The Social Life of Soil

Author:

Hayden, Jennifer Ann

Graduate Program:

Rural Sociology

Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

Document Type:

Dissertation

Date of Defense:

August 26, 2015

Committee Members:

Carolyn Elizabeth Sachs, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Carolyn Elizabeth Sachs, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Cynthia Clare Hinrichs, Committee Member
Leland Luther Glenna, Committee Member
Mary Ellen Barbercheck, Committee Member

Keywords:

Soil Health
Agriculture
U.S.
Chesapeake Bay
Qualitative
Focus Groups
Case Study
Policy
Actor Network Theory
Geography

Abstract:

Soil health is emerging as a national and international priority, with the United Nations declaring 2015 as the International Year of Soil. This prioritization recognizes that soil health supports human health and wellbeing, while also mitigating environmental problems such as climate change. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the influences on farmers’ soil management decisions and in turn what those decisions do to support or constrain soil health across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Qualitative inquiry guided by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) supports the generation of data. ANT is apt because it insists on the influence of non-human actors, such as landscape, wildlife and machinery. Four purposefully diverse, grain-producing farms located across the watershed formed the core cases that inform the findings. Forty-seven farmers and related agricultural specialists participated in interviews, farm walks, participatory photography and focus groups from which data were generated. These qualitative techniques were complemented by soil health lab analyses. Findings include four case studies describing the soil health actor-networks on the core farms. Each case’s actor-network is given a descriptive label: Observation, Experimentation, Innovation, and Privilege. Patterns that emerge from the case data reveal ten categories of influence on the key soil-health affecting practices of tillage, rotation, and amendments. These categories of influence are: worldview; farming norms; learning; policy; labor; technology; crops; landscape & soil; manure; and the farming system. Three main conclusions are drawn from the findings. First, to foster soil health there must be an explicit goal of soil health at the farm or policy scales and this goal must be supported by networks that value farmer knowledge, on-farm observation, experimentation and innovation. Second, the proliferation of influences on tillage, amendment and rotation practices means that there are ample opportunities to shift actor-networks to support soil health. And, finally, research, or interventions, that focus on the adoption of specific practices belies the specificity of whole farm cases. These conclusions have real-world implications that cluster around designing policy and research from an interdisciplinary, participatory perspective with the explicit goal of supporting agricultural soil health by working with farmers rather than on or for farmers.