Negotiating Mastitis: Animal health assemblages, new ways of seeing disease and hidden frictions to changing antimicrobial use practices

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on antimicrobial use in the dairy industry and farmer responses to the changing political climate centered around the threat of antimicrobial resistance. In this dissertation. I examine animal health assemblages with a particular focus on mastitis assemblages. My investigation of mastitis assemblages offers insight into both the epistemologies around animal health management and the hidden frictions to changing antimicrobial use practice. In this dissertation, I seek to answer the following questions. How do antimicrobial use-related policies affect mastitis management? What information sources do dairy producers use to make mastitis management decisions? And to what extent do producers consider bacteria agency when developing and implementing mastitis management strategies? To do this, I draw insight from work in policy mobilities, more-than-human geographies, science and technology studies, critical data studies and agri-food studies. The methods I used for this research included interviews, direct and participant observation and document analysis. Dairy cows get mastitis when interactions with the farm environment inevitably expose them to pathogenic bacteria that their immune system cannot manage. There is acceptance among producers that mastitis-causing bacteria will continue to exist within farm spaces despite their best efforts. Dairy farmers have learned the best way to reduce the incidence of mastitis is to better manage human-cow-bacteria relations. Producers must negotiate the flows of life on their farm and the resources they have available. Mastitis assemblages evolve with the changing political-economic circumstances, new knowledge introductions and farm characteristics I discuss throughout this dissertation. In the first empirical chapter, I examine dairy producer concerns about future antimicrobial regulations and how these concerns could serve as a form of friction to the movement of stricter antimicrobial use policy. In the second empirical chapter, I examine how new ways of understanding bacteria have changed human-bacteria relations and by extension how producers manage and treat mastitis. In the final empirical chapter, I assess the impact of data technology adoption on dairy farm practices and how associated difficulties produce hybrid epistemologies around animal health management.