Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Norwegian and Costa Rican farmers’ relations with soils as sites of emergency and transformation provoke particular soil rhythms and temporalities that in turn may reveal farmers’ perceptions, responses, and urgency (or not) toward climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper treats agricultural fertilizing practices as an intake to investigate the relationship between knowledges, soil temporalities and climate change. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among farmers across three productions in Norway and Costa Rica, this paper explores how farmers relate to agricultural soils and other more-than human beings in context of national policy plans that aspire toward carbon neutral agricultural sectors through “decarbonizing” measures. In this context, national and international governance bodies and farmers consider that soils contribute to climate change mitigation due to their perceived potential for atmospheric carbon capture and storage. Simultaneously, farmers in both countries experience to different degrees soil related challenges such as soil compaction, soil runoff, and yield loss that are all exacerbated by extreme weather events. Soil thus becomes a dual site of emergency and transformation. Soil emergencies combined with the climate change threat have resulted in the emergence of a variety of agricultural models that either seek to intensify, partly change, or break away from established approaches, knowledges, and soil related practices – the goal supposedly being sustainable agriculture. As these models gain momentum to varying extents, so are different soil rhythms and temporalities set into motion wherein soil health and fertility becomes a continual and ongoing process, rather than a static stage that can be reached at one point in time.

How do farmers’ particular relations with soils provoke particular soil rhythms and temporalities? And what can these relations reveal about farmers’ perceptions, responses, and urgency (or not) toward climate change?