Industrial agriculture most often focuses on what we can see – that which is above ground, such as yields, production, cropping systems, and profits. Plant physiologist, David Wolfe, calls this a “surface chauvinism”, or the tendency to think that what we see on the surface tells the whole story when equally or more important is what goes on out of sight and below ground. Soil health is emerging as an alternative perspective among scientists and international agricultural development agencies to unsettle dominant perceptions of soil as simply a growth medium for crops that emerged along with the Green Revolution and its emphasis on “improved” seeds and agri-chemicals. Growing attention to soils as living bodies (perhaps with rights to flourish and determine their own course) suggests we need to repair or build anew our relationships with what some soil practitioners refer to as “the skin of the earth”. Before we ask if “soil health” is a useful paradigm to inform this kind of reparative work, it is prudent to inquire: What is soil? Then: What is health? Who decides if a soil is healthy, and for whom does it matter? Where do the boundaries of soil health begin and end? Is there a continuum between soil-human-ecosystem health? Many farmers also find themselves in a transitional moment in which the destruction of their livelihoods is vitally linked to the destruction of local soils. How might the agricultural practices of diverse rural communities be informed by concepts of “soil health” – and not only health-oriented paradigms? We draw upon our research with small farmers in Uganda and Colombia to discuss the way emergent ideas about “soil health” may serve to build collaborations between soil scientists, agricultural extensionists, and farmers in the global South. We also explore how a concern for soils pushes us beyond human-centric frameworks, and towards understanding the shared ecological nature of justice, ethics, well-being, and food production.
Co-Sponsored by the departments of Anthropology and Environmental Studies
Kate Scow is Professor of Soil Science and Microbial Ecology in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at UC Davis. She is Director of the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility that hosts the Century Experiment (http://asi.ucdavis.edu/rr). Scow’s research program investigates the role of soil microbial communities in providing ecosystem services in agricultural and polluted ecosystems. Specifically, she investigates linkages between diversity and greenhouse gas emissions, responses of soil functional diversity to long-term management practices, effects of co-contaminants in organic amendments on soil communities, and works extensively in Uganda on irrigation and soil management for enhancing vegetable production for smallholder farmers.
Kristina Lyons is Assistant Professor of Feminist Science Studies at UCSC with affiliations in the Department of Anthropology, Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Science & Justice Research Center. She is currently working on a book project entitled, Decomposition at Life Politics: Soil Practitioners and Vital Spaces in the Colombian Amazon. This manuscript is based on more than ten years of fieldwork in Colombia where she engaged in an ethnography of human-soil relations across laboratories, greenhouses, gardens and farms with soil scientists in the capital city of Bogotá, and small farmers in the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Putumayo. She has worked closely with rural social movements in southwestern Colombia, and her work has focused on the ways soils become (or not) matters of concern within the militarized U.S.-Colombia “War on Drugs” and its discontents.
Rap Report > Soil Health
4:00 – 6:00PM, Engineering 2 room 599