By Katherine Lawless, an associate professor in the Centre for Global Studies at Huron University College in London, Ontario, Canada. Katherine is trained as a critical theorist in the humanities and social sciences. Over the past 5 years, she has been developing a new field of specialization in the environmental humanities focusing on the social dimensions of conservation, restoration and climate change adaptation. Below, she describes a pilot study in her collaborative research project on human-soil relations. klawles@uwo.ca
In 2019, my research team (including soil scientists, social scientists, artists, and humanists) and I received an Exploration Grant from the Canadian New Frontiers in Research Fund to conduct field research in Yukon, Southern Alberta and Southwestern Ontario with communities who understand soil as a living system rather than an inert object or simple resource. We wanted to know what kinds of solutions to complex social-ecological problems might emerge by reframing soil as a relational medium, and a set of natural and cultural relations that participate in the adaptive development of living systems combining ecological and social dynamics. Here, we take our cue from media theorists (Parikka, 2015), human geographers (Kryzwoszynska and Marchesi, 2020), and Science and Technology Studies scholars (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015) in thinking of soil as a medium that bridges nature and culture; an object that is shaped by human interaction rather than a given, natural thing; and a network of human and more-than-human actors embedded in a nested series of social and ecological networks (see also Greenhough, 2014). This approach recognizes both the biophysical agency of multiple species and the ways in which humans co-create worlds with their non-human counterparts, from flora and fauna to rocks and water. Naturally, we gravitated toward practitioners and knowledge holders with a close relationship to soil, including regenerative farmers, environmental conservationists, restoration practitioners, and Indigenous communities. This research was delayed by the COVID pandemic; so, we started close to home with a small and willing pilot site: Sunnivue Farm. In what follows, I present an overview of this ongoing study in the spirit of the Ecological Health Network and SER International principles and standards for the practice of ecological restoration (Gann et al., 2019), wherein the Restoration Continuum includes the restoration of agroecosystems.
Beginning in 2021, we used this pilot study to develop our transdisciplinary methodology: the Expanded Soil Profile (ESP). The idea was to begin with conventional soil profiles and soil analyses, and build out from there, incorporating layers of social and cultural history across scales and eras through interviews and archival research. We hoped this would allow us to form a clearer picture of the kind of place-based social and ecological dynamics at play in the health and wellbeing of human and non-human members of any self-organizing “multi-species soil care community”. To be clear, we define “soil care community” as a group of individuals with a shared practical and ethical commitment to the ongoing labour and attention required to maintain and repair soils in need of repair, and all those who depend on soils in a given landscape, region or place, so as to live as well as possible with a given subset of the land, water, biodiversity, and resources that comprise our world. The concept of a “multi-species soil care community” recognizes that more-than-human actors share with humans in the care work that has shaped and continues to shape this biophysical world (see Kimmerer 2016 for an example).
Our overall goal is to better understand the connections among soil health, farm ecosystem health, and the perceived health and wellbeing of the local farming and non-farming community in each study area. More specifically, we aim to show how, in the context of internal and external social and economic pressures, local place-based knowledge can be paired with scientific analysis and historical-archival research to orient and guide efforts to restore and maintain sustainable and desirable relations among social actors and institutions in differing contexts.
The core members of the research team and two research participants discussing the project over lunch, Sunnivue Farmhouse, 2021. From left to right: Katherine Lawless (PI), David Janzen (co-PI), Henry Janzen (soil scientist collaborator), Ed Gregorich (soil scientist collaborator), Michael Courey (incoming farmer/research participant), and Alex Nurnberg (retiring farmer/research participant). Photo: Michelle Wilson.
Sunnivue Farm is a 180-acre biodynamic farm about 22 mi from London, Ontario in the heart of the Carolinian forest, which boasts some of the highest biodiversity in Canada including rare and at risk species. Much of this biodiversity is threatened by urban expansion and agricultural intensification. According to a report issued by the Ecosystem Status and Trends Report (ESTR) Secretariat, “as of 2009, there were 865 species of conservation concern in the [Lake Erie Lowlands] ecozone,” including all 12 reptile and amphibian species, 7 of 8 native turtle species, and 11 of 17 snake species (ESTR Secretariat, 2016, p. 16). And, as the founders of Sunnivue Farm noted in our very first interview, bumblebees are on the decline (ESTR Secretariat, 2016, p. 16).
