Emergent Imaginaries of Regenerative Agriculture

This project examines the competing visions of practices aimed at improving soil health, called regenerative agriculture. This project will focus on a set of recently launched company-sponsored soil health and carbon farming initiatives in the Great Plains and New England, both regions with well-established regenerative agriculture movements. Drawing on the perspectives of diverse stakeholders – farmers, companies, scientists, and community members – the project aims to understand how their visions of regenerative farming shape both on-the-ground practices and broader debates about the future of U.S. agriculture and its role in addressing climate change.

The project’s findings will be widely disseminated through both scholarly and public channels, and will be of interest to agricultural decision makers, agricultural practitioners, companies, researchers, and community members.

The project starts from the premise that competing visions of regenerative agriculture can be understood as emergent sociotechnical imaginaries. This project will employ semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis to examine a) the origins of these emergent imaginaries, b) how they shape ongoing regenerative agriculture initiatives; c) how these initiatives evaluate progress, and d) how farmers and other key publics view and experience those initiatives.

Conceptually, the project will enrich the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries by incorporating insights from social scientists’ analyses of human-soil relations as well as from agrarian studies scholarship. It will show how these imaginaries both draw on and inform the ways that people work with and otherwise experience the more-than-human world.

It will also consider how visions of desirable agrarian futures are shaped by larger histories of settler colonialism and capitalism. The project will thus call attention to how efforts to realize and scale up such visions may build upon and potentially replicate prior scale-making projects. Empirically, this project will undertake the first study of corporate regenerative agriculture initiatives.

It will thus advance agri-food studies and corporate governance scholarship. By examining recently launched corporate projects in tandem with pre-existing movements, the project will also bring to Science and Technology Studies scholarship a fuller picture of sociotechnical imaginaries in-the-making.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.