Presentation short abstract

This paper critically explores the “fertiliser addiction” metaphor, showing how nitrogen dependence forms across soils, microbes, animals, plants, and farmers, and explores what a more-than-human recovery might mean when soils and people heal together.

Presentation long abstract

In agricultural discourse, “fertiliser addiction” has been used to describe farmers, soils, and national food systems locked into escalating nitrogen use. Much like invocations of substance abuse disorder, this can be rhetorically powerful but risks moralisation, obscuring socio-ecological and political conditions that make synthetic fertiliser dependence seem unavoidable. This paper takes the metaphor seriously, critically exploring how nitrogen dependences emerge beyond individual failings, as more-than-human relational conditions rooted in soils, plants, microbial communities, agronomic infrastructures, and food-system pressures.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with farmers in southwest England, I rethink “addiction” as a relational condition distributed across human and nonhuman agencies. Long-term nitrogen enrichment reorganizes microbial and plant communities, producing forms of ecological tolerance, withdrawal, and dependency that echo clinical models of addiction. Farmers’ narratives of being “trapped” by fertiliser further illuminate the affective and livelihood dimensions of this entanglement, where shame, guilt, pragmatism, and care coexist with structural constraints.

Attending to soil as an active and responsive substance (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), I propose “fertiliser recovery” as a socio-ecological transition involving attunement, community support, and alternative nutrient practices. Tracing the muddy, co-constituted agencies of nitrogen dependence, this paper opens new ethical and political questions about how soils participate in, resist, and transform the dynamics of industrial agriculture—and what more-than-human forms of recovery might look like. The paper asks what it means to follow the addiction metaphor to completion: to recognise soils as affected kin and to imagine forms of recovery in which humans, soils, and their communities heal together.