Soil balancing within organic farming: negotiating meanings and boundaries in an alternative agricultural community of p
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Soil balancing within organic farming: negotiating meanings and boundaries in an alternative agricultural community of practice Caroline Brock1 · Douglas Jackson‑Smith2 · Steven Culman2 · Douglas Doohan3 · Catherine Herms3 Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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. Keywords Soil balancing · Organic farming · Community of practice · Ways of knowing · Soil science · Farmer experience
Introduction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10165-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Caroline Brock [email protected] Douglas Jackson‑Smith jackson‑[email protected] Steven Culman [email protected] Douglas Doohan [email protected] Catherine Herms [email protected] 1
Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
2
School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH, USA
3
Department of Horticulture and Crop Sciences, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH, USA
For decades, the development of new knowledge and innovations in agricultural systems was thought of as a linear process wherein discoveries from scientists are transferred through various channels to farmers (Blackburn 1989; Leeuwis and Van Den Ban 2004; Rogers 1995). More recently, researchers have recognized the importance of farmer-generated local or ta
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