Industrial agriculture has transformed vast stretches of the Earth, but few places reveal its contradictions more clearly than the Pampas of Argentina. 

In At the Edge of the Pampas, anthropologist Rachel Cypher traces the explosive rise of genetically modified soybeans across one of the world’s great agricultural heartlands. Drawing on immersive long-term fieldwork, the book moves from soybean fields and cattle feedlots to dryland forests to show that industrial agriculture takes many forms. Soy—one of the world’s most standardized commodities—must first pass through local ecologies, informal economies, inherited obligations, and intimate relations of trust before it can circulate as a global asset.

Urgent and deeply original, At the Edge of the Pampas offers a major rethinking of how value is gathered within industrial capitalism and how unruly social and ecological life persists inside even the most engineered landscapes.

Rachel Cypher is an anthropologist whose work examines how people inhabit worlds under conditions of ecological and social rupture. She is co-editor of Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds.