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Soil balancing within organic farming: negotiating meanings and boundaries in an alternative agricultural community of practice

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Abstract

Soil balancing is widely used in organic farming, but little is known about the practice because technical knowledge and goals for the practice are produced and negotiated within an alternative community of practice (CoP). We used a review of the private soil balancing literature and semi-structured interviews with farmers and consultants to document the knowledge, shared meanings, and goals of key actors within the soil balancing CoP. Our findings suggest this CoP is dominated by discourse between private consultants and farmers, with few contributions to or from scientists or the peer reviewed literature. The idea of soil balancing is centered around improving soil quality through adjustments in Base Cation Saturation Ratios (BCSR), and practitioners report a wide range of positive agronomic outcomes. For most soil balancers, however, BCSR is only one part of a broader approach to soil health management that also utilizes traditional soil fertility recommendations and soil health-building cultural management practices. Meanwhile, a survey of land grant university soil fertility specialists and the peer-reviewed literature documented a high degree of skepticism and a lack of scientific evidence that BCSR can boost crop yields. We conclude that this scientific discourse reflects a disconnect from the practices and meanings used in the soil balancing CoP. While tensions between the dominant and niche agricultural knowledge systems are not unique, we believe a better appreciation for the nuanced meanings and goals within the soil balancing CoP present an opening for expanded collaborations with scientists doing research on soil health.

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Data availability

Data available on request due to privacy/ethical restrictions given the nature of the interview data. The IRB (see below) confidentiality agreement (under which the data were collected) prevents us from releasing information that reveals the identity of informants. We would need to remove all identifying information before sharing with other researchers.

Notes

  1. The researchers obtained permission from the Institutional Review Board at The Ohio State University to conduct this research.

  2. Five of the consultants were also active farmers. One person was classified as a consultant because of their reputation and influence with the farm community, although they did not do actual paid consultancy work (hence 11 and 23 not adding up to 33). Of the consultants who were also farmers, two were vegetable farmers, one was a dairy farmer and three were crop farmers.

  3. Farmers who were interviewed operated diverse types of farm enterprises: vegetable/berries (9); cash grain (5); dairy (6); diversified vegetable and livestock (2); retired dairy farmer (1).

  4. Anabaptists are Christians who formed in the Protestant Reformation period based on their emphasis on adult baptism as a conscious choice and ideas of separation of church and state. The word “Plain” refers to groups who have made collective restrictions on certain types of clothing and/or technology because of commonly held values.

  5. Although some of the consultants we interviewed were also active farmers, they are not included here.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the farmers and agricultural consultants and farm advisors who provided invaluable information on soil balancing. We also benefited from input from and discussions with other members of our project team, and extensive editorial support from Cassandra Brown.

Funding

This work is supported by Organic Agriculture Research & Extension funding grant no. 2014–51300-22331/project accession no. 1003905 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Caroline Brock

  2. School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH, USA

    Douglas Jackson-Smith & Steven Culman

  3. Department of Horticulture and Crop Sciences, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH, USA

    Douglas Doohan & Catherine Herms

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  1. Caroline Brock
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  2. Douglas Jackson-Smith
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  3. Steven Culman
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Contributions

The first two primary authors (CB and DJS) performed the data collection, analysis, and the majority of the interpretation and writing. The last three co-authors contributed to the conceptualization of the study and writing of the manuscript, and are listed alphabetically. All three co-authors were involved with the broader USDA funded soil balancing project that involves agronomic on-station and on-farm trials. DD is the Principal Investigator on this broader project. DD, SC, CH were all involved in early forms of the project helping to shape the questions around which this conceptions piece was developed. All three co-authors offered invaluable insights into the agronomic and soils science around these ideas and were involved in the latter stages of writing this paper.

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Correspondence to Caroline Brock.

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Brock, C., Jackson-Smith, D., Culman, S. et al. Soil balancing within organic farming: negotiating meanings and boundaries in an alternative agricultural community of practice. Agric Hum Values 38, 449–465 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10165-y

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