, who do all of the on-farm human labor, sacrifice profits and work exhausting days, often taking second jobs, because of their commitment to raising “higher quality” animals through practices they consider more environmentally sensitive and humane. ² For my ethnographic fieldwork, I joined farmers at collaborative training programs, attended social gatherings, and conducted targeted interviews. But even more, I spent time on farms, helping farmers with chores, doing plant surveys in pastures, and visiting with confined animals in the absence of the farmers (albeit with their permission).

This article explores the enduring devotion to this kind of animal agriculture demonstrated not only by their farmers but also by many others in the region, including customers, environmentalists, and politicians. It does so in the context of a broader research project that examines—through ethnographic, historical, and field ecology methods—how material landscapes and banal more-than-human practices have served as crucial sites of racial formation in the Hudson Valley throughout the (ongoing) colonial period. This historical scope, as well my interlocutors’ frequent invocation of earlier eras, required me to go beyond specific ethnographic encounters in order to, as Saba Mahmood once wrote, “grasp fragments of the past congealed in the present, their temporal weight pressing into it (2015: 23).” As a result, although I use ethnography as a basis for engaging contemporary social phenomena, my analytic focus is on the churning historical currents that deliver the present, not the individuals through whom these momentums flow and are expressed. ³ As a White researcher, I float with my overwhelmingly White interlocutors on these inter-generational streams and, regardless of the extent to which our intentions may have varied, soak in the same waters. Moved by the many admirable qualities of my farmer interlocutors and their gracious willingness to have me work and study alongside them, this article is meant to be anything but a repudiation or a self-serving “settler move to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012).” Exceeding any individual, it is rather an investigation into how the past bleeds through the landscape and at what costs. Here I ask, other than relatively small amounts of edible flesh and an insubstantial profit, what else is yielded from animal and other bodies through the small-scale, artisanal animal farm?

Visualizing sustainability

Given the flood of alarming statistics implicating animal agriculture as a significant cause of accelerating global climate change and habitat destruction, I was initially surprised by how eagerly environmental organizations in the Hudson Valley promoted it. The farm described in the opening of this article was on a site leased from a leading regional land conservation organization. Many similar nonprofits also actively sought farmers who would raise animals on their lands. ⁴ And yet, introducing farm animals into northeastern landscapes generally does not yield ecological benefits. Rather, in much of North America including the Hudson Valley, animal farming often has adverse ecological impacts, especially for native plants and grassland nesting birds, regardless of whether contributions to climate change are even considered. Given that these environmental NGOs are generally keen to position themselves as scientifically informed protectors of nature, their lack of ecological rationale for this major land use decision was notable.

Seeking clarification, what I repeatedly encountered was a combination of aesthetic preference and allusions to regional tradition. “Cows are sexy,” the executive director of New York state's largest private nature preserve explained bluntly at a public event, suggesting that farm animals are what both residents and visitors want to see in the countryside. Another large conservation organization, this one based in New York City, referred to a rural town's “history and culture” as its reason for introducing animals to the large grasslands they had just spent millions of dollars to purchase. “We are happy to carry forth a centuries-old tradition of local agricultural production [by hosting these farmers],” an ensuing press release read, continuing that the decision to pursue the arrangement reflected the organization's “commitment not only to the scenic splendor of the Hudson Valley but also to the preservation of its cultural heritage.” Adjacent to and buttressing these justifications is a neo-agrarian, locavore ethos that takes small-scale agriculture to be an important component of a sustainable future. Often invoked together in various permutations, these several validations jointly form an implicit consensus, grounded in a visually oriented, affective sense of rightness that pervaded popular media as well as personal conversations with conservationists about rural Hudson Valley landscapes throughout my fieldwork, leading them to pursue animal farmers for their lands despite the ecological tradeoffs.

While the young small-scale farmers I worked with shared this normative landscape ideal, the visual celebration of the pastoral was supplemented by their self-classification as practitioners of “regenerative agriculture.” Despite being vague and infrequently elaborated, the term is powerful currency among these farmers, their advocates, and their customers. That the ecological benefits suggested by the term exist only in comparison to industrial agriculture and not to the old fields that the animals were being introduced to in the Hudson Valley—which had been largely repopulated by native meadow plants following waves of farm abandonment in the 20th century—was something only botanists seemed to notice. Of course, “organic” and “sustainable,” the latter being the adjective supplanted by “regenerative” within small farm worlds in the past decade, can also be used ambiguously and likewise sometimes serves to mask ecological impacts. ⁵ Nonetheless, what is conspicuous about the term regenerative is that while its meaning may be no less precise, its temporal politics are distinctly evocative. Whereas sustainable suggests endurance, regenerative indicates renewal. Unaddressed is what stands to be revitalized given that animal farming in the Hudson Valley is a practice with a short and particular history.

