Curiosity and controversy: The emerging field of regenerative agriculture in Norway

This article explores the knowledge controversies within regenerative agriculture in Norway, and how farmers navigate this emerging field based on interviews and participant observations throughout four growing seasons. We employ Thomas Kuhn's classic concept of paradigm shifts and Thomas Gieryn's cultural boundaries of science to analyse the agronomic foundations farmers challenge, the scientific fields they combine, and the social barriers they bridge. Regenerative farmers encountered what we coin the microbial anomaly: knowledge about microbes and natural processes that do not fit within the current agronomic paradigm. It triggered a search for knowledge beyond what is usually included in agricultural science and led farmers to apply knowledge that is accepted within the scientific community but has failed to reach them, and to adopt practices that traditional experts deem unscientific but that experience shows can be useful. Farmers called for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that goes beyond the established cultural boundaries of contemporary agronomy, which has shown to limit both knowledge and future imaginaries that are fundamental to agricultural transformation. The emerging paradigm shift provides novel opportunities for farmer-led research that combines science with local knowledge, and can have significant scientific, political and societal implications. However, the structural support for an agronomy that foregrounds microbially mediated plant nutrition and health, and the potential futures it enables, remains marginal. Whether a large-scale agronomic paradigm shift is underway, or whether the microbial anomaly is successfully assimilated into the status quo depends not only on scientific and agronomic credibility contests. They depend on which, and whose, visions of the future are invested in. At stake are farmer livelihoods and autonomy over how to grow food, and whether agriculture shifts from driving environmental degeneration to its regeneration.