Sunnivue rests on a Burford soil, a gravelly and cobbly soil formed by glacial-fluvial outwash, or fast-moving glacial meltwaters in a floodplain environment, and the back 20 acres is intact Carolinian forest. The farm is cut through by the Ausable River, a winding waterway flanked on both sides by a three-zone riparian buffer that runs south from West Perth to Ailsa Craig and arcs to the west before emptying into Lake Huron at Port Franks; significantly, it supports “26 species of freshwater mussels and 85 species of fish,” 6 of which are listed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) as endangered, threatened, or of special concern (DFO, 2020, p. iii). Many of the key threats to these species—such as build up of sediments due to erosion following the loss of riparian cover, nutrient enrichment (due to tile drainage), contaminants (including pesticide and manure runoff), and habitat modification and landscape fragmentation (due to intensive land use and continuous cultivation)—are linked to the high levels of intensive agricultural practices introduced in the 1850s and that continue still today to dominate the watershed (DFO, 2020, p. iii).
The Upper Ausable River running through Sunnivue Farm, 2023. Photo: Kate Lawless.
We began field research in the summer of 2021 with in-depth oral history interviews with five key informants: Alex and Ellinor Nurnberg (the primary farmers from 1991-2021, and founding members of ROSE, a Land Care Association, the not-for-profit trust governing Sunnivue farm), Kristina and Michael Courey (the new farmers as of July 2021 and founders of the social enterprise, New Moon Community Homestead, now operating at Sunnivue) and Jens Stickling (a long-time member and then-chair of the ROSE Board of Directors). We followed these interviews by extracting soil monoliths and samples from two representative sites on the farm, one cultivated and the other uncultivated. The uncultivated site, located in a patch of forest in the back 20 acres, provided a benchmark for the cultivated site, an arable field (previously the market garden) hosting an alfalfa cover crop that has since been reconverted into a market garden.
Site of the soil pit in cultivated soil with a temporary alfalfa cover crop, Sunnivue Farm, 2021. Photo: Ed Gregorich.
Extracting the forest soil monolith, Sunnivue Farm, 2021. Photo: Kate Lawless.
From here, we began historical and archival research starting with Sunnivue Farm and ROSE: Celebrating 21 Years of Building a Dream, 1992-2013, a retrospective containing (among other things) a collection of annual newsletters written by Alex. We continued with visits to local archives and extended periods of participant observation, including a 3-day Vision Retreat in September 2021 to discuss the farm-level vision during the transition between incoming and outgoing farmers. We are continuing this background research by following threads in the interviews that lead us to broader systems-level interactions. We are especially interested in how the farmers and greater community understand their relations with non-humans on the farm, as well as how they speak about the relationship between natural and social systems and their decline or flourishing. Our aim through this process is to elucidate how local human-soil relations are shaped by the often-divergent pressures of both intimate social spheres (i.e., kinship networks) and more-or-less abstract global structures (i.e., international trade networks), and how multi-species soil care communities, or complex networks of diverse lifeforms, negotiate “ecological livelihoods”–or interdependent “habitats” of making, receiving, and providing (Miller & Gibson-Graham, 2020)–in this context. Importantly, the concept of “ecological livelihoods” refuses a clear distinction between Economy and Environment, instead recognizing the “myriad interdependencies in which our sustenance is implicated” (Miller & Gibson-Graham, 2020).
The results of our research are preliminary but show high levels of soil health despite community perceptions of the overall decline of farm-level ecosystem health. Surprisingly, from a soil science perspective, the health of the cultivated soil (approximated here by measures of soil nutrient levels, soil organic carbon, and microbial respiration and biomass) surpasses that of the uncultivated soil in the forest on the same farm holding. While magnesium and potassium levels are comparable in both soils, phosphorus levels are much higher in the cultivated soil, which indicates good management of inputs. In addition, the total mass of soil organic carbon (which gives an estimate of the health and fertility of the soil) is roughly 40% higher in the cultivated soil (10.9 kg/m2) compared to the uncultivated soil (6.12 kg/m2) which, according to Ed Gregorich, our collaborating soil biochemist, is quite unusual. Alex and Ellinor attribute this to the incorporation of alfalfa in the rotation and the use of composted manure. In addition, the respiratory quotient of the arable soil is larger than that of the forest soil, indicating higher carbon cycling and nutrient cycling by soil microbiota.
