Paper short abstract:

As an international green market emerges, large corporations are promoting “regenerative agriculture” on an industrial scale by valuing soil life. Using ethnographic data from the Paris Basin, I ask how the STS framework can illuminate the impact on non-human and human labour at the farm level.

Paper long abstract:

In the face of environmental crises, European policies respond mainly by integrating ecosystems into the market economy. In agriculture, soil life is increasingly seen as valuable, often depending on its ability to store carbon. In Ile-de-France, large companies are promoting “regenerative agriculture” experiments through public-private research partnerships. To disseminate these practices (no-tillage, cover crops, sheep grazing) on an industrial scale, agronomists are developing digital tools to translate farmers’ relationships with their soils into calculable, marketable data.

In line with the panel theme, I will focus on the tools created to value the earth, i.e. farmers’ complex soil biodiversity. What kinds of knowledge and criteria do they rely on? What technologies do they require? How do they change the division of labour at the farm level? Beyond the opposition between high-tech, climate-smart robots, and agro-ecological solutions, “regenerative agriculture” is expanding through technologies of valuation to enrol soil ecosystems in a global green market competition.

The Marxist theory of the Capitalocene, as articulated by Jason W. Moore, is primarily based on the idea that today’s ecological crisis is rooted in the capitalist appropriation of “cheap natures”. STS approaches show how non-humans are increasingly being enrolled in the generation of capitalist value. In the context of farmers’ protests against the European Green Deal, this paper suggests that STS can also be a tool for analysing how the valuation of "nature" can contribute to the precarisation of human labour – from increased inequalities between farmers, to gender to the exploitation of migrant workers.