Modes of food production–consumption defined as ‘alternative’ have received considerable academic attention, with studies exploring both their potential for contributing to rural development strategies and the opportunities they provide for countering established power relations in food supply systems. However, the use of the term ‘alternative’ as part of a persistent dualism in which it is opposed to the ‘conventional’ is problematic as it loses sight of the specificity of different examples food production–consumption. Based on extensive field research with a series of very different food projects, this article develops a methodological framework which structures a description of how specific examples of food production–consumption are organised with reference to a series of analytical fields. This framework retains a sense of the diversity and particularity of particular cases of production–consumption, and directs attention to the particular locations of resistance to prevalent power relations in food systems that are made possible through different food projects.

Recent representations of human–animal relationships in farming have tended to focus on human experience, and to essentialise animal subjectivity in granting them a centred subjectivity akin to that assumed to be possessed by humans. Instead, this paper develops an understanding of the coproduction of domestic livestock animal subjectivities and the technologies used in farming domestic livestock animals, based on an analysis of texts produced by agricultural scientists, farmers, and equipment manufacturers relating to the effects of introducing new robotic milking technologies into dairy farming. Drawing particularly on Foucault's conceptions of subjectivity and biopower, I explore the emergence of particular forms of bovine subjectivity associated with robotic milking. Through an analysis of a wide range of secondary sources, the paper shows that, although robotic technologies have been presented as offering cows ‘freedom’, better welfare, and a more ‘natural’ experience, other relations of domination come into effect in association with such technologies and their spatialities. These are expressed through the manipulation of animal bodies and behaviours, in expectations that cows move and act in particular ways, and through normalisation and individualisation processes. I argue that nonhuman animal subjectivities in agriculture are thus heterogeneous, fluid, and contingent on specific sets of relationships between animals, humans, and technologies and on specific agricultural microgeographies. The paper ends by acknowledging that these relationships need further empirical exploration in terms of both attempts to understand animals’ changed experiences and ways of being, and their ethical implications in particular situations.

Genetic techniques have become increasingly prevalent in livestock breeding, associated with new types of knowledge‐practice and changes in the institutional and geographical relationships related to animal husbandry. This paper examines the value of Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ to theorising livestock breeding and the implications of the rise of genetic knowledge‐practices in agriculture, developing the concept to apply to nonhuman animals and to situations where humans and nonhuman animals are co‐constituted through particular knowledge‐practices and corporeal meetings. It focuses on the idea of ‘population’ as a central component of biopower, and relates this to conceptualisations of biosocial collectivity. Reacting to the inherent humanism of Foucault’s outlining of biopower, the paper argues for its relevance in relation to nonhuman populations, and for heterogeneous conceptualisations of biosocial collectivity. Drawing on research with UK beef cattle and sheep breed societies, the paper explores how, in practice, populations are constructed in relation to the production of particular sorts of truths concerning, and particular modes of intervention in, the lives of nonhuman animals. It explores how heterogeneous biosocial collectivities are constituted around these interventions. The emergence of genetic techniques is shown to transform the processes constituting populations and heterogeneous biosocial collectivities, and this is discussed in terms of a new inflection of agricultural biopower associated with novel interventions in the lives of livestock animals.