Paper short abstract:

In line with climate policies, "living" soil is increasingly valued. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Paris Basin, I show how practices of valuation based on digital tools are taking shape on farms. By studying the case of French agroindustry, I contribute to the theory of (non)human labour.

Paper long abstract:

In the face of multiple environmental crises, European policies are responding mainly with technological, market-driven solutions. In agriculture, high-tech machinery such as climate-smart robots and sensors are often seen as opposed to agroecological solutions. However, soil life is also increasingly considered valuable, often based on its ability to store carbon in a stable and measurable way (Kearnes & Rickards 2017; Granjou & al 2020).

In France, large companies are promoting experimental “regenerative” farming projects on an industrial scale. Cereal and beet farmers are being pushed to account for their practices by measuring not only how much food they can produce, but also how much carbon their soil can store and how much “living soil” they can re/produce. Through public-private research partnerships, agronomists are developing digital tools to translate so-called agroecological soil practices into calculable and marketable data.

Drawing on multispecies ethnography, my research explores how these valuation practices take shape at the farm level. What human and non-human labour do they rely on? What kinds of knowledge and technologies do they require? How do they transform farmers’ relationships with their soils? It has been argued that Marxist value theory needs to be extended to better examine how non-human labour participates in the generation of capital value (Krzywoszynska 2020). I then ask how the value of “regeneration” changes the “nature” of agricultural labour in the context of the highly industrialised Paris Basin.