Trading with risk: associating bovine Tuberculosis to cattle commodities in risk-based trading

Abstract

The trading of cattle across England poses challenges to the control and eradication of the cattle disease bovine Tuberculosis (bTB). To encourage the consideration of risk in the practice of cattle trading in England, Cattle Health Certification Standards (CHeCS) were introduced in 2016 to associate cattle commodities with bTB. However, CHeCS has only been adopted by approximately 60 farmers and there is no evidence to suggest it is encouraging risk-based trading of cattle. In this article, I use three empirical cases to analyse how disease risk was calculated, how it was framed through CHeCS as a quantifiable quality that could be associated with cattle, and how it failed to be taken up in the market. Drawing on the work of Callon and others, I conceive this failure to be an overflow of the efforts of qualculation. Building on their work, I argue that attaching a quality to a commodity requires effort, is an unstable process and is ultimately prone to failure.

(Dis)Entangling livestock marketplaces: Cattle purchasing, fluid engineering and market displays

“…Secondly, perspectives from anthropology (Carrier, 1997;Carrier and Miller, 1998) and science and technology studies (Callon, 1998b;2021) have reinvigorated interest in markets, and marketplaces as part of efforts to examine and conceptualise the processes of marketisation (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010). These perspectives have provided the focus for new studies of the social-technical arrangements, referred to as 'market agencements' (Callon, 2021), that organise the conception, production and circulation of goods; and encompass the tools, devices and skills that seek to articulate and make sense of the qualities of goods.…”

“…Studies have therefore focused on the ways in which the marketplace is organised and performed (Knorr-Cetina, 2003; Leyshon et al, 2005; Mackenzie et al, 2008) through different strategies and devices that makes the marketplace familiar and navigable. In agricultural studies, these perspectives have directed attention to the role of market devices, modes of calculation and standardisation (Lockie and Higgins, 2007) in relation to commodities such as red meat (Henry, 2017) as well as cattle trading (Enticott, 2016; Enticott et al, 2021; Phoenix, 2021). Whilst these studies reveal much about agricultural markets, they say little about the place of the market and the encounters therein: their design, practices, spatialities and identities.…”