Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically explores how farmers in southeast Norway relate differently to ideas of conservation through practices of care that seek to work with nature. How do farmers approach agricultural soils in efforts to stimulate convivial relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds?

Paper long abstract:

Agricultural soils are not subject to conservation regimes in the conventional sense of drawing boundaries between keeping nature in and humans out. Conservation as a concept is nevertheless analytically interesting to apply when considering contemporary soil emergencies and transformations provoked by ecosystem changes. Within this context emerge novel ways of relating to, and caring for, soils.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among grain farmers in southeast Norway, this paper explores soils as sites of contestation in terms of their management. To varying degrees proponents of conservation- and regenerative agriculture challenge the hegemonic mode of practicing agriculture, along with the prevailing perception of soils as a passive medium of growth – an idea that arguably has developed in tandem with an agro-industrial model that favors efficiency and volume. Farmers that practice these seemingly novel approaches rethink and refamiliarize themselves with soils in attempts to confront soil related challenges. Contrary to the established mode of agricultural practice which typically undercommunicates soil biology, these farmers aspire to learn from soils, improve them, and care for its living beings by tuning in to ecosystem rhythms. In doing so, they arguably engage in an ethics of care that can be considered as more-than-human life-making projects. This ethics of care is differently constituted from that of the established mode of agriculture.

How do farmers approach agricultural soils in efforts to stimulate convivial relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds? What kinds of temporalities and rhythms emerge through conservative and regenerative ethics of care for more-than human lifeworlds?