Unearthing care: Rooting alternative agricultural practices in Norway and Costa Rica

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing literature on human-soil relations by exploring how care for agricultural soils unfolds among farmers who engage with alternative agricultural practices across different productions and sites in Norway and Costa Rica. These farmers approach soil as a living being and seek to approach care with macro- and microorganisms in response to soil challenges and economic instabilities. The article follows recent literature on soil care in showing how agricultural practices challenge the dominant approach to soils as passive. However, the article argues the necessity of expanding on existing notions of care. This, I argue, involves ethnographically “unearthing” care: unpacking and situating a diversity of soil care practices, their human and other-than-human entanglements, and how these relations are conditioned by environmental, genealogical, sociocultural, temporal, epistemic, economic, and political mechanisms within and beyond the farm. Considering these variables is essential to keep soil care in the emerging literature from following a romanticizing path toward abstract individualism.