In policy, scientific, and grower communities, soils are being recognized as living and lively ecosystems. This liveliness is driving conceptual and practical transformations of agricultural labor from working the soil to working with the soil, promising to replace human labor with the activities of soil biota. This change to the material process of soil labor will deliver, it is hoped, a true ecological intensification of modern industrial farming, in which the production of ever-growing yields and the maintenance of healthy ecosystems is co-constitutive. This paper presents an analysis of the historical and current changes to soil labor in England on the basis of ethnographic research. I argue that the current transformation of soil labor into an activity carried out by soil biota is consistent with the previous logic of ‘improvement’, which has transformed the processes of soil labor in the past in the project of making soils into better economic resources for capitalist agriculture. By proposing an understanding of labor as a material process of transformation oriented towards the generation of capital value, this paper establishes a dialogue between hitherto separate literatures concerned with the making of economic resources, and with the nature of non-human labor. Through this, I productively collapse the distinction between resources and labor which continues to characterize debates about the relationship between nature and capital. I argue that acknowledging the material co-constitution of (any form of) labor and of resource-making allows us to better analyze the processes through which natures are rolled into capital. In relation to soil biota, enrolling the activities of soil biota as labor, I argue, opens up the whole bio-sphere to the logic of improvement, and to the operations of capital.

中文翻译：

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非人类劳动与资源创造

在政策，科学和种植者社区，土壤被公认为是活泼的生态系统。这种活跃性正在推动农业劳动的概念和实际转变，从土壤工作向土壤工作，有望用土壤生物区系的活动代替人工。希望这种对土壤劳动的物质过程的改变将带来现代工业农业的真正生态集约化，其中不断增长的产量的生产和健康生态系统的维持是共同的。本文在人种学研究的基础上，对英国土壤劳动力的历史和当前变化进行了分析。我认为，当前将土壤劳动转化为土壤生物群所进行的活动与先前的“改善”逻辑是一致的，在过去将土壤变成资本主义农业更好的经济资源的项目中，它改变了土壤劳动的过程。通过提出一种对劳动的认识，这种劳动是一种面向资本价值产生的实质性转变过程，本文建立了迄今为止有关经济资源创造和非人类劳动性质的独立文献之间的对话。通过这种方式，我有效地打破了资源与劳动之间的区别，这继续成为关于自然与资本之间关系的辩论的特征。我认为，承认（任何形式的）劳动和资源制造的物质共同构成，可以使我们更好地分析自然被转化为资本的过程。关于土壤生物