Factorij farms

In her classic study of animal agriculture and early British colonialism in North America, Virginia Anderson (2004) emphasizes that animal agriculture was, for European settlers, never about subsistence alone. Rather, it was a cultural practice understood to embody Christian civilization and was thus also taken to be a point of differentiation from Native peoples. As reflected by the multiple valences of the term “husbandry,” a Christian, patriarchal order radiated through the conjugal relation into the greater domus of the farm and beyond (Merchant, 1989). While this multispecies archetype was intended to inspire emulation among Native peoples, the disciplinary logics and practices of animal domestication also provided a framework for early colonial violence against Native neighbors. “Put a bit in the mouth of the heathen,” New Netherland governor Willem Kieft directed his council in 1643, well-aware of the familiar imperative of control conveyed by this imagery, as he instructed them to “enlist a number of planters” for an infamous military campaign intended to instill subordination among Lenape communities in the lower Hudson Valley (Grumet, 2009: 58).

Never merely a metaphor for political action and organization, the material role of animal agriculture in displacing Native peoples along the Eastern Seaboard was massive, as Anderson and others have described (e.g. Brooks, 2018; Williams, 1995). Settlers’ animals, initially allowed to roam free in forests and upland areas, also ran amok in Native cornfields and gardens—often released there intentionally—and repeatedly destroyed irreplaceable harvests (Den Ouden, 2005). As the farm animals’ range expanded gradually in the Hudson Valley in the 17th century, Lenape retaliation against wandering herds was a primary and routine cause of the almost constant friction that characterized the early colonial Hudson Valley. ⁶ Seemingly minor settler assumptions of land access and use cumulatively enabled the expansion of colonial settlement without typically necessitating a formal declaration of war. In this way, animal agriculture functioned as a form of “nonviolent” violence that both materially and metaphorically provisioned settler futures. ⁷

The reconfiguring of this not-only-human landscape also depended on a regime of racial slavery the scale of which, at the time of US independence, exceeded that of any region north of the Chesapeake (Williams-Myers, 1994: 21). What emerged in the 17th century was a profitable, slave-dependent agrarian economy oriented around raising wheat and farm animals to be exported to the Caribbean plantation islands so completely planted with export commodity crops (such as sugar) that dietary staples needed to be imported. These 17th-century and 18th-century Hudson Valley farms were “factory farms” (or factorij in Dutch), albeit in an early modern sense, as the word “factory” then referred to the trading posts (or entrepôt)—from the Elmina Castle, to the Dutch slave depot at Curaçao, to New Amsterdam—through which Hudson Valley agriculture was linked through circuits of extraction, accumulation, and terror. Despite their centrality to the Hudson Valley's agricultural ascendency, enslaved Africans and their descendants were never intended to become permanent residents of the region. Rather, as the historian A.J. Williams-Myers (1994) argued, they were primarily held as a temporary solution to a labor shortage in what was designed to be, from the beginning, a White region. ⁸

In time, as European settlements further formalized and intensified, a more thorough ecological remaking began as European forage plants were introduced to vast areas, replacing the native plant communities that Lenape peoples had tended for generations (Teale, 2018). To sustain these new pasture plants, soils were gradually transformed through the addition of manures and minerals. In this way, the distinctly extractive practices of franchise colonialism elsewhere were supplemented by practices of deposition and recomposition that characterize the settler colony. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue that such material-discursive practices of improvement never merely addressed land but rather, following Sylvia Wynter, also served to secure the ascension of a normative (White) figure of Man. Regarding colonialism in the early modern period, they write, “racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement (2017: 85).” Reading Anderson through Harney and Moten, nascent formations of Whiteness can be seen emerging through colonial possession and optimization—of “humans,” “animals,” and “land”—as acts of incipient racial distinction. The banal practices of improvement, including the biological simplification that accompanied animal agriculture, were cumulatively understood as a project of civilizational succession and replacement in which, almost immediately, Native people came to be expected to inevitably wither away, whether lamentably or not, in the presence of a superior form. To borrow from Carse (2014), this early colonial agrarian landscape formation in the Hudson Valley can be understood as an infrastructure, a reworking of materiality and relations toward specific economic and political ends. It is in this vein that William Cronon wrote in 1983 that in New England “the pig was not merely a pig but a creature bound among other things to the fence, the dandelion [a non-native species of “disturbed” places], and a very special definition of property (p. 14).” As a grandiose infrastructural project, the agrarian landscape composed of European plants and animals, was specifically intended to bring about Native replacement—either through eviction, murder, or forced assimilation—and, in the Hudson Valley, ultimately Black banishment in the interest of cementing exclusively White settlement.

