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Short abstract:

Reflecting on participatory action research, government agricultural extension, soil science and smallholders, this paper discusses soil improvement through the dual articulation of materials and discourse, where articulation is messy and diverse, requiring many moments of integration.

Long abstract:

In a coffee-growing village in Thailand, extended smallholder households are the core bases for soil repair. Yet soil knowledge and imaginaries are slow in becoming valued amongst commodity crop farmers, despite the efforts of government agricultural extension workers. While new scientific models of soil are transforming agricultural research, extension and commerce, this enthusiasm does not reach smallholder farmers who experience fractious histories with the state.

This paper brings together two methodological moments: long-term fieldwork in the village shaped by participatory action research, and a month of fieldwork and interviews with the Land Development Thailand’s soil chemistry lab for farmers. Focusing on the government extension worker, I consider the obstructions he faces. Real improvement of soil that farmers can see involves the dual articulation of materials and discourse, where articulation is messy and diverse, requiring many moments of integration.

Building on Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation, this paper shows how soil articulates new affinities and cross-cutting solidarities between ethnic minority highland farmers and government soil scientists from the provinces. It discusses the use of participatory action research in examining the mediation/translation of knowledge. I argue that soil health as a boundary object in the preparation of a workshop/gathering in the village, offers a way to understand how a different era of the scaled local, where it meets appropriate technology, is emerging. This is a repair of soil’s materiality, and a repair of knowledge: intergenerational, south-south and south-north, and how ethnography has dealt with agrarian knowledge in Thailand.