Paper short abstract:

Two futureoriented 'timescapes' encounter eachother in the field of the farmers: The technoscientific futurity of Climate Smart Agriculture associated with progress, and the timescape of entropy, calling for limitation. The response is paradoxical.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at ambiguities of industrial farming in a temporal perspective. Large industrial farmers in Saskatchewan speak of their passion for farming, their emotions involved with the cycles of growing and becoming, the thrill of driving mighty machines, the gamble of being caught up in the whirlwind ferocity of the staples economy. However recently their vision of progress as a linear increase in speed, size and quantity, of producing more with faster machines on bigger fields, has being challenged by the spectres of climate change, soil depletion and intoxication. The 'anticipatory' affective state of technoscientific futurity confronts the climate change paradigm in the field of the farmer disenchanting the future to the point of despair. The response is paradoxical: religious belief in science, hope for salvation, business as usual, anger towards those with a different vision of the future. Two futureoriented 'timescapes' encounter eachother in the field of the farmers. The technoscientific futurity of Climate Smart Agriculture that associates the future with progress, disagrees with the timescape of entropy, the diffusion of fossil energy that leads to heating up the Earth atmosphere and calls for limitation. The socio-affective engine of innovation-driven 'expectation' still drives the farming practices of most farmers, while the entropy paradigm is less sexy — a broken trust in promissory science. However it could lead farmers back in touch with the warmth of things, to the metabolic cycles of being, becoming and dying and to a reconnection with the intricate web of life of the soil.