During the past several decades, as ecological concern about industrial agriculture has intensified, some sectors of agriculture have become subject to environmental regulations, a trend rural sociologist Fred Buttel called the environmentalization of agriculture. Although this transformation has had a crucial technoscientific dimension, and although agricultural technoscience has long been an important topic in rural sociology, rural sociologists have had little to say about the relationship between environmental regulations and agri-environmental technoscience. In this thesis I address this relatively neglected topic by examining a particular regulatory system: the nutrient management regulations that attempt to reduce nutrient runoff from industrial livestock and poultry operations. The thesis examines the regulatory science that laid the scientific foundation for the regulations as well as three techno-fixes that were developed to reduce the risk of runoff. I explain how these two types of agri-environmental technoscience have helped keep regulatory compliance costs in check, maintaining the profitability of the regulated industry and of regions as locations for it. My thesis is that agri-environmental technoscience plays a crucial role in overcoming (socio)ecological obstacles to the accumulation of capital. I also use this case study to grapple with the larger intellectual problem of how to understand the relationship among capitalism, technoscience, and nature in an era of increasing environmental concern. Focusing on one of the techno-fixes in particular, the Enviropig(TM), the first animal ever genetically engineered to be more "environmentally friendly," I highlight the emergence of a striking new development in the capitalist production of nature: the reconstruction of nature----in this case, the body----as a way of overcoming (socio)ecological obstacles to capital accumulation.
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