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Long abstract:

Guided by the buzz phrase of ‘farming with nature’, agricultural wastelands across Europe have become experimental sites for sustainable farming in an effort to repair these ecologies while maintaining their economic function. We focus on an exemplifying case of such an experiment in the Netherlands: the restoration of a degraded peat polder by means of cranberry cultivation. The economic potential of cranberries lies in their ecological ability to grow in wet conditions allowing the peat ecosystem to re-establish itself as both carbon sink and biodiversity haven. A ‘win-win-win scenario’. To bring such a scenario into being, intricate relations among cranberries, soil microbiome, other plants, fauna, groundwater, greenhouse gases, farmers, and consumers need to be facilitated and fostered. These intricate relations are animated by an economic register of valuing as cranberries are meant to become commodities. The aim, though, is no longer to just produce the cranberry as a pacified good (Çalişkan and Callon 2010). The ecology in which the cranberry grows is, in addition, meant to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to help restore biodiversity. These ‘ecosystem services’ might, in turn, also be commodified. Conceptualising the commodification of cranberries, and their ecologies, as a co-modification process (Asdal, 2018), we explore who or what may be animated and who or what may be pacified as the cranberry plant is economised as part of sustainable farming. In so doing, we seek to enrich the co-modification agenda within the anthropology of markets with some multispecies-inspired insights.