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

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

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.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union