Un/breathable futures and pasts in the nitrogen crisis: An account of fieldwork on three cow farms in 2023

The sounding of a ‘nitrogen crisis’ (Raad van State, 2019) necessitates - among many things - an agricultural transition in the Netherlands, especially for cattle farming. Since 2019, effective policies have however failed to materialise. On the basis of short-term ethnographic observations and interviews on three cow farms in 2023, in this paper I argue that the bureaucratic-scientific nitrogen accounting system set up to manage the nitrogen crisis tends to generate ‘unbreathable futures’ (cf. Van Balen forthcoming) and trace two other circulations of 'nitrogen' at work in the data that bring into view relevant histories and open up other -breathable? - ways out of the crisis at hand.