By the 19th century, the surge of new arrivals to New York from adjacent states and Europe made employing “free” [White] labor less expensive than the cost of keeping Black slaves. This shift in demography permitted the abolition of slavery in New York, the institution having become increasingly untenable because of escalating agitation by its opponents both enslaved and free. Long New York's most fervently pro-slavery region, in the agrarian Hudson Valley, the abolition of slavery also represented, and not accidentally, the abolition of Black presence in the countryside, as within decades ex-slaves and their descendants overwhelmingly fled rural hostility for the partial shelter of urban centers. The exodus of Black people from the Hudson Valley countryside was a precursor that closely resembled the mass departure of freed slaves and their descendants from the rural south following the Civil War, which Saidiya Hartman, following W.E.B. Du Bois, has described as a “general strike” against what was, in both cases, essentially the survival of slavery after formal emancipation (2019: 108). The effect of this flight was so severe in the rural parts of the Hudson Valley that, even though New York embraced legally and extralegally enforced “segregation as the preferred method for dealing with emancipation” throughout the 19th century, there were increasingly few Black residents left to whom these exclusionary policies applied (Gellman and Quigley, 2003: 202).

Accompanying emancipation was the region's first industrial crescendo, the destructive impact of which inspired the foundational aesthetic glorification of the American landscape in the form of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. This major artistic movement inaugurated the US obsession with vast and “empty” wilderness, heralding it as a site of rejuvenation for White men understood to otherwise be increasingly imperiled by industrialism and urban life. The enslaved and their descendants were unremorsefully omitted from the “sanctified landscape” promoted by the Hudson River School painters, while lone Native people on isolated mountaintops were included only to suggest that their fate was already sealed (Schuyler, 2012). The ocularcentric legacy of this aesthetic movement remains deeply embedded in the US environmental tradition and its appetite for the scenic vista. ⁹ In the contemporary Hudson Valley, “open space” preservation initiatives frequently invoke the imagery of the Hudson River School and remain animated by the curative promise of nature for a primarily White regional public. Aesthetic fetishization and the righteous rhetoric of conservation help to obscure evidence of the centuries of violence needed to secure White control and achieve these seemingly neutral landscape forms. It is in this context that nostalgic calls are routinely made by those advocating for local food systems to look to the past for inspiration, to a time when the Hudson Valley was a “breadbasket” (and a meat locker). ¹⁰

Ecologies of belonging ¹¹

“What a vista, no?” inquired the caption of an Instagram post on an interlocutor's farm's feed. The image showed the farmer standing in one of her pastures, the sun just beginning to set. A chicken enclosure was to her side, just out of the frame, and behind her was a locally iconic forested mountain, blanketed with the mosaic of browns, greens, and yellows that signal the onset of fall. The caption continued, “what too often goes unnoticed is that this scenic landscape is only possible because of farming. The heritage of this land is grounded in agriculture. When we farm the right way, the protection of this natural viewshed and regenerative agriculture can work hand in hand.” Discussing the post later, the farmer reminded me that “if it wasn't for agriculture, Dairytown Road would all be woods, you wouldn't even have a view of the mountains.” Anticipating a response she had likely heard before, she added “what's the standard for ‘natural’, anyway?” Exemplifying the regional confluence of conservation and agriculture discussed above, the post draws upon the region's visually oriented landscape ideal to unite agricultural heritage with the long-standing local commitment to conserving “open space.” In this case, the emphasis on “scenic beauty” draws attention away from the sea of invasive and nonnative pasture plants that the farmer stands amongst that became predominant following the reintroduction of agriculture to this field about 10 years prior.

During a group visit to a different farm, a small-scale organic animal farmer explained to me that, inspired by the rural scene of the early 19th century, he was developing an agricultural system he hoped would last for 200 years. “I want to feed the local community like in the old days,” he added. The young farmer's nonchalant invocation of such a vast historical scale when situating his project (from “the old days” to 200 years into the future) resonated with a common regional version of agricultural history that I encountered frequently in similar, White-dominated venues throughout my fieldwork. Reminiscent of John Burroughs’ epigraph at the beginning of this article, the local agrarian landscape was often presented as timeless. The ordinariness of this account was evidenced when the farmer's ambitious chronological scale provoked no questioning or requests for clarification from other farmers assembled, as might have been expected had a professional in just about any other vocation made a similar claim about transhistorical continuity across the centuries. This distinctive articulation between putative pasts and possible futures was epitomized by the farmer's ambition to “bring the farm back to its former glory.” And yet, as the farmer extracted this aspirational future from the bodies of his animals, one they would never share, he was also unwittingly conjuring a tradition of hegemonic Whiteness that continues to erase—albeit never successfully—ongoing Black and Native presence. As Rifkin (2014) asks (albeit without addressing the no-less-pivotal legacies of racial slavery), “when and how do projects of elimination, replacement, and possession become geographies of everyday nonnative occupancy that do not understand themselves as predicated on colonial occupation or on a history of settler-Indigenous relation (even though they are), and what are the contours and effects of such experience of inhabitance and belonging (p. 9)?”

