“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”: Regenerative agriculture, farming by numbers, and calculability in soil microbiopolitics', my paper is just out in EPE: Nature and Space in opeb access. A few notes on main points and potential audiences:
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The paper grew out of my interest in the centrality of calculability, the desire to express knowledge numerically, amongst UK #regenag farmers. The soc sc and humanities #microbes lit, and m-t-h lit more widely, is all about embodied knowledge and affect. So, why this disconnect?
I propose that even #regenag farmers operate within an agrarian biopolitics of 'farming by numbers' in which farming realities/landscapes and farmers themselves are made legible and governable through quantification (of money and material/ecological processes). Farmers are not passive in this,
but self-governing. As a result, they experience the need to quantify both because of the demands from the powers which shape their realities (capital, state), and they use quantification to navigate these powers for their own benefit.
What the paper argues, simply, is that calculability and quantification are not going to 'go away', and we need to deal with them as political powers which operate 'externally' (on people's realities) and internally (through their self-governance).
Empirically, the case study brings out the knowledge and experience of #regenag farmers in relation to #soil #microbiome, and calls for more human-microbial studies with communities/places which are not already 'probiotic' (these farmers sit within the dominant agri-food system).
Theoretically, I analyse the intersection of self-governance, calculability, and expertise in the making and unmaking of (micro)biopolitics. So, hopefully fun on both fronts.
I warmly invite discussion and feedback - find my email online or msg me here!
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I warmly invite discussion and feedback - find my email online or msg me here!