Mycorrhizal technologies for an agriculture of the middle

Abstract

Societal Impact Statement

Across industrial societies, midsize farms are in decline. A future of sustainable agriculture will require more than industrial and cottage farmers. We show that emergent mycorrhizal science is well-suited to support applications for an “agriculture of the middle,” and note two obstacles to the development of more integrated mycorrhizal technologies: an overreliance on commercial inoculants (industrial agriculture) and a tendency to treat soil biology as a black box (cottage agriculture). In this paper, we aim to provoke conversation among policy makers, research funders, and corporate executives on the development of mycorrhizal technologies for an agriculture of the middle.

Summary

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are dealt with in agriculture in a strongly bifurcated way: products and techniques to optimize AMF communities are designed for either large-scale (industrial) or small-scale (cottage) farming operations. We show how research and applications with AMF are bound up in these contrasting visions for what agriculture should be—an industrial system based on economies of scale, or small-scale operations that cater to regional societies, economies, and ecologies. These distinct socially and technologically bound initiatives—which involve research institutions, government policies, corporate investment, activism, and public relations campaigns—we refer to as sociotechnical imaginaries. Drawing from emergent mycorrhizal research, we argue that mycorrhizal technologies are well-suited to an “agriculture of the middle,” a mode of farming that is not strictly scale-based, yet falls somewhere between the industrial and the cottage. Unlike these two extremes, middle agriculture does not have a well-established sociotechnical imaginary. Developing this collective vision poses a challenge: will a middle agriculture that uses AMF fall short of the established goals of industrial and cottage modes of farming? The process of determining appropriate compromises on a wide range of parameters is likely to be contested. However, we believe that calling attention to these extreme visions of agriculture, along with the divergent (if potential) roles of mycorrhizal applications, will jumpstart a productive dialogue among stakeholders, including farmers, policy makers, scientists, and industrialists. Highlighting extremes may also help stimulate ideas about building bridges between seemingly irreconcilable and contradictory approaches.