Rifkin's question casts the regenerative animal farmers’ stated interest in “leaving the land better than we found it” in a particular light. As Harney and Moten (2017) argue, the assumption and pursuit of improvement is a red thread that runs through the history of US settler colonialism and racial capitalism. But whereas making “better” use of “squandered” land was the overt justification for the European taking of Native land in the first instance, improvement here functions independently of the promise of legal possession. Often frustrated by their NGO landlords’ unwillingness to assure a long-term lease and knowing they were unlikely to ever be able to own the land they farmed, for many of my interlocutors the application of techniques of improvement was a source of self-validating, affective possession of the landscape. Committed to the regenerative farming principle that “healthy soils” make for “healthy animals,” through fertilization via animal excrement, the addition of soil pH buffers, and the draining of wetlands, my farmer interlocutors transformed the acidic, nutritionally “poor”, variably wet soils that native grassland plants evolved with into the nutritionally “rich,” uniform soils in which nonnative forage plants will exclusively thrive. “Look at this” one cow farmer told me, her arms raised, palms up, beholding the mix of European pasture plants around her, “good forage is diverse forage—just like how we humans need a diverse diet.” As I will discuss below, the gap between promoting biodiversity as a desired, abstract objective and the actual impact of “improving pastures” was filled by a pervasive affective affirmation that suffused the countryside and made it almost impossible not to be certain that the small-scale animal farmers were indeed “leaving the land better than they found it.”

The redemption of “neglected” (albeit more ecologically dynamic) fields complemented a constant striving for “leaner,” more efficient approaches to saving time and money on the farm. The broiler houses themselves were carefully designed to be portable, hygienic, transparent, and impossible to escape. Confinement and constant access to food conformed absolutely to the chickens’ “task” of rapid growth. The embodied improvement of animal growth was itself a manifestation of farmer investment matched by an increased notion of possession. The achievement of improvement externally—of the land and what it could be brought to yield—enabled a deepened feeling of inhabitation, of a self-more grounded in the place. The language of regeneration—its coherence and appeal reliant on the presumed virtues of the agrarian tradition—gives animal agriculture crucial cover in a moment when increased awareness of its high costs has resulted in a heightened level of negative scrutiny. Through the prospect of continued improvement, it offers to strengthen the “knots of attachment” (Mitropoulos, 2012: 118) that enable belonging and assure that the crises of legitimate presence that unfold in the wake of colonial settlement remain submerged.

In a basic sense, a present-day Hudson Valley scene in which lambs graze on clover while being enclosed by a fence is a colonial assemblage remarkably unchanged since the pre-US period. However, despite artisanal animal farms often coming to resemble, intentionally or not, a combination living history museum and memorial to agrarianisms past, broiler chickens are a thoroughly modern biotechnology. In contrast to the “timelessness” of the lambs in the pasture, raising chickens for meat in conditions of severe confinement is a recent, thoroughly industrial practice molded by the demands of the market and which arrived in the bucolic pastoral scene from the CAFO, rather than the other way around. Beginning in the first part of the 20th century, university-based animal science labs worked in conjunction with industry partners to construct a broiler chicken industry where none had previously existed, as US per capita chicken availability went from about 10 pounds in 1910 to nearly 70 pounds today (USDA, 2021). ¹² To accomplish this earth-shattering dietary change, a new architectural form, the broiler house, was conceived to isolate the chickens raised exclusively for meat from other farm animals and maximize replicability, production, and scale. This corresponded with the literal remaking of chicken architectures, as breeding programs introduced a distinct morphological form, one bred for fast-growing flesh and not for egg generation: the “broiler” (Nesheim, 2018; Potts, 2012). Although other farm animals have also been genetically recomposed according to the logics of the CAFO, the broiler alone exists—through its very conception— in permanent relation to the relentless imperatives of improvement manifested in the suffocating captivity and optimized life brought about by the productivist principles that delivered the factory farm more generally. ¹³ Although the broiler houses were generally set far away from roads frequented by passersby, their small size and unpretentious construction seemed to ease their blending into the traditional; I never heard anyone, including the farmers, mention the relative incongruence of their recent and particular provenance.

Infrastructures of feeling

Carse's conceptualization of landscape-as-infrastructure enables the denaturalizing and historicizing of Hudson Valley agriculture. Whereas Carse works from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) framework, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2017) revisits Raymond Williams via the Black radical tradition in proposing “infrastructures of feeling” as the “consciousness-foundation, sturdy but not static,” that viscerally underlies our sense of possibility and historical and geographical emplacement (p. 237). With this term Gilmore recognizes affect as a powerful site of politics and world-making while also addressing, as a geographer, the critical role of the material in generating collective consciousness. Developed through her study of prisons and opposition, infrastructures of feeling powerfully link the monumental materiality of the prison with the discursive normalization of carceral geographies. If the prison-industrial complex is hard to see, Gilmore writes, it is because “the many structures that make carceral geographies disappear (which is to say, become ordinary) depend, for their productive capacity, on the infrastructure of feeling (2009: unpaginated).” ¹⁴

