Fertilizing Southern Ontario: Tracing Phosphorusthrough Agribusiness Value Chains (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This resource is an application for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Phosphorus is an essential element for all life and a fundamental component of commercial fertilizers. This project follows phosphorus through agribusiness value chains that sustain the fertilizer demands of southern Ontario, a major Canadian agricultural region. I explore how phosphorus-related value-making practices both adapt to and transform planetary mineral cycles, particularly in the context of growing public scrutiny concerning the colonial extraction of phosphate rock, the depletion of phosphate reserves, and the intensifying eutrophication caused by phosphorus-rich farm runoff. This project asks:(1) Through what processes do agribusiness actors produce value through and with phosphorus? 2)How are agribusiness value chains responding to phosphorus becoming an object of rising public concern? And 3) what can be learned about the Anthropocene as a geo-ecological constellation of human/more-than-human relations by tracing agribusiness value chains? I will conduct 16 months of fieldwork at three sites: a recently announced phosphorus water recycling facility, fertilizer industry association events, and local farms using a mix of fertilizer methods. Combining economic anthropological approaches to value chains with environmental anthropological approaches to the Plantationocene and metabolism, I conceptualize value-making acts as metabolic relations that co-produce distinct planetary geologies as they transform phosphorus from inert rock into world-feeding nutrient.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".