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Paper short abstract:

I analyse transatlantic soy landscapes through their more-than-human entanglements. I ask how soy altered more-than-human relations and shaped ways of inhabiting landscapes. I work with contemporary actors to question my readings of these histories and explore how history relates to current issues.

Paper long abstract:

Since the mid twentieth century, the Dutch livestock industry relied on soybeans imported from Brazil to feed its animals. Soybeans, therefore, have connected landscapes of soy plantations in Brazil and farmlands in the Netherlands. In my PhD, I investigate these histories to rethink connected agricultural landscapes as more-than-human co-productions to shift perspective beyond perceiving them in terms of their anthropogenic purpose and spatial boundaries. In my work, soy as a plant, feed, carrier of nutrients and embodied in manure becomes an entry point to interpret the more-than-human entanglements of connected landscapes in the past and the present. In this paper, I focus on the Dutch region De Peel, a drained peatland marked by intensive livestock agriculture that has been associated with various land use controversies in the past century. I conduct fieldwork to find material and discursive traces of the more-than-human processes soybeans shaped to highlight De Peel’s historical entanglement with landscapes elsewhere. I connect these insights to archival and oral history investigations of how soy contributed to the intensification of livestock agriculture and how various agencies (soils, pigs, unruly plants) interpreted and co-constructed the materialities that emerged from the growing presence of soy. Methodologically, in investigating a historical issue that is connected to several contemporary socio-ecological threats, I engage with (more-than)-human actors to make explicit the present concerns informing my historical research. In doing so, I contribute to debates about how environmental history can address present-day ecological issues, and how various agencies become co-constructors of historical knowledge.