The LandBruk seminar series is open to all who are interested in, or curious about the Nordic region and various forms of land use. It is possible to attend the seminars in person or on Zoom.
Language
This seminar will be held in English. The discussion will be in English, Danish and Norwegian.
Abstract
Speculative Soil Sensing: Experimental approaches to soil monitoring among regenerative farmers in Denmark
Regenerative farmers in Denmark, as elsewhere, engage in agricultural practices that aim to restore soil health while producing foods. Facing degraded soils, climate volatility, and acknowledging that much of their agricultural education no longer offers reliable guidance, farmers experiment with soil monitoring through practices that go beyond conventional agronomy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how regenerative farmers rely on their full sensory repertoire to interpret soils: attending to smell, touch, sight and even taste. Through these practices, they interpret the soil’s subtle and often ambiguous responses to their experiments with new practices, adjusting their methods accordingly.
While scholarship on human-soil relations has valuably shown how care and attentiveness are crucial for noticing and responding to soil’s needs (Krzywoszynska 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Hugøy 2024), we suggest that these are not sufficient in times of crises. In contexts of uncertainty, where neither farmers nor researchers fully know what is happening underground, speculation becomes an equally important mode of engagement. Sensing soils, we suggest, is not only a way of registering soil health but also of imagining: a speculative practice through which farmers explore who they are farming-with and how such relations may transform agriculture more broadly. Technologies such as microscopes and geophones extend farmers’ sensory reach, and practices of phytomorphism, or vegetal sensing (Myers 2015), expand speculative engagements with soil life. We see speculation as a generative concept to capture how farmers navigate uncertainty, cultivate relations with more-than-human beings, and imagine possible futures.
We use multimodal forms to examine what the implications of such sensory and speculative practices are for anthropological and multispecies scholarly engagement.
About the presenters
Sille, Astrid and Emma are colleagues on the project “Soil Matters: Reimagining Soils through Multispecies Collaborations in Regenerative Farming” (Jordforbindelser: Et projekt der vækker jorden til live gennem sanserne), which is a collaboration between anthropologists from Aalborg University and the association Andelsgaarde.
Sille Ragnhild Skovgaard is an anthropologist and Ph.D. student at Aalborg University. Through fieldwork on regenerative farms, she examines how new understandings of soil and more-than-human collaborations challenge and transform Danish farming practices. Sille is co-author of Lysbønder and co-director of the documentary I think we begin as light.
Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen is a social anthropologist and associate professor at Aalborg University. She researches how people relate to landscapes, nature and environment in different contexts - how nature is categorized and practiced, and how it becomes the object of interests, politics and conflicts. She is co-editor of the book Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene.
Emma Harris is a visual anthropologist specialised in multimodal methods and regenerative agriculture. She is the interdisciplinary coordinator in the project Jordforbindelser, employed by the association Andelsgaarde. Emma co-directed the short documentary I think we begin as light (2025), focusing on multispecies relations in the regenerative farming milieu in Denmark.
About LandBruk
LandBruk (LandUse) is a group of researchers and students associated with the NorLab research group, who come together to discuss anthropological perspectives on land-use in the Nordics.