The terms with which farmers, conservationists, and other Hudson Valley landscape celebrants most frequently ornament contemporary enactments of the pastoral—such as tradition, aesthetic beauty, stewardship, citizenship, culture, family, and virtue—become, following Gilmore, much more than intangible qualities and rationales. Rather, they can be seen as constitutive of the infrastructures of feeling that become materialized through enabling and constraining action (Gilmore, 2017: 237). The land conservation organization's decision to make a preserved grassland habitat available for animal farming and to then seek out suitable farmers evidences an infrastructure of feeling in which the creation and maintenance of a particular pastoral infrastructure is inseparable from the sense of affective-historical emplacement, experienced most acutely by some and not others, which is both generated by the infrastructure and which provides its justification. The emphasis on the mutuality and relation between what might otherwise be taken as discrete material practices, discursive articulations, and affective experiences links the mundane projects of subsistence, cultivation, and management to the historical emergence of belonging, order, and difference.

Bringing Gilmore's concept into conversation with feminist science studies, the crucial roles of a range of material and immaterial entities—lambs, landscape aesthetics, notions of the past, historically sedimented landscape forms—in the cementing of a social order through the formation of infrastructures of feeling prompts recognition of a political field in which the biotic/abiotic opposition is no longer a viable organizing principle. These entities animate social and political formations, albeit in specific and disproportionate ways. As Neel Ahuja (2016) writes,

a critique of the interspecies zone of the political—which at its broadest would expand beyond the human-animal and human-microbial relations discussed in this book to include the diversity of living species, matter, energies, and environmental systems that produce everyday life out of biosocial crossings—helps us understand the persistence of empire in a postcolonial age precisely because it conjoins power to forces that retreat into the seemingly natural and ahistorical domains of body and matter (x).

These diverse actors are all components of the material-discursive infra of infrastructure: the in-between, that which binds, stabilizes, and weaves (Mitropoulos, 2012). It is no coincidence that both the Democratic and Republican slates in local elections pose for their photos in front of the idyllic, agrarian scene. Whoever wins will administrate under a county seal (Figure 1) in which a bushel of wheat and a well-armed White man, allegedly from 1683, provide the cosmogonical basis for governance. As a material manifestation of powerful historical currents and a generative site for a specific “genre of the human,” the farm field becomes not just a politicized pasture but a crucial, generative locus of the political field more broadly (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). Like the paintings of the Hudson River School, these specific landscapes move people, both figuratively—in the sense of stirring them, of transforming their connection to the place—and also literally, in that they have long ushered certain people into the landscape while forcing others out. Following Ahuja, it is by being presented as no less “natural” than the forests or the mountains that Whiteness can be at once smothering, ambient, and unmarked, while always antiblack and anti-Native. Together the field, the sheep, and the figure of the White farmer form an apparatus for the normalization of an ongoing rampage that extends far beyond them. This is the basis of what Rifkin calls “settler common sense” or how “nonnative access to Indigenous territories comes to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood (2014: xvi).”

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The present-day county government seal for my primary field site, one of few majority Democrat rural counties in upstate New York. Here, the role of racial slavery and wars of conquest are erased—albeit perhaps obliquely referenced through the man's weaponry—providing an “immaculate conception” vision of agrarian virtue (Ulster County Climate Smart Task Force, 2022).

Despite their lustrous copper feathers and crimson combs and wattles, the Freedom Rangers™ never made it onto the farm's polished Instagram feed alive. Their crowded quarters prevented a photo of them alive that would adequately resemble the kind of expansive, bucolic image that the farm's loyal customers were eager to swallow. A butchered breast appeared once posthumously under gravy, the roasted skin almost approaching the reddish brown of the feathers that once protected the breast from sun and wind.

What did feature prominently on the farm's Instagram feed were photos of smiling farmers cuddling with baby animals and of the sun setting behind open fields where the small herd of cows grazed in the last moments of daylight. While carefully stylized, these images were never as deceptive as the cartoonish farm images commonly seen in the logos of industrial animal farmers and distributers. After all, I had deliberately sought out commercial animal agricultural at its most benign. My goal was never to produce an exposé or to selectively focus on atypical moments of extreme violence. Partially for this reason, I did not participate in the process of slaughter. Other researchers have done the commendable, much more dangerous work of infiltrating and documenting the unfathomable pain and agony that characterizes life at industrial agricultural operations for farm animals (as well that of the precariously positioned people who work there) (e.g. Joyce, Nevins and Schneiderman, 2015; Pachirat, 2011). My interest instead was on the banalities of my interlocutors’ farms, run by earnest, compassionate people whose commitment to “animal welfare” ensures a quality of life for their farm animals that is exceptionally rare.

But therein lie the knots of contradiction. Why was it that the farmers contrived a scenario in which they would have to work around the clock to keep their many animals relatively healthy and in conditions up to the standards of themselves and their Instagram followers in exchange for revenues that would only force them to take second jobs off the farm and never have a vacation? How was I to make sense of one farmer's passionate devotion to a deathly sick lamb whose uncertain fate prevented him from sleeping and whom he nursed back to health through tears, only to send her off to be “processed” 4 months after her miraculous recovery?

