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Paper short abstract

Regenerative agriculture is a practice of regeneration that responds to socio-ecological crisis by building a multispecies alliance of soils, trees, humans, ancestors, and God. Patience and hope are crucial to this intergenerational project of change.

Paper long abstract

In western Kenya, in a context of deep socio-ecological crisis, regenerative agriculture is gaining prominence. While often framed as a set of techniques to restore soil fertility and improve yields, regenerative agriculture here is also understood as a broader transformative practice aimed at addressing legacies of extractivism, rural out-migration, and intergenerational conflict. In this paper, I analyse regenerative agriculture as a practice of regeneration: a relational effort to create “growth” (dongruok) under conditions of decline. I trace the everyday work involved in cultivating what local practitioners describe as central to regeneration: a multispecies alliance among soils, trees, animals, humans, ancestors, and God. Centring the hardships and uncertainties of this work, I highlight the temporal and ethical orientations through which regeneration is pursued. I show that patience and hope are key generative dispositions. Patience enables attunement to the rhythms and agencies of human and more-than-human others, making cooperation and joint becoming across difference possible. Hope, in turn, sustains regenerative efforts in the face of failure, delay, and disappointment. Together, patience and hope orient regenerative agriculture as an intergenerational project that works to renew kin relations with land and more-than-human worlds.