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Short abstract:

Through ethnographic fieldwork with soil-food-web practitioners, growers, and scientists in Italy, I suggest how emergent practices and imaginaries of soil repair can ‘compost’ Green Revolution technosciences in what I characterize as ‘grass/roots’ re-mediations and relationalities.

Long abstract:

In this presentation I offer ethnographic materials from ongoing fieldwork in the compost station and laboratory of a soil-food-web collective start-up in Italy, where soil practitioners, scientists and farmers experiment collaboratively. Responding to the pressing need to make space for the rhizosphere’s thick relationalities in new ways to engage and take care of the living soil in agriculture, my informants elaborate alternative knowledges, practices, imaginaries, and collectives of soil-food-web care and experimentation. Backed by larger translocal networks of agroecological alternatives, I argue that these engagements can prefigure emergent forms of what I call grass/roots technoscience in an effort to ‘compost’ the Green Revolution and its legacies.

Such attempts, I show, depend on extensive mediations: from those between different knowledges, approaches, and concerns that are made explicit in my informants’ collaborations, to those facilitated by the technological infrastructure of the laboratory (like microscopes, cameras, and so on), to the multispecies mediations of living compost. Shifting away from an understanding of soils based principally on chemistry, such microbiologically attuned approaches to repairing the living soil bring to the fore soils as a contact zone constantly being (re)mediated. As these relationalities are constantly troubled by the politics of (non-)scalability, though, I also highlight the frictions, troubles and surprises that emerge in my informants’ attempts to facilitate the reproduction and diffusion of microbial communities in the soil-food-web - in the hope of learning how to repair and compost Green Revolution agriculture.