“We won't do Cornish Cross,” one farmer, Amanda, explained to me. “It's too cruel. It would be cheaper for us because they reach a saleable size so quickly but they get so many health problems, by the end they can barely walk because their breasts are so oversized and they are in constant pain. Freedom Rangers™ take an extra week or two but they are healthy birds.” Cornish Cross, another variety of broiler chicken, is the industry standard for both “conventional” and “pastured” poultry farmers. Celebrated as an incredible achievement in poultry breeding because of their propensity for rapid weight gain, their genetic design assures that they will quickly encounter life-threatening health problems even if not slaughtered by the promised eighth week. On farms like those I studied, the specter of the disabled Cornish Cross licenses the barely longer but “healthy” lives of their “humane” alternatives, Freedom Rangers™. The business principles of “lean” farming that regulate the most fundamental conditions of their fungible lives are unaltered regardless of which variety is raised. They are bound by the same mesh, crowded in with the same number of peers, eat the same food, and are slaughtered in the same way that they would be if they were Cornish Cross. Their lives remain characterized by constraint, residential congestion, and stress. Amanda's final profit from the circumscribed lives of 350 Freedom Rangers™ was several thousand dollars.

What is authorized by the cute and humane? What does a photo of a farmer nuzzling a lamb permit? Kin separation, gender segregation, selective breeding, quarantines, castration, early death, and restricted, stressful lives are de rigeur. The humane insulates the sharp edges of the property relation, fortifying the taken-for-granted policies of captivity and abridged lifespans. Deferring rising criticism of US animal agriculture in general, the humane suggests restraint and demonstrates care. Only in the horrifying shadow of the CAFO could a sleeping pig, its snoring nose inches away from a powerful electric fence, tickle the hearts of Instagram users who would respond with messages like “so adorable.” Here the cute sanitizes the quotidian violence of confinement and coercion that saturates animal agriculture on its best days, allowing one farmer to delight in “getting to be around baby animals all day” without needing to acknowledge how this intimacy is the consequence of electric fences. The cute also sterilizes the lingering, discernible residues of the bloody past that made the place, that rendered the landscape pastoral. This is how one farm could be located on Delaware Drive, a 19th-century homage to a people assumed to be long gone, without anybody thinking twice. The “care” shown towards the animals during their unnecessarily curtailed lives bathes Whiteness in benevolence and innocence. The cute genially normalizes land theft and White control in the realm of everyday.

Although the flesh of these animals will only be directly metabolized by a relatively small group of farm customers, it will nonetheless be digested at a far greater scale by the many thousands who, through tourism, social media, and residential adjacency, consume the pastoral landscape and extract affective affirmation from it. The farmers themselves are relatively small players in the maintenance of the landscape in which decisions about farming are increasingly being made by others, be they real estate interests, politicians, or environmental NGO landlords. I further reject a reading of these farmers as emblematic of a kind of rural Whiteness hastily pathologized by liberal handwringers. For one thing, these are not the farmers reflected in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) demographic surveys—aging and conservative—but rather an emergent set of overwhelmingly young, left-wing, college graduates, including many one-time vegetarians, inspired by critiques of industrial agribusiness. That the regenerative farmers are heavily dependent on liberal, urban-based wealth, whether at the weekly farmers’ market or on the board of the New York City-headquartered (and/or funded) land conservancies prevents a reduction of this situation to a simple “red vs. blue” issue. Indeed, it is this progressive, affluent sector of newcomers, tourists, and second-home owners whose investment and envelopment in the prevailing infrastructure of feeling and the conservative practices of remembering that sustain it might seem most puzzling and unnecessary. The almost sacrosanct veneration of animal farming in a moment of planetary calamity would not be possible without, in part, an erasure of specific histories of violent landscape formation. And yet it is their influential support, whether through land conservation practices, shopping habits, or nonchalant affective experiences, that critically elevates the pastoral as not only “beyond politics” but also as a sort of balm or point of consensus that can help sooth political factionalism. Embracing the pastoral becomes a means of accessing a fount of American virtue taken to be uncontaminated by partisanship. Every rejuvenating weekend spent in the country upstate or “like” on the farm's Instagram normalizes the infrastructure of feeling, postponing Gilmore's call to turn “what becomes ordinary towards the extraordinary…[and] cause what disappears to be visible, palpable, present here and now (2009: unpaginated).”

