Getting intimate with crops in horticulture’s loveless human-plant relations

Abstract

Intimacy suggests familiar, close-up knowing, resulting in emotional attachment to another. Such affective encounters occur between domestic gardeners and their plants, but what about commercial horticulture? Anna Tsing suggests not, characterizing plantationocene agribusiness as production without the love (2012). Relations between commercial growers and plants have scarcely been considered, but horticulture complicates multispecies ethics as plants are to be eaten, and tackling human exploitation might have precedence. Applying a care ethic to agriculture therefore must question care work’s outcomes and motivations. In research with UK commercial growers I trace plant intimacies as how growers relate to their plants, and how globalized food systems touch plant and human bodies in horticultural fields, asking: can following plant intimacies signal how more just food production could love human and plant labourers? Intimacies are shown to be shaped by time, scale and labour, as global food regimes press into intimate plant work, whilst specific modes of plantiness shape labour regimes. Tracing plant intimacies reveals that power to gain intimate plant knowledge is unequally distributed, whilst harmful intimacy concentrates with the most marginalized workers. Rather than questioning whether growers love or care for plants, it may be more important to ask who owns the crops, and who/what benefits.

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