‘What can a little leaf do?’: mulch, farming autonomy, and the generosity of infrastructures in ruined agricultural landscapes

In recent years, conceptualizations of infrastructure have proliferated alongside a growing concern for the role they play in sustaining and shaping socio-political life. In this article, I engage with mulch as an infrastructure to bring forth agroecological imaginaries and practices of soil care and to examine their potential to foster more just and sustainable agricultural futures. Working with the concept of ‘generous infrastructure’ and my own sustained engagement with mulch as an agroecological farmer, I explore how mulch is mobilized to take care of soils and how it can promote more autonomous ways of farming in ruined agricultural landscapes. As a generous infrastructure, mulch can be easily improvised with accessible materials and its (de)composition can contribute to growing autonomy by enabling generous exchanges and encounters between farmers and soils. I argue that reframing mulch from a passive material to a generous infrastructure challenges notions of autonomy as an exclusively human achievement and foregrounds the relations of care between farmers and soils that are key to it. However, I also highlight the importance of not romanticizing generous infrastructures by drawing attention to material, temporal and cultural complexities, as well as tensions and challenges across farming communities and contexts.