Ethnographic extraction, ethnographic failure

The chickens’ enduring sociality, born through a life of growing together, manifested in part through constant sonic exchange, is what animal husbandry can neither abide nor do without. This is the irreconcilable dissonance in the conjunction “live-stock,” an apt description for a practice that fundamentally depends on life even as the relative perfection of its execution is predicated on the almost absolute restriction of the exercise of that life. Constraints of all sorts limit movement and possibilities for social relations within and amongst these various creatures of empire. And yet, it is the truncated socialities they form under duress that, as much as the industrial corn and soy that they eat, keeps them alive and thus capable of improving their value to the farmers. This is what Anna Tsing calls “salvage accumulation” or the “creation of capitalist value from noncapitalist value regimes (2015: 128).”

Whenever I approached the enclosure, especially when I was alone and only there to take notes, I would try to drape myself in the Harawayan insight that we are always in complicated, nonconsensual, and intimate relation with others, often in extremely asymmetrical ways. There is no refuge of a life of study in safe solitude, I would tell myself, and so we have to do our best knowing that it may never be enough. Yet the retreating chickens before me made clear that this was still a classic ethnography “of” not “with” ethnographic subjects. Protected by a fence and sanctioned by the local authorities, I did not request permission but only placed myself where they had nowhere to hide. The violence of my ethnographic presence and the tenuousness of their sociality undermines my claim of them as my “interlocutors.” Given the fraught nature of the “inter-”—that which was between us—how were they to “locute” with me? Through our affective proximity? Through emotional, political, or, in the case of pigs and cows, physical threat? While the absence of human speech seems to make way for other forms of subjectivity or nonsubjectivity, did the ethnographic form only prevent their register, thwarted by utterly inadequate instruments of recognition? As Mel Chen (2012: 106) writes:

I wish to assert that limiting ourselves to reworking the philosophies of animal-human dependencies, or the ethological studies of a particular animal, or this or that human-animal relationship, carries certain risks: namely, the importing of historical racializations and queerings (or, indeed, imperial tropes) that subtend the very humans and animals under discussion, despite all the bracketing we may be cautioned to do (of Aristotle and his problems, or Derrida and his, etc).

One question that might emerge from this situation could be: how best to ethnographically represent what is going on here? Another could be: why are they still in the cage? Between us, only I was aware of the abrupt terminus that would obstruct their passage into the prime of life. By ethnographic failure here, I mean two things. On one hand, the fundamental failure of my ethnography to provide remedy or redress. Specifically, my failure to my ethnographic subjects, periodically subject to terror, gathered under a death sentence, who would be gone in two weeks. Yet, in the spirit of Jack Halberstam (2011), I also embrace a different sense of ethnographic failure: the failure of positivism, of an over-confident empiricism, instead nurturing a disinterest in ever knowing what is “really” going on with chickens or what their experience was “really” like (Stengers, 2012). How could I have described them in my notes as being “happy” one day when the farmer brought them food, given not only that their precarious community was bounded by extreme and arbitrary violence but also given the heavy humanist baggage carried by such implications of sentience and individuality? Here, a recognition of nonrecognition, that is knowing that the social worlds made within the cage were important even if I barely knew them at all, might inhibit the rush toward casting the farm animals as either individual subjects or else as “absent referents” (Adams, 1994)—genericized, fungible, and always part of someone else's future.

In time, the ethnographic depth that prolonged visits were supposed to afford seemed less vital to the research than did, following the notable example of Juno Parreñas (2018), the momentary experiences of particular affective sensations that link diverse bodies briefly brought together by specific histories. And yet, would a shift toward affect nonetheless imply that the project of representation can be salvaged and put to worthwhile ends in scenes like this where unnecessarily shortened lives are the raison d’être? Did attention to the various modalities of ethnographic attunement merely distract from the circumstances in which I enjoyed and exercised the powers of the researcher? Such a reframing shifts emphasis from possible representations of the Freedom Rangers™ to my accountability to them as something other than a “theoretical spectacle (Dave, 2014: 441).” How was I obligated to alter the research project in light of our undeniable if unsought relation?

Whiteness, Coloniality, and the Human

How is it that those whose presence in a landscape should generate the most suspicion and merit the most concern are those who transit the space most carefree and self-assured? How is that those who are most responsible for the multi-century crime wave that continues unhindered are those who expect to enjoy unrestricted mobility and assume total access? Were the farmers or I to be spotted in the farm's fields by a passerby, the resulting photo would not be scrutinized as potential evidence of wrongdoing but instead submitted to a social media audience reassured by the persistence of a tradition of stewardship and an agrarian heritage.

