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Paper short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, carbon registries, and verifiers, this paper examines how sensing technologies enact particular ontologies of soil and what is gained by attending to the more intimate sensing practices that these dissipated carbon verification systems struggle to apprehend.

Paper long abstract

Agricultural soil carbon sequestration (ASCS) has emerged as a focal point for climate mitigation investment attracting billions in funding, much of it directed toward novel sensing technologies: satellite remote sensing, AI-driven modeling, distributed mobile apps, and field instrumentation for measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). Yet as IPCC synthesis reports acknowledge, the socially attainable potential for ASCS is, in fact, much lower than the technically attainable potential (Smith et al. 2007, 500; 2014, 847; Nabuurs et al. 2022, 774). This gap is constituted and mediated by numerous, contextually-specific, and poorly defined social processes (Nabuurs et al. 2022, 774). This paper aims to illuminate some of the critical social processes at play through examining the disjuncture between how carbon is sensed at the level of global stocks and flows amenable to financialization, and how it is known on-farm through the day-to-day enactments of agricultural work. The conceptual challenges structuring ASCS verification—additionality, permanence, leakage—each presume particular ontologies of soil and practice. The sensing regimes emerging around ASCS operate at a distance from the localized and intimate collections of people, plants, animals, and soil that constitute farming as lived practice. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, carbon registries, and verification organizations, this paper examines how these sensing technologies presume and enact particular relationships and how these presumptions sit uneasily against the ways farmers come to know soil. It asks what is learned by attending to the more intimate and bodily sensing practices that dissipated verification systems struggle to apprehend.