This collaborative research project examines how farmers in the Midwestern US relate to and manage soil, and how agricultural practices and soil relations are constituted together. The project brings together political ecology, multispecies approaches, and qualitative social science methods to study soil as part of a living set of relationships among farmers, plants, microbes, agricultural practices, and landscapes.

About the project

Working with undergraduate researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, we use semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival research, and qualitative analysis to investigate how farmers understand and care for soil across different agricultural contexts.

Our research examines soil health practices, composting, microbial life, farmer knowledge, agricultural communities, and changing ideas about what healthy and productive soil requires.

Soil as a living collaborator

A central focus of this work is how soil and compost might be understood relationally rather than primarily as inputs into agricultural production. In related work on compost and regenerative agriculture, we are examining composting as a practice of creating and stewarding the conditions necessary for beneficial microbial communities and plant flourishing.

This approach asks how agricultural practice changes when soils, microbes, plants, and compost are understood as living participants in food production rather than simply as resources to be managed.

Toward relational land practices

Across these projects, we are interested in how land practices and more-than-human relations are constituted together. Agricultural practices help create particular soil ecologies and relationships, while the capacities and responses of soils, microbes, plants, and other organisms also shape what forms of agriculture become possible.

Undergraduate collaborative research

The project also serves as a collaborative undergraduate research program. Students participate in the full research process, including research design, ethics and IRB development, interviewing, archival research, ethnographic observation, qualitative coding, analysis, and presentation of findings.

Related work

• Regenerative agriculture and compost
• Leadership in Land Practices
• UW-Platteville Edible Garden