The Myth of ‘Modern Agriculture’: Scale and Ecological Rupture
I. Dismantling the Myths of Western Modern Agriculture
For the authors of *Crop Migrations* (hereafter referred to as *Crop Migrations*), the answer is no. Co-authored by four historians of agriculture, the original English edition was first published by Yale University Press in 2023. The authors challenge the Western-centric, progressivist teleology found in traditional historical narratives. This perspective of post-colonial critique can, to some extent, help us dismantle the myths of “faster, higher, stronger,” including in the realm of agriculture: is larger scale necessarily more efficient? Is higher yield always a good thing? Is genetic breeding inherently more advanced?
One of the authors, Francesca Bray, specialises in the history of Chinese agriculture and science and technology, and has long contributed to post-colonial critique within the field of Chinese history. By uncovering the intimate relationship between technology and society, she has challenged the mainstream narrative that the late Chinese Empire’s technological backwardness justified its subjugation. As the primary author of the “Agriculture” volume (1983) of *Science and Civilisation in China*, edited by Joseph Needham, she has worked to vindicate the biological technologies of ancient China.
In acclaimed works such as *The Rice Economies* and *Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China*, she emphasises how technology is embedded within society, culture, and institutions. She found that East Asian rice societies had long developed divisions of labour and organisational forms resembling “sprouts of capitalism,” yet these never replaced the model of intensive small-scale farming—small plots managed by family units supported population growth, technical progress, and commercial and cultural prosperity. She argues that mechanisation and scaling are not the only paths forward, nor are they applicable to all societies.
*Crop Migrations* does not merely focus on the comparison between East and West; by documenting “migrations,” it clarifies that the dominant Western modern agriculture—which seems to be “miles ahead”—did not exist in isolation from a “primitive and backward” non-Western world. Crops that symbolise the “advancement” of capitalism or modern technology, such as wheat, tulips, and cinchona, do not have origins that are so exclusively “Western”; nor is the actual operation of large-scale industrial agriculture as monolithic as one might imagine. From small vegetable plots with multi-species crop rotation beside rubber plantations in Southeast Asia, to the tuber crops that provided “cheap calories” for sugarcane workers in South America, the stories in the book reveal that global commodity supply chains and large-scale intensive farming are not a panacea for development; rather, they often rely on the maintenance of “primitive” modes of production and life to enable the extraction of surplus value.
Having read this book, I believe it is time to stop obsessing over the old question of whether the “West is the centre”. Agricultural history needs to dissect more directly how large-scale monoculture has expanded globally since the colonial era, transforming agricultural landscapes, dismantling rural communities, and reshaping the relationship between humans and nature, and what ruinous consequences this has left behind. At the same time, we must ask: what kind of knowledge production and institutional arrangements have caused the rupture between generations, knowledge, and values, rendering other modes of production and living unimaginable?
II.The Plantationocene: Past and Present
Novel terminology is merely a tool for discussion; for now, let us continue to use “Anthropocene” to refer to the most urgent ecological issues requiring scholarly intervention. Regarding agriculture, I suggest introducing a more useful concept: the “Plantationocene”, proposed by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. The word “plantation” might sound like something from the distant colonial era in South America or Southeast Asia, but what these scholars are attempting to clarify is a form or logic of agriculture: the large-scale cultivation of single crops for the purpose of commodity production. This agricultural form is ubiquitous across the globe and continues to expand.
Plantation-style agriculture is built upon drastic ecological simplification and the forced labour of multiple species: it requires the complete clearing of indigenous inhabitants from a piece of land—including forests, wildlife, and human communities—and the introduction and disciplining of crops (often alien plants or even GMOs), animals, and foreign labour that serve human needs. Imagine a vast blueberry plantation: only one plant is permitted to exist here to serve the global commodity chain. Through processes that consume vast natural resources, such as temperature control and cold-chain transport, off-season cultivation is achieved. This requires high-intensity investment from foreign capital and the employment of seasonal temporary workers, whose labour is deskilled into simple, repetitive motions.
