Paper short abstract:

Introducing a South Indian natural farming movement, the so-called Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) movement, my presentation seeks to show the imaginative and affective responses of farmers to a situation of agroecological crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Introducing a South Indian natural farming movement, the so-called Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) movement, my presentation seeks to show the imaginative and affective responses of farmers to a situation of agroecological crisis. These farmers are second or third generation of cash-crop settlers at the frontier of Western Ghats agriculture. They find themselves at a historical conjuncture of post WTO price fluctuations and in a landscape "blasted" (Tsing) by capitalism and the technologies, substances and biologies of the so-called green revolution. While this situation has compelled many smallholders to exit agriculture and to commit suicide, the question of how to continue living as agriculturalists has also opened up space for experimentation and innovation. Natural farming, I argue entails an ontological politics of reconceptualizing farming as multispecies assemblage of plants, animals, microbes and humans "in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating" (Haraway). I argue that the ontological project of natural farmers brings them close to the emergent new materialist, posthuman and multispecies ontological stance in the environmental humanities.

I will focus on the microbiopolitcs (Paxon) of soil liveliness and the art of fermenting fertilizers as well as on the cultural politics of reviving indigenous cow breeds in the context of high-modernist development and Hindu chauvinist politics.