‘It Would Have Been Odd to Separate the Animals and Then Look the Cow in the Eyes’. A Qualitative Study of Norwegian Dairy Farmers

ABSTRACT Farmers’ rearing practices in livestock production and their decision to adopt alternative practices are of ongoing interest in rural sociology. For social scientists examining alternative agriculture, enduring questions remain about not only how alternatives can emerge but also how mainstream systems often remain relatively unperturbed by the emergence of alternative practices. This article explores these questions through an examination of cow–calf contact (CCC) in Norway. In the industrial dairy sector in the Global North, the removal of dairy calves shortly after calving has become an emerging concern within veterinarian medicine and ethology. In this study, we explored why dairy farmers decide to change rearing practices to CCC systems where calves have contact with the dam for more than 14 days in dairy production, an alternative practice which misaligns with wider practices in the industrial dairy sector. The paper reports the results of qualitative interviews with Norwegian farmers who use these alternative practices and, using Convention Theory (CT), addresses the on‐farm and off‐farm dynamics that shape both the emergence as well as the current marginalisation of this new alternative practice of calf and cow rearing in dairy farming. The results of the study reveal multiple dynamics shaping the adoption of CCC. The results reveal the way that farmers have the ability to draw on multiple justifications which enable CCC adoption despite significant structural misalignment with Norway's industrial dairy sector. The conclusions support the arguments of social scientists engaging with animal welfare about the importance of societal dynamics both outside and within agricultural systems. How these social dynamics connect with on‐farm contexts is highly influential in shaping animal rearing practices and associated farmer justifications. The use of CT demonstrates clearly that creating better animal welfare practices, in this case through the adoption of CCC, is not simply a matter of education, policy or technical interventions. It requires wider alignments between worlds of production, often in hybrid forms, or else the solid industrial centre of these kinds of farming world simply endures relatively untroubled and unchallenged.