"Relating to Soil Differently: Reciprocity between Humans and Soil" -A paper I presented for a conference last year.

Relating to soil differently: Reciprocity between humans and soil

Introduction

Hello all, to begin, there is a wonderful quote that we all owe our existence to two inches of top soil and the fact that it rains. This paper, and my intended research, attempts to take up and discuss Maria Bellacasa’s suggestion that “inheritors of the agricultural revolution are slowing-down to soil’s temporality through understanding and becoming an actor within soil’s ecological food web” by looking new, young women, sustainable farmers relationships with the soil through their practices of soil care and in the face of land tenure issues.

To situate myself in what I am to discuss, I would like to say that I am fortunate that as a native anthropologist studying the relationship new, young women, sustainable farmers have with the soil, I have life experiences in my research interests outside of the academy. I am both a farmer’s daughter and was at one time a sustainable farming apprentice. Meaning I have a particular set of knowledge and insights that intimately relate to the western multi-species, nature-culture turns in soil science and the social sciences.

What brought me back to the academy was experiencing mentors and farmers speaking of soil and plants in anthropomorphic terms, such as listening and reading what plants tell us about the soil, soil “health” being determined by how well we “take care” of the soil and feeding the organisms within it so that the healthy soil would in turn grow healthy plants to feed us. These notions of understanding the reciprocity of soil-human relationships are documented in cultures outside of the western scientific model of knowledge production and were almost adopted in the scientific model when several growing with nature advocates were conducting soil-feeding experiments, but this knowledge was pushed underground by techno-scientific advances sparked by the world wars.

Techno-scientific soil science has given us soil chemistry and mineral components of soil, synthetic ways of growing crops according to human demands, and even the culture of soil. Through microscopic power, humans have been able to see soil, widening their imaginations of what exists below our feet, that soil is not just dirt… rather it is teaming with life, with culture.

When I speak of soil as culture, I do not mean to speak only of the actual primary mineral constituents of soil: sand, silt, and clay. These three minerals alone could not stand up as ethnographic subjects; Sand, silt, and clay are the framework, which holds the culture of soil together though.. A culture, for anyone outside of anthropology, with even a slight scientific background, probably entails envisioning a plastic or glass petri dish with fuzzy lines growing on a “gel.” This is not what is intended with a “culture of soil.” What is intended is a close examination of the invisible work of millions of miniscule organisms that exist within even a teaspoon of healthy, well-fed soil: work that we assume farmers only do, but how do farmer and human practices affect these organisms and the work they do? How do tractors, animals, and compost affect them? How does soil affect us? How does the smell of spring’s first cut into sleeping ground affect the relationship farmers have with that soil?

Before tending to these questions, let us first consider what the techno-scientific model of farming entails for human-soil relations.

Modern Agriculture

For millennia advances in agriculture were done through slow experimental trials of various plant breeds (requiring a full growing season) and trying diverse farming techniques, testing differing ways of interacting and working with the soil (National Research Council, 1995). This being a slow production of knowledge. The beginning of the twentieth century commenced a techno-scientific fueled, radical change in agriculture in the United States. What had for centuries always been just “farming” now came to be known as “traditional farming” (and today is commonly known as “organic farming”), replaced by “modern farming,” commonly known now as “conventional farming” and even more modernly, farming fell under capitalistic nomenclature as “agribusinesses” (Conkin, 2008).

The World Wars brought about massive changes in farming to create “modern agriculture” as a result of war backed advances in techno-science, especially within the fields of bio-chemistry and engineering, two war time chemicals were also repurposed for agriculture; ammonium-nitrate for nitrogen and DDT for insecticides. Advances in these fields and the re-use of chemicals resulted in early versions of present day crop hybrids, seed patents, and precise chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticide applications to federally subsidized crops. Advances in engineering largely displaced agricultural labor by replacing men and horse-power with combustible engine power, changing the ratio of farmers to acres of farm land and farmer to number of mouths fed, spurring the mechanization of agriculture (Conkin, 2008).

