Generative idleness and gestures of reparation: the resurgence and promises of intentional fallowing practices in European regenerative agriculture

Project Information

FALLOW

Grant agreement ID: 101064934

DOI

10.3030/101064934

Project closed

EC signature date 11 July 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2024

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 226 751,04

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FALLOW (Generative idleness and gestures of reparation: the resurgence and promises of intentional fallowing practices in European regenerative agriculture)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The practice of intentional fallowing, edged out by the advent of synthetic fertilisers in the 19th century, has been an object of renewed interest in agricultural policy and microbiology in recent years; it responds to a growing concern with the depletion and regeneration of soils in agricultural and environmental policy. Fallowing has seen a recent resurgence as a technique for agricultural productivity through improved soil fertility, an additional arrow in conservation biology’s quiver of potential restoration tools, and as a promising resource of micro-organisms that could be used to engineer novel plant holobionts. This project investigates this resurgence and contemporary uses of fallowing and fallowed land through a critical philosophical analysis of scientific discourse and practices, combined with extensive documentary and ethnographic research.
This project deploys an interdisciplinary approach grounded in philosophy and ethnography to analyse the contemporary resurgence and mutations of intentional fallowing practices in European agriculture and policies, as well as the cultural, social, and scientific consequences of this shift. It analyses experimental fallowing as a site in which new forms of biopolitics – the management and optimisation of life through apparatuses of knowledge and power – as well as cosmopolitics – the negotiations and articulations between the human and nonhuman entities involved in creating an ecological collective and common world – are rehearsed and enacted. It analyses the economic and political underpinnings of this renewed interest in alternatives to synthetic fertilisers and intensive agriculture by showing that fallowed soils are a site where a variety of interests and projects converge, and by tracing how these practices take up, replay, and extend questions of productivity and idleness, growth, and alternatives to economic expansion. This project combines documentary research with an extensive engagement with literature in agricultural science, microbiology, conservation biology, and ecology, producing an analysis of fallowing that cuts across what is usually deemed “cultural” and “biological” domains and studies the role, promises, and implications of fallowing practices in times of mass extinction and soil depletion.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project consisted of a wide-ranging documentary and discursive analysis of contemporary uses of fallowing in crop rotation systems that mapped the places, projects, and discourses in which the practice has either persisted or is being revived. This mapping engaged with both academic sources (peer-revied articles in agronomy, biology, etc.) and non-academic sources (reports, blogs, popular science material etc.). In parallel, the project engaged with secondary historical sources, in particular the work of French agronomists and historians of agriculture, to contextualise the analysis of contemporary uses of fallowing and gain a better understanding of the historical processes that have created the resurgence that is the focus of this research project. Finally, this project combined its empirical and historical analysis of fallowing with an extensive reading of adjacent literature in conservation, microbiology, soil science, and other disciplines, where necessary to support and in-depth understanding of the mechanisms and consequences of fallowing and to understand how fallowing crosses over from agriculture into otehr contexts such as conservation or microbiological research.
The main theoretical achievements of the project were to show that the concept and the practice are historically contested and fraught, existing at a volatile diplomatic border between groups of practitioners, agronomists, and policy-makers. On this historically grounded basis, I formulated a working definition of fallowing as a flexible tool that is reached for when certain ecological, financial, or social relations break down, and is used to mediate in these situations, for instance by doing weed-breaking work when synthetic pesticides fail, modulating grain prices in mandatory set-aside schemes, or providing buffer zones for the conservation of endangered species. This allowed me to establish a first working taxonomy of fallowing practices, classifying them according to whether they are used to modulate, mediate, remediate, or sever.
This project also represented a methodological intervention in the field of the environmental humanities, as it consolidated a combination of philosophical analysis with and engagement with empirical data that has been in development for about two decades. The documentary component of the project analysed relevant scientific literature not merely as discourse, but as revelatory of generative practices that influence the course of human-soil relationships and create new ways of negotiating a pathway through climate change and the extinction of soil ecosystems; the project fully integrated scientific concepts and projects into the analysis, allowing the results of this empirical research to inform its theoretical approach.
The findings of this project will be published in two scientific articles that are currently in preparation.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

As noted in the project proposal, scholars in the environmental humanities, science and technology, and anthropology have recently started turning their attention to soil as a living ecosystem, and as the result of collaborative multispecies work (or coercive human interventions). Special issues in environmental humanities and anthropological journals also provide an overview of the breadth of contemporary scholarship on soils and soil science, ranging from historical accounts of the advent of synthetic fertilisers to studies of soil mapping and anthropological studies of composting practices. But fallowing practices in themselves, while sometimes considered as part of ethnographies of soil use and science, have not yet been the object of extensive monographic studies or thematic edited collections; one notable exception is a recent issue of New Geographies focusing on urban fallows and the “dialectic of devaluation and renewal” they embody.
This project has contributed to expanding scholarship on this topic beyond the state of the art by conducting a first of its kind synthetic analysis of fallowing across agriculture, conservation, and scientific research, and contextualising this analysis in historical data. It also contributes to clarifying a terminological conflation and clearly separating an analysis of so-called fallow land as abandoned and fallowing as an active intervention into soils used for agricultural, conservationist or scientific purposes. This contribution fills a scientific gap in the study of agricultural practices and soil science by highlighting and under-studied but crucial component of agriculture, and marks a first step towards a cross-cutting and wide-ranging analysis of fallowing in its own right.