Like Gold, with Yield... and Carbon: The Role of Knowledge and Quantified Expertise in the “Environmental Turn” of the Assetization of Farmland

As a key resource to answer to both climate change (through carbon storage) and biodiversity destruction (through the preservation of hedgerows as well as of microbial life in soils), farmland is considered as a tool of ecological transformation by both States and the private sector and its future is scrutinized by a wide range of actors. Focusing on the finance industry, this article examines the dynamics of financialization of farmland in the French/EU case under the lens of specialized data and knowledge that found a “green” assetization of the resource. Building upon studies that stressed the role of specialized knowledge and data in assetization processes (Chiapello, 2018; Birch and Muniesa, eds, 2020), the article first describes the growing dialogue between economics and soil sciences and its impacts on practices of farmland valuation and the quantification of farmland’s return on investment. In a second part, it focuses on metrics that enable to think of an “environmentalization” of the financial value of farmland (e.g. the increasing weight of “ecosystemic services” in the quantification of farmland prices, and the possible links with compensation markets) as well as on regulatory initiatives that empowers such metrics (e.g. the proposal to introduce mandatory “soil diagnoses” before each farmland transaction in the context of the preparation of the EU so-called “Soil Directive”). Last, the article discusses the limits of the process, stressing the resistances to the hybridation between economic and environmental knowledge, as well as the assertion of other imaginaries for the future of farmland in ecological processes rising from civil society organizations. The study is based on a series of interviews with financial investors, regulators of the farmland market, farmland experts from various academic disciplines, as well as civil society representatives.