Post-Rhizome Thinking: Farmers Beyond Deleuze-Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari's famous celebration of the rhizome, after borrowing the concept from science, has made the studies and intellectual projects conducted by Nepali farmers and agriculture-related groups more scientific/science-centric: in Nepal we have much scientific research into chemical pesticides, the mechanics of irrigation techniques etc. In post-rhizome thinking however, there is the need for farmers to understand a crucial logical inversion regarding their work-environment: the farmers need to understand that the soil on which they plant their crop is not the nourishing element to that crop, rather, the soil is nothing but the fragmentation of the roots of the crops they plant; the soil is the remnants of the death of the crops they plant and have planted.

With this post-rhizome logic, the Nepali farmer may be able to position the crop's root as origin of soil, and present the landowner with the argument that it is the farmer's crop, and the farmer's toil that crop represents, which composes and creates arable soil. This logic will make the landowner face the fact that his soil is dependent on the crops planted on it, that the value of his land depends on the fragmentation of the roots of the farmer's crop.

Thus the farmers' groups can engage in studying the history of the soil of their arable lands, in order to then evaluate whether that soil has been enriched and nourished ever since planting by farmers began on it. They need to see whether the introduction of human planting on the soil had made the soil even more receptive for plantings in the future, and whether human planting caused the increase of the monetary value of the soil over time. These are not properly technical-or-scientific studies, but rather historical studies of the soil on which farmers plant, with an inclusion of scientific-agricultural methods of soil investigation inside a farmer's social change agenda.