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Short abstract

In China’s tobacco regions, soil degradation, fragmented land, and planting contracts make terrain a shifting frontier. Company deploys soil science, mechanization, and digital mapping to govern fields, yet the dynamics of soils, humans, plants, and devices continuously unsettle control.

Long abstract

In China’s tobacco-producing regions, recurring tensions around soil quality, fragmented landholdings, and area-based planting contracts render terrain a critical site of intervention. These dynamics reflect broader land use transformations beyond Europe, where agricultural landscapes are continually restructured through intensification, mechanization, and negotiated abandonment. I argue that these tensions crystallize around tobacco terrain as a shifting operational frontier where knowledge, technique, technology, and governmentality intersect. This frontier produces new and contested relations among humans, soils, plants, and infrastructures. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nanxiong, northern Guangdong, this paper examines how tobacco companies mobilize soil science, mechanization, and digital mapping systems to reorganize rural space and agrarian livelihoods. It also explores how various actors, including matter and living beings, participate in and respond to these transformations in diverse ways. In promoting farmyard manure, companies attempt to reclaim soil as a living system, drawing on the epistemic authority of soil science to legitimize organic cultivation practices. Meanwhile, technological interventions—mechanization and digital mapping systems—seek to standardize and govern tobacco fields. Yet these efforts are continually unsettled: commercialized organic inputs have disrupted soils’ self-nurturing cycles, farmers maintain traditional planting habits and spatial strategies, and bureaucratic and infrastructural constraints complicate governance. This paper shows that tobacco companies seek to impose a particular ontology of tobacco terrain through scientific discourse and technological interventions, yet these efforts are continuously unsettled by the materiality of things themselves. The inherent heterogeneity and openness of tobacco terrain inevitably allow vitality, decay, and relationality to continually exceed the boundaries of governance