Over the past decade regenerative agriculture has moved from the margins of Danish farming to the centre of debates about sustainability and soil health. What began in 2017 as a grassroots movement among small-scale organic farmers concerned with soil degradation and the climate crisis has since grown into a diverse network of practitioners, associations, and corporate actors. Today, regenerative agriculture in Denmark is both a practical and political field, shaped by farmers’ multispecies experiments with new farming practices and large corporations and agricultural organisations debating what counts as truly regenerative.
For this reading seminar, Sille Skovgaard, Emma Harris and Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen will visit from Aalborg University and the association Andelsgaarde (DK) to share work in progress from the project Soil Matters: Reimagining Soils through Multispecies Collaborations in Regenerative Farming (2024–2027). Two texts, based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, will be circulated prior to the seminar.
One text examines the manifold kinds of experimentation that regenerative farmers in Denmark develop and test in their farming practices. The text explores how regenerative farmers in Denmark engage in endless unpredictable and open-ended experiments with soil health – from coating seeds with microbial inoculants to spraying lactic acid bacteria on crop leaves. Such multispecies practices demand sensory and speculative ways of knowing, revealing experimentation as a process of learning-with the living soil rather than leading to solid answers – a process of learning to perceive and respond to the soil’s dynamics shaped by the specific context of the farm.
The second text approaches the regenerative turn as a political battlefield and documents how actors in the agricultural sector in Denmark claim and define the term “regenerative” in different ways, pointing in radically different directions for the future of sustainable farming.
Bios
Sille Ragnhild Skovgaard is an anthropologist and PhD student at Aalborg University. Through fieldwork on regenerative farms, she examines how new understandings of soil and more-than-human relations challenge and transform Danish farming practices. Sille is co-author of Lysbønder and co-director of the documentary I Think We Begin as Light.
Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen is a social anthropologist and associate professor at Aalborg University. She researches how people relate to landscapes, nature and environment in different contexts – how nature is categorized and practiced, and how it becomes the object of interests, politics and conflicts. She is co-editor of the book Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene.
Emma Harris is a visual anthropologist specialised in multimodal methods and regenerative agriculture. She is the interdisciplinary coordinator in the project Jordforbindelser, employed by the association Andelsgaarde. Emma co-directed the short documentary I Think We Begin as Light (2025), focusing on multispecies relations in the regenerative farming milieu in Denmark.
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