Ways of (un)knowing landscapes: Tracing more-than-human relations in regenerative agriculture

Abstract

In the face of diverse socio-ecological crises, regenerative agriculture promises to enliven rural landscapes by positioning farmers as key actors in mitigating the ‘carbon problem’ on the one hand, and adapting to it on the other. This article troubles ways of knowing regenerative agriculture through soil-and-carbon centered representational knowledge practices. Conceptually, we build on relational scholarship and use the concept of (un)knowing landscapes to suggest that agricultural landscapes both become, and become (un)known in and through diverse more-than-human relations. Empirically, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork independently conducted at farms in Finland, Norway and Italy practicing diversified regenerative agriculture. By focusing specifically on the practices of composting and processes of decomposition, we show how farmers come to know and reciprocate the aliveness of their landscapes through both proximate and distant relational dynamics: balancing between control and cohabitation, caring for and taking care of, and attending to multiple rhythms of (re)production. We argue that placing a deeper focus on soils — even when representing them differently — not only risks making proximate relations in diversified regenerative agricultural landscapes unknown, but also permits these landscapes to become known primarily through relations of distance. This, in turn, enables the commensurability of regenerative agricultural landscapes into tradable units for carbon markets. We conclude that transformation towards ecological livelihoods requires a radical reevaluation of, and accounting for, diverse more-than-human landscape relations.