In response to an agrarian crisis, small-scale farmers in South India are experimenting with the application of agricultural ferments to their degraded soils. This article focuses on the Nectar of Life, a fermented preparation made by practitioners of Zero Budget Natural Farming out of the urine and dung of native cows. Based on ethnography in Wayanad, Kerala, and textual analysis of statements by Subhash Palekar, the inventor of the ferment, I unpack its recipe ingredient by ingredient and show that fermenting the Nectar of Life enacts a microbial ontology of agriculture. Through fermentation, natural farmers rethink soil care as a fundamentally relational activity that requires humans, cows, plants, and microorganisms to work together for mutual benefit. However, fermentation and natural farming are also implicated in what I call bionativism, a nativism focused on biological belonging. The native cow as the cornerstone species of probiotic fermentation makes microbial thinking compatible with nativist politics and tropes of the Hindu Right. I analyze the ambivalences of combining probiotic perspectives on more-than-human health with a rejection of alien species. I show how fermentation practices produce not only living soils but also nativist objects such as native cows, native earthworms, and native soils as well as their foreign enemies.

中文翻译：

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生命的甘露

为应对农业危机，印度南部的小农正在试验将农业发酵物应用于退化的土壤。本文重点介绍生命花蜜，这是一种由零预算自然农业从业者利用本地奶牛的尿液和粪便制成的发酵制剂。根据喀拉拉邦瓦亚纳德的民族志，以及发酵发明者 Subhash Palekar 对声明的文本分析，我逐个拆解了其配方，并表明发酵生命花蜜形成了农业的微生物本体论。通过发酵，自然农民将土壤护理重新视为一项基本的相关活动，需要人类、奶牛、植物和微生物共同合作以实现互惠互利。然而，发酵和自然农业也与我所说的生物原生主义有关，一种专注于生物归属感的本土主义。原生奶牛作为益生菌发酵的基石物种，使微生物思维与本土主义政治和印度教右翼的比喻相容。我分析了将益生菌对超越人类健康的观点与拒绝外来物种相结合的矛盾心理。我展示了发酵实践如何不仅产生活的土壤，而且产生本土主义的物体，如本土奶牛、本土蚯蚓、本土土壤以及它们的外敌。