Introduction `` They give us funds and they don't follow up on the projects...this money is the poison of the people. We receive the project and begin to work...without even knowing how to organize the project. Problems arise: machines break, we need a veterinarian; there are no resources and no end to this. People start to fight: `you broke it, you fix it', `no, it's your fault'... and like this, everything goes badly. Some complain to the village authorities, fighting among themselves.'' La Luz Coop member, Oaxaca City (July 2004) In this paper we focus on the role played by technological protocols in development projects. Our case study will assess a tiny herd of high-yield dairy cows öfour Holstein heifers and a bull ötogether with the associated `heifer care' protocols that guided care and feeding, the difficulties of undertaking these protocols, and the consequent effects on village lifeways. We pose two questions. First, how did a dairy project warmly received in the village of Santa Cruz come, in time, to generate far-reaching, destruc- tive effects upon local social relations? Second, why did the project persist across a temporal span of over fifteen years despite its social and environmental costs and failure to produce the promised milk? Our thesis, developed in the body of this paper, will argue that insights may be found through analysis of project protocols. On the one hand, we find that the protocols were relatively inflexible ö and tied to the physiology of the Holstein heifer herself ö in a manner not compatible with local Dialectics of disassembly: heifer-care protocols and the alienation of value in a village dairy cooperative Tad Mutersbaugh Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA; e-mail: tmute2@uky.edu Lauren Martin Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland; e-mail: lauren.martin@oulu.fi Received 24 March 2011; in revised form 7 September 2011 Environment and Planning A 2012, volume 44, pages 723^ 740 Abstract. This paper examines `protocols' öinstructions that inform project recipients about how technology is to be used. Our case study of `heifer-care' protocols associated with a microdairy scheme raises two questions. First, we ask how these protocols effect a disassembly of social relations within the village ö`poisoning' them, as coop members put it. Second, we raise the question of persistence: namely, how were village participants in the microdairy cooperative able to continue for over fifteen years despite a failure to produce milk and the deleterious effects upon village social relations? To address this paradox, we examine protocols from the standpoints of both science and technology studies (STS) and labor-process studies(LPS). STS supply a `boundary object' concept that helps to explain protocol persistence; LPS provide a theory of alienation that furthers our under- standing of how protocols alienate labor övia a spatiotemporal dislocation of value öand shape coop members' subjective experience of development. By joining these theories, we hope to provide insights into the operations of protocols and suggest a theoretical liaison between STS and LPS that would provide STS with a better theory of subjective experience and LPS theory with an improved poststructuralist framing. As a matter of praxis, we also show how coop members recognize, in time, the mechanisms through which value is dislocated and respond by reworking their engagements with NGOs to capture a share of the value produced by their labor. Keywords: cooperatives, companion species, political ecology, STS, labor process studies, political economy, alienation, assemblage, rent theory, Mexico-Oaxaca. doi:10.1068/a44157