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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Romania’s Bărăgan Plain, this paper shows how drought operates through the breakdown of irrigation systems. Conservation farming emerges as a partial substitute for lost infrastructure, transforming historical neglect into individualised responsibility.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches drought as both an infrastructural and a climatic condition. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among industrial farms and smallholders in Romania’s Bărăgan Plain, it argues that contemporary drought is inseparable from the dismantling of socialist irrigation systems and the uneven redistribution of land and responsibility following decollectivisation. Farmers experience drought through soil moisture loss, crop stress, and pest proliferation, as well as through the absence of functioning canals, pumps, and collective maintenance regimes that once buffered climatic variability. In response, farms make efforts to turn to conservation agriculture/no-till methods as partial substitutes for lost irrigation systems. These shifts, however, require capital-intensive machinery, chemical inputs, and new forms of farming knowledge, deepening inequalities between farms that can afford such investments and those that cannot. I show how drought transforms infrastructural neglect into individualised technical problems, reframing historically produced vulnerabilities as matters of farm-level competence. By tracing drought across soils, machines, and failing irrigation systems, the paper shows how climate change unfolds through infrastructural breakdown, reshaping agrarian futures while obscuring the political decisions that produced uneven vulnerability.