On (de)composing mulch

In this photo-essay about mulch and its (de)composition, I explore the relationship between infrastructures and autonomy in agroecological food production. I do so by considering mulch as a multi-species infrastructure (de)composed by concerned agroecological farmers and billions of soil organisms, and by attending to the material, energetic and elemental exchanges between humans and non-humans that mulch enables. I begin the essay by narrating my encounter with a severely degraded agricultural soil in southern Italy to situate the discussion in the context of widespread land degradation, and to draw attention to the productivist agricultural models, capitalist logics and associated infrastructures (e.g. financial and biotechnological) that have led to it. Then, through a series of photos (see Figure 1 as an example) taken as part of both my research and my experimental practice as an agroecological farmer, I detail the process of “growing soil” with mulch (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2019) and I discuss the material interrelationships between soil, infrastructures and farmers’ autonomy. In so doing, I uncover the contribution of various non-human beings and agencies to the building of farmers’ autonomy, and I argue that, in the context of agroecological food production, autonomy cannot be considered as an exclusively human achievement, but as a more-than-human collaboration mediated and enabled by “minor infrastructures” (Barua, 2023) such as mulch

Agriculture · Agroecology · Autonomy · Mulch · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Water Governance and Infrastructure