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Short abstract:

This paper explores the agricultural practice of fallowing as an ecological and diplomatic buffer or mediator, enacting forms of soil remediation through more or less violent negotiations with a host of nonhuman lives at the margins of agriculture.

Long abstract:

This paper is structured around an inquiry into fallowing – the practice of leaving agricultural land uncultivated for a regularly recurring period of time, which used to be an integral part of European agriculture and is still in use in different places and different forms, even as the advent of synthetic fertilisers and chemical weed control have reshaped the agricultural context in which it emerged. Fallowing still persists as a practice, and as an object interest in agricultural policy and microbiology, responding to a growing concern with the depletion and regeneration of soils in agricultural and environmental policy; in this persistence it shapes and reshapes forms of knowledge about and relation to depleted soils.

More specifically, this paper will explore the practice off fallowing as a buffer – ecological, chemical, financial – and a mediator in highly disturbed ecosystems. Fallowing endows cultivation systems with different kinds of flexibility, allows for more or less violent modes of negotiation with a host of plants and micro-organisms at the margins of agriculture, and sometimes enables the regulation of grain prices by modulating production as well as the controlled fostering of wild plant and bird life. This paper will investigate the contradictory facets of this untimely diplomatic tool, whose archaic nature is remobilised in these transitional times.