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Abstract
The fieldwork for my doctoral degree was carried out over nineteen months, a year
of which was spent working on an industrial dairy farm in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost
Island. As in much of the industrialised world, dairy farming in Japan is rapidly
changing. Many farmers are forced by neo-liberal agricultural policies to shift from
small family operated farms to high-tech, high-speed, and high overhead industrial
operations. This paper focuses on the history of dairy farming in the Tokachi region;
more specifically one farm and the shift over a generation to a rotary parlour milking
system. It addresses the linkages this mode of production has cultivated amongst humans,
dairy cows and industrialized space.
The parlour system at Great Hopes Farm allows five workers (aided by three more stall
staff) to milk over 1000 cows, fifty at a time, three times a day. The impetus behind
moving to parlour technology is that it increases productivity through mechanically
enhanced observation and control. However this recent mechanical separation of human
and cow during the milking process has led to affectively shared interspecies and
inter-human alienation. The technology of the parlour system sets daily rhythms for
bovine and human alike, and separates both from a process formerly dependent upon,
specialized knowledge, affective empathy, and embodied knowledge. Human and bovine
experience the systemic violence of the machine and what remains is a complex bio-politics
of interspecies affect and the separation of “bare” and “political” life.