Presentation short abstract

An auto-ethnographic essay exploring different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations from a family farm in Central Finland. The essay works as an opening for diversifying and “storying” knowledge about agricultural lands in Europe.

Presentation long abstract

In this auto-ethnographic essay, I trace and explore different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations (me, my father and my grandparents) who have lived and worked on a family farm in Central Finland. By weaving critical social scientific and multidisciplinary thinking together with personal accounts, the contribution offers an examination of how relationships and knowledge about agricultural soils exist in a variety of ways, many which cannot be reduced to techno-scientific or agro-productivistic understandings. The essay discusses embodied, and silent ways of knowing land, that are thick with time and socially shared, making visible the parallel soil knowledges that exist in a place. The essay is also an opening for thinking how diversifying and “storying” knowledge about agricultural lands can build further understanding about more-than-human relations, slower timescales, and the disappearance of local ways of knowing land.