The unruly edges of climate change: Agrarian temporalities and the case for making kin

Climate change has us confronting the temporality of agriculture. Agrarian lives are timed lives. These times include biological rhythms of germination and flowering, meteorological rhythms of frost, rain, and heat, market rhythms of delivery windows and seasonal demand, labor rhythms of urgency and waiting, and lived rhythms that leave some bodies more readily aligned with agrarian life. Climate change does not simply place these systems under stress; it desynchronizes them. This desynchronization generates a governance paradox. Precisely when agriculture requires flexibility, it is increasingly disciplined by rigid timetables, contracts that still dictate delivery dates and federally subsidized crop insurance deadlines, even as historical averages lose predictive power. Climate change thus exposes the fiction of temporal stability that has long defined agrarian governance. Drawing on Tsing's “unruly edges,” this paper reframes climate change not as an external shock but as a condition that renders visible the unruliness that has always been present, though often concealed, within agrarian systems. The paper's central intervention is to theorize Haraway's concept of “making kin” as a situated, anticipatory mode of temporal coordination for agrarian arrhythmia. Kin-making is offered as a way of organizing relationships—across households, farms, and species—that can absorb temporal mismatch without demanding a return to a single, controlled rhythm, though its possibilities remain unevenly structured by power, property, and histories of exclusion. Two practices anchor the argument: diversified polycultures and farm–land–labor cooperatives. These practices matter not because they are ecologically resilient or socially just, but because they actively re-time agriculture, redistributing temporal pressure through more reciprocal, yet still constrained, forms of coordination. Finally, drawing on queer phenomenology and chronopolitical critique, the paper argues that climate change brings to the foreground long-standing temporal injustices concerning whose agrarian timelines are treated as normal and worth sustaining—and whose never were.