Sensing Uncertain Soil

Hoyng, Rolien and Es, Murat (2025) Sensing Uncertain Soil. In: Digital Ecologies 3, 2025-07-24 - 2025-07-25, Bath Spa University.

Abstract

This paper draws on process-oriented theory by Simondon, Whitehead, and Gabrys to imagine an alternative way of sensing climate change, particularly as it unfolds in the ecologies that farming partakes in various parts of Turkey. In recent years, Turkish farms have been exposed to shifts in regional climates as well as a barrage of unfortunately timed droughts, rain, heatwaves, hailstorms, et cetera. AgriTech promotes “smart farming” solutions to tackle difficulties through sensing, modeling, and forecasting. Instead of modeling climate-exposed farm worlds as a physical reality and predicting singular future states for it, this paper proposes to consider practices and technologies of sensing that are oriented onto a more-than-human, multispecies pluralism of many worlds. Such sensing produces climate change as multiple—namely consisting in ongoing individuations and openness derived from “real potentiality” as defined by Whitehead. It encompasses data practices as individuations of sense that generate new and deeper relations in a transindividual, more-than-human network. Whereas uncertainty in Big AgriTech’s smart farming comes with a distribution of risk that imparts precarity onto farmers, this paper explores an alternative approach to uncertainty that builds on experimentation as sharing in potentiality and re-articulating sense. Referencing concrete examples encountered during fieldwork in Turkey that suggest alternative practices of sensing, this paper explores farming formations and practices that intervene in AgriTech’s big data and its politics of uncertainty. Several questions are guiding the exploration: What are the possibilities for more-than-human sensing that is situated and pluralistic rather than disembedded as big data formations? What different politics can be imagined involving the unknown and uncertain? How can we rethink what farming is and does on the basis of such sensing practices?