The colonial landscape infrastructure built to deliver a White agrarian utopia, like all infrastructures, failed and continues to fail. Black and Native people never completely left the rural parts of the Hudson Valley and never will, even though to this day Black communities make up a smaller percentage of the total population than they did during the times of slavery. A 2017 US Department of Agriculture census of my primary field site of Ulster County, NY reported only three Black farmers, a number that is slightly less than a century before, and just one Black-owned farm out of a total of over 800 farmers and 400 farms (USDA, 2017). ¹⁵ Despite having been in the Hudson Valley since the beginning of the colonial period, for many in the White majority, Black presence in the countryside is still regarded as an anomalous curiosity taken to be of necessarily recent vintage. The presumption of timeless White centrality likewise enables the ubiquitous and no less erroneous assignation of local Native presence to the past tense whether on the walls of museums, in media, or in casual conversation. Nonetheless, the enduring presence, memories, and research of Black and Native residents continue to provide the basis for accounts of the regional past (e.g. Armstead, 2003; Pritchard, 2007; Williams-Myers, 1994) that deviate from the hegemonic White histories deployed to legitimate the prevailing state of affairs. In the face of erasure and ubiquitous violence, these dissenting engagements with a “past that is not past” undergird divergent contemporary land practices—from the protection of burial sites, to the dissemination of Munsee language signage, to the promotion of Black and Native practices of food generation—that provision disparate futures (Sharpe, 2016: 9). I invoke them here not as a utopian flourish but rather to emphasize that there has always been more going on.

Inspired by an expansive, emergent nexus of scholarship on the relation between colonialism, racialization, and formations of the (non)human, I take the highly unstable interfaces between the human/nonhuman, to say nothing of the very assumption of a human/nonhuman interface, as crucial, generative sites of racial formation and the perpetuation of the violence of conquest (e.g. Boisseron, 2018; Jackson, 2020; Kim, 2015). Human exceptionalism as both an ontological premise and political expression in North America today is necessarily a colonial formation that displaces Indigenous accounts of world-making and kin-making, no less now than in the early colonial period (Belcourt, 2014; Simpson, 2017; TallBear, 2018). Further, that the normative colonial category of the human valorized by human exceptionalism is constituted through related practices of forcible inclusion and violent exclusion according to inter-reliant but non-analogous formations of race, ability, gender, and species assures that the status and prerogative afforded by human exceptionalism will, by necessity, never be equally wielded by all (S Taylor, 2016; Gillespie, 2018). ¹⁶ Rather, “humanity” has always been a matter of degree.

Chen's insight that “entities like disability, womanhood, sexuality, emotion, the vegetal and the inanimate [are] rendered proximate to the human, although they have always subtended the human by propping it up” points to the foundational irony that the “individual” humanist self is necessarily constituted through its relation to others (2012: 98). As part of a specific multi-century inheritance, the humanity, freedom, and therefore Whiteness of the farmers and I—but never us alone—are in fundamental relation to that which is deselected. In but one of countless illustrative contrasts, animality on the farm is enacted through the violence a given organism can be humanely subjected to. When a chicken is called a “broiler” it receives a name that shadows its entire life with its untimely death, reflecting that its paramount and indeed singular value is its eligibility to be killed young. Here, the work of species—as a reduction to kind, an authorization of the cage, and a means of sorting bodies and calibrating deadly regimes of care—precludes the possibility of any meaningful accountability. ¹⁷ The farmers and I, as the real “freedom rangers,” yielded our mobility and subjectivity from our respective extractive enterprises though these possessions remained available to us far beyond them. We could traverse our cherished landscape unencumbered, our capacities as self-directed individuals affirmed. Long futures—in principle—awaited us just as long pasts validated our agentive roles in the present.

Of course, the relative durability of White supremacy, settler colonialism, and the afterlives of racial slavery involves social and political forms that cannot be entirely attributed to the composition of the landscape. And yet, Ahuja's contention that the intransigence of unbearable, world destroying more-than-human orders depends in part on their ability to retreat into the realm of the natural and ahistorical draw me to the countryside, especially given how commendable research has more regularly succeeded in establishing how legacies of violence shape legal, economic, and more conventionally “political” spheres. Further, Virginia Anderson's account of the centrality of specific subsistence forms to broader social life (and death) in the early colonial period provides a powerful precedent for studies of contemporary rural places that have, since their inception, been in foundational mutual relation with the metropoles taken as the primary sites of history. At the very least, Anderson's insight that animal agriculture was as much about the perpetuation of Christian civilization as it was about diet seems hardly less true in the present instance. Then as now, healthy food could be more easily and affordably obtained through other means. What small-scale animal agriculture offers and continues to regenerate for White communities is an opportunity for material-discursive aggrandizing that has spanned the duration of the colonial Hudson Valley.

The Freedom Rangers™ are held in not only by the legacy of British manufacturing and the entrepreneur's bottom line but also by an infrastructure of feeling. More than dollars, their anxious (and “sexy”) bodies are sites for the production of virtue, place, and belonging for some humans at the expense of others. It is this political power contained in affect and aesthetics that has guaranteed the continued acceptability and standing of “redeemed” forms of animal agriculture despite increasingly widespread shifts in opinion regarding what constitutes acceptable relations with nonhumans and the seriousness of multiform ecological crises. Recipients of self-described “animal lovers’” proprietary love and incidental participants in infrastructures of feeling that normalize landscapes of violence and absolve the ongoing crimes of the past, extracted from these animal bodies is not just meat but an individual and collective sense of self.