About Andrew

Andrew Ofstehage is currently a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University in the Development Sociology Department. He completed his PhD in Anthropology in 2018 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he defended his dissertation, "'When We Came There Was Nothing': Land, Work, and Value among Transnational Soybean Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado." His research among transnational soybean farmers in Brazil incorporates training in agronomy and anthropology and asks how transnational farmers engage with soils and landscapes in Brazil; become managers of workers and investors; and create and re-create agrarian communities out of place. He is now conducting new research on the bio-cultural life of soy consumption in the United States, planning new work on the socio-material life of soil, and continuing ethnographic research with transnational soy farmers in Brazil.

He is preparing two book manuscripts. "Welcome to Soylandia!" addresses how American farmers encounter ecologies, communities, and infrastructures of soy production in Brazil; how business and farming practices of Brazil are becoming farming models for the rest of the world, and welcomes the reader to the on-the-ground realities of the soy boom through vivid ethnographic storytelling. His second book, "The bio-cultural life of soy in America: Four stories of the future of food and farming," will bring together ethnographic stories of the cultural and biological life of soy to ask what the future of food looks like. It includes stories of Mennonite and U.S. Midwestern soy farmers in Brazil, ethnographic analysis of the marketing and vision of Soylent as an efficient nutrient delivery system for busy tech workers, and digital ethnography of right-wing Redditers who mobilize nutritional studies of soy to claim that soy is making men into feminine liberals.

You can follow him at @AndresDeLipez and email him at alo52[at]cornell[dot]edu