But what of soil? This modern agricultural model viewed soil as a means to “prop the plant up” while farmers and scientists determined and measured the needs of the plant-crop to make the plant reach the human desired yield quantities (Fitzgerald, 2014). These needs included the correct applied amount of nitrogen and phosphorus to make the plant grow fast and hardy, herbicides to kill competitor weeds, and insecticides to kill any living organism that existed other than the desired plant-crop. This style of agriculture also required the soil to be deeply tilled so the plant’s roots could easily infiltrate the soil. The old farmer adage regarding “an acre of ground is what a man can work in a day” was no longer true with new combustion engine tractors pulling the heavy plows quickly turning soil over and over until it was turned into a fine powdered dirt. The wide tires and heaviness of the steel tractors simultaneously compacted the layers beneath the plowed topsoil into hard concrete layers, becoming impenetrable by plant’s roots and water, requiring deeper tillage in future years. Only then were seeds ready to be sown. Only after there was no physical environment left for any other living entity to survive, then were the special seeds of modern agriculture able to be planted (Fitzgerald, 2014).

This kind of sanitation of the soil is similar to the relationship between cheese, microbes, and production facilities Heather Paxson lays out in “The Life of Cheese.” Utilizing Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, how the state has extended its influence to the biology of humanity as a form of control, Paxson furthers this concept to microbiological life, deeming it micro-biopolitics. She discusses how the hyper-sanitization of cheese production facilities, which are mandated by state regulations, is in opposition to the very acts of cheese making, which requires a cultured relationship with microbial life and ecology to make cheese ferment. This notion of micro-biopolitics could be extended further to soil and how modern farmers are expected to interact with the soil. Modern agriculture has turned away from utilizing the microbial activity in soil to grow crops through feeding a complex ecosystem like Dale and his family have for generations, to controlling the activity in soil with chemical insecticides and herbicides, which effectively sanitizes the soil through insecticides and herbicides, killing off any living thing other than the crop. This information of how to utilize these chemicals against the soil are passed down and promulgated through universities and state agencies alike. Soil has gone from an ecosystem of life to plain old dirt.

As this upheaval of modern methods of agriculture occurred, simultaneous to the development of modern agriculture, there was a growing community of key figures who sought to apply scientific methods to the “old model” (commonly known as organic methods) of growing crops and tending land. They sought to prove traditional agriculture’s efficacy and show that modern farmers should cultivate a relationship with the land/soil instead of ruling over it. Botanist Sir Albert Howard (considered the father of organic agriculture) and Lady Eve Balfour (who believed that human health depended on soil health) from the United Kingdom, Agronomist F.H. King of the United States, Rudolf Steiner of Germany (father of Biodynamic Agriculture which emphasized farmers as balancing and shepherding the interactions between farms animals, soil, and plants), and Masanobu Fukuoka a soil microbiologist from Japan, all believed and showed that a different form of knowledge and land tenure is better for Earth and for humans in the long-term than “modern agriculture” (Conkin, 2008). These people essentially believed that by actively “managing soil health” as part of soil’s ecological food network is an integral part of human agricultural life.

Both modern agriculture and “organic” agriculture as we know them today are results of modern science, yet one is controlled far more than the other. Organic certification, requires farmers to keep strict records of everything they do on their farm, from washing out binds to collect produce to how many times compost was applied to the vegetable beds, if these records were not kept, farmers would be considered invalid for organic certification by the USDA. Going back to Paxson’s concept of micro-biopolitics, organic certification requirements are a premier example of how the state is regulating not only the biology of soil but also deeply affecting the actions of farmer themselves and how they must interact with their farm on a day to day basis.

A counter point to consider though, a farmer does not need to be certified to use heavy machinery to tear open the land, pulverizing the dirt into fine powder, nor do they have to keep records of how often they spray insecticides and herbicides, in addition they often have to apply rock-lime to counteract the over application of-chemically-fertilized soils to make them “sweet” again. Yet, to be considered organic, an organic farmer must keep very strict and timely records of every move they make, time a field is plowed, how often the plow is washed, did the farmer apply an organically approved fertilizer?   So how is it possible that traditional, “organic” agriculture of soil, and farmers who work with the nature-culture of soil, literally feeding soil’s micro-organisms, are more heavily regulated than those farmers who have used modern agriculture’s techno-scientific “advances?” Nature is now regulated further than the synthetic chemicals. Anna Tsing notes this, “the rise of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into resources.”

The world has seen the results of “regulating” nature and allowing techno-science to run amuck; the largest dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes are resultant of chemical agriculture of the Midwest states. Chemicals used to grow commodity crops are flushed down the Mississippi causing more than common massive fish kills, affecting fishers’ livelihoods and “the health” of our planet to name a very known and direct link of modern agricultures’ relationship with soil to the greater world (Rabotyagov, 2014). Science and technology has given humans the ability to see life everywhere and the implications of treating soil like dirt are clear: farmers and all people must begin relating to nature differently if we are going to mitigate the future implications of the Anthropocene and save ourselves and our home Earth.