Knowing Familial Soils

In this autoethnographic essay, I trace and explore different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations (me, my father and my grandparents) who have lived and worked on a family farm in Central Finland. By weaving together critical social scientific and multidisciplinary thinking using personal accounts, this contribution offers an examination of how relationships and knowledge about agricultural soils exist in a variety of ways, many of which cannot be reduced to technoscientific or agro-productivistic understandings. I discuss embodied and silent ways of knowing land, which are thick with time and socially shared, making visible the parallel soil knowledges that exist in a place. This essay also offers an opening for thinking about how diversifying and “storying” knowledges about agricultural lands can build further understanding about more-than-human relations, slower timescales, and the disappearance of local ways of knowing lands. Keywords: autoethnography, agriculture, soils, soil knowledge, Finland