Fuelling bodies: phosphorus, agriculture, and energetic relations

Industrial agriculture requires intensive applications of phosphate fertilizers to maintain soil phosphorus levels. To produce the fertilizers, phosphate rock is mined, processed, shipped, and applied to farmland, where crop plants take up and convert it into organic forms that humans can consume. Within human bodies, phosphorus is responsible for cellular energy as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Scientific and policy discussions on phosphorus increasingly focus on concerns of depleting global phosphate reserves and eutrophication from phosphate-heavy runoff. I argue that these scientific approaches, which treat phosphorus as matter, create discursive “patches” (taking cues from Anna Tsing) whereby the scientific translations of one form of phosphorus to another obfuscate global relational webs. When different forms of phosphorus are separated between biology, chemistry, or geology, the connections phosphorus makes across substances, bodies, and spaces are lost, and by consequence it becomes harder to respond to these local and global issues. In this paper, I suggest that conceptualizing the movements of phosphorus as an energetic relationship brings these multispecies, transnational webs to the forefront. I trace the energetic phosphorus networks formed between the bodies of migrant farm workers, soil microbes, crop plants, and consumers in the British Columbia Fraser Valley, in order to reveal how the predominately white settler consumers atomically embody global systems of mineral extraction, transnational labour exploitation, settler-colonial land practices, and inequitable food systems. By framing phosphorus as a kind of biological fuel, I highlight how its movements map webs of uneven metabolic transfers across multiple spatiotemporal scales.