By contrast, our qualitative analysis shows a shared perception of soil and social “crises” and farm “dis-ease” among the community members, a perception in part linked to declines in biodiversity observed by Alex and Ellinor, a worrying trend that they connect to changes in land use management. These changes were precipitated by external economic pressures, especially proposed changes to the milk quota in 2008. In response, Alex and Ellinor sold their dairy herd. Of course, this was a difficult decision for them since cows are a central component of biodynamic agriculture, which strives to operate as a closed-loop system. They replaced the herd with water buffalo (which does not have a quota), but the market for water buffalo milk is smaller, and water buffalo, as Alex explains in one of his newsletters, are not as open as cattle to being milked. Ensuing financial struggles were compounded by the difficulties of retirement and farmer succession (a significant problem across Southwestern Ontario); indeed, it took roughly 6 years for Alex and Ellinor to find a suitable incoming farm family (eventually Mike and Kristina) who would uphold the vision and objectives of the farm: promote biodynamic agriculture; make the farm a social, therapeutic and educational hub; assist with research related to these objectives; and hold the land in trust for agricultural use. In the meantime, they leased the land out to off-site farmers.
Alex and Ellinor with water buffalo calves, Sunnivue Farm, 2014. Photo: Craig Glover/The London Free Press.
Throughout this transition, Alex and Ellinor claim that the health of the farm began to decline, a sentiment shared by the rest of the community at the Vision Retreat. The founding farmers explain that only a few years of “doing things differently” caused visible changes in biodiversity on the farm, in particular the disappearance of bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), bumblebees and phlox (Phlox divaricata). A walk around the farm today shows that Common eastern bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) are on the rise, but the bobolinks have not returned and, indeed, this appears to be part of a larger dynamic that is as yet poorly understood. (To wit, bobolinks were assigned a COSEWIC status of “threatened” (T) in 2010, which was downgraded to “special concern” (SC) in 2016.) Some of these negative trends at Sunnivue Farm may have been the result of changes in farming practices (i.e., the use of liquid rather than composted manure during the transition period) and some might be attributed to broader environmental and climate changes (exemplified this past year by an unprecedented spate of Ontario wildfires and excessive precipitation). In the future, we will explore these questions.
The findings of this pilot study suggest at least two things: First, external political-economic pressures can disrupt sustainable social-ecological relations by prioritizing socioeconomic values over personal, cultural and ecological values (for more on the role of these values, and interactions among them, in ecological restoration see the four-quadrant model of Clewell & Aronson, 2013, Chapter 2). This results in a complex set of negotiations that has the potential to influence and indeed compromise the integrity of ecological trajectories in a site undergoing transition, and now restoration. Second, while the impacts of both systems-level and interpersonal conflict or disruption may not be visible in standard measurements of soil health, our qualitative research demonstrates that these disruptions may impact the health of the farm ecosystem.
Building on Henry Janzen’s claim that “the soil remembers” (Janzen, 2016), we will continue to explore how soils might “remember” or reflect past social and ecological relations, and our Expanded Soil Profile analytical tool will, we hope, help to identify the “latent and active ‘ecological memories’” (Balaguer et al., 2014, p. 12) required for the construction of multiple, sequential reference models that we expect will be needed to truly restore the Sunnivue Farm ecosystem. And we hypothesize that soil care communities with a shared conception of soil as a living system or relational medium are the best vehicles for this exploration because they are at the forefront of a broader ecosocial transformation that not only recognizes humans as part of nature (and soils) and understands the deep interdependencies of societies and ecosystems, but also recognizes the intrinsic value of nature and strives to minimize extractive practices. Moving forward, we will aim to further develop the Expanded Soil Profile as a tool for social-ecological restoration through the exploration of and collaboration with soil care communities in Dawson City, Yukon and Lethbridge, Alberta who also see soils as the foundation of both social and ecological health, integrity, vigour, care, and resilience.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Tri-Agencies’ (The Canadian Institutes of Health Research [CIHR], Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council [NSERC], and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [SSHRC]) New Frontiers in Research Fund–Exploration Grant, which supports interdisciplinary, high risk/high reward, transformative research in Canada.
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Natural History of Ecological Restoration 