Making soil in the Plantationocene

ABSTRACT

Based on 14 months of ethnographic research, this paper analyzes soil management within the plantation model of farmingin order to understand the extent to which life on large-scale monocultural farms can be controlled and directed toward extractiveproduction. Transnational soy farmers in Western Bahia Brazil ‘correct’ soils in the region to make them productive and marshal thisagronomic work to claim that they have added value to the land by ‘building it up’. Still, the permeability of the plantation keepstransnational farmers from achieving their dreams of control.

KEYWORDS:

• plantation
• soil
• Plantationocene
• land
• Brazil
• United States
• Cerrado

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Wendy Wolford for her continued efforts to bring forth ‘A Conversation on the Plantationocene’ and later to lead the Journal of Peasant Studies forum on the Plantationocene. This paper received generous critical feedback from the Wolford Writing Lab as well as two highly thoughtful and engaged reviewers. All shortcomings are the author’s. This work would not have been possible without the participation of research participants and funding from the UNC-CH Graduate School, Wenner-Gren, and IIE-Fulbright.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A moniker for the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia. These states are at the center of soybean commodity frontier expansion in Brazil, thanks in good measure to government support (consisting primarily of agricultural credit and agricultural research).

2 This is not the first time whitefly have threatened the Brazilian soy crop. A 1973 report warned of large populations of whitefly in soy fields of Parana and Sao Paulo as well as an increased incidence of related viruses; 100% of the soy crop was affected and whitefly numbers were blamed on the great extension of the cultivation of soy beans, long planting seasons, and a long, hot summer. They recommended restricting the cropping season, working to identify whitefly control strategies, and instituting breeding programs to develop virus-resistant plants (Costa, Costa, and Sauer 1973).

3 Once-prominent hypotheses that land ‘exhaustion’ or degradation in the US South deepened Southern plantations’ dependence on slaves have been largely disproven (Zirkle 1943), but legacies of land degradation on plantations live on in soil memories (Martens and Robertson 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright Association; the Graduate School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant Number 8906].

Notes on contributors

Andrew Ofstehage

Andrew Ofstehage is currently a program coordinator at North Carolina State University; previously he was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. He completed his PhD in anthropology in 2018 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he defended his dissertation, ‘“When We Came There Was Nothing”: Land, Work, and Value among Transnational Soybean Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado’. His research among transnational soybean farmers in Brazil incorporates training in agronomy and anthropology and asks how transnational farmers engage with soils and landscapes in Brazil; become managers of workers and investors; and create and re-create agrarian communities out of place. He is now conducting new research on the bio-cultural life of soy consumption in the United States, planning new work on the socio-material life of soil, and continuing ethnographic research with transnational soy farmers in Brazil.