Plantations destroy soil, exhaust water, and encroach upon the habitats of wild flora and fauna, often bringing about epidemics in crops and livestock; the consumption and exploitation of farm labour also widen the wealth gap and exacerbate social injustice. Some scholars have even found that it was these single-species, intensive plantations, feedlots, and slaughterhouses that inspired the modern factory assembly line. The plantation logic decomposes complex living organisms into standardised components to be controlled, foreshadowing the discipline and alienation of employees within corporate systems. For example, on a Ford production line, car assembly is broken down into specialised movements at fixed workstations, with artificial lighting and shift work serving the 24-hour rhythm of machine production.
The reason plantation logic is lauded—beyond the profit-seeking nature of capital—is the efficiency of this management model and the promise of a future of “extreme material abundance”. However, can the global population only achieve a more prosperous life by increasing efficiency and yield through large-scale industrial agriculture? In the third chapter of *Crop Migrations*, “Scale”, the story of how Chinese tea was transplanted to British colonial India provides an interesting example.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the tea industry consisted of a decentralised network of small-to-medium farmers (family-run, seasonal workers), local processors, and tea merchants. At each node of this network, growing, processing, and drinking tea were integral to local communities and customs, while remaining flexible enough to respond to a vast domestic market and shifting external markets.
After British plant hunters “stole” Chinese tea trees, they attempted to transplant them to British India to develop a tea industry, attracting significant investment from capitalists in Britain. The sugar industry—already capital-intensive and driven by economies of scale—had brought shareholders substantial profits in the colonies and served as evidence of the British Empire’s superiority and the legitimacy of its colonisation. Why not apply the same plantation logic to tea gardens?
However, unlike the tea industry in China, which had long been embedded in society, India’s tea gardens were man-made landscapes created with extreme speed: operators typically cleared vast swathes of forest in remote areas, tamed the wilderness, and hired workers from elsewhere. Throughout this process, they faced a constant stream of problems, from attacks by local wildlife to malaria caused by stagnant water. For a long time, the venture was volatile and failed to yield steady returns. Ultimately, the success of Indian tea relied on chance and marketing: domesticated wild Assam tea could be processed by machines, reducing labour costs, while successful marketing encouraged people across all social strata of the British Empire to start drinking tea. Meanwhile, Chinese tea maintained its decentralised, small-scale cultivation. Although it faced setbacks in exporting to the British Empire, it actively adapted, introducing new products such as Oolong tea, and was not wiped out by the competition.
In this story, the diverse, small-scale growers of the Chinese tea industry demonstrated stability and resilience in both ecological and market dimensions, acting as producers of a rich tea culture. In India, the success of large-scale tea plantations was not inevitable; rather, it was driven by ideology and market competition, and the process was fraught with difficulties, with profit eventually made possible by a series of coincidences.
However, as capitalist ideology was translated into economic terms such as “economies of scale” and “increasing returns to factors of production”, the plantation logic was transformed into a more efficient and universally applicable template. After the Second World War, Western nations and international organisations launched a series of development aid programmes in the Third World, and the agricultural model of “hybrid seeds + fertilisers + pesticides + irrigation + mechanisation” spread under the banner of the Green Revolution.
This technical solution was similarly built upon the plantation logic of ecological simplification, scaling, and high control: pursuing comparative advantage through monoculture and integrating crops into global commodity markets. Despite claims of improving farmers’ livelihoods, these interventions actually favoured capitalised agriculture, prioritising urban needs over those of smallholders, at the cost of the disintegration of rural communities and ecological degradation.
Whether in the form of colonial exploitation or development aid, plantation-style agriculture abstracts crop cultivation into calculable inputs and outputs, thoroughly reorganising land, crops, and labour to increase production efficiency and profit from commodity markets. The globalisation of this production mode constitutes the past and present of the Plantationocene.
If we have already seen that small-scale, non-plantation agriculture—at least partially oriented towards local markets—is better for both the environment and people, then historians should be more resolute in exposing the trickery of the Plantationocene and searching for the forgotten “non-plantation”. What social support systems, institutions, and cultures in history made “non-plantation” practices possible, and how were they negated? Is it possible for us to escape the collective unconscious obsession with “scaling up and strengthening”, and make the “non-plantation” feel new and imaginable once more?
III. Seeking the “Non-Plantation”: The Possibility of Care
Within the boundaries of the plantation, the complex interspecies interactions and dependencies that once existed are artificially minimised; only that which humans require is permitted to exist. Specialised agriculture has become a composite of external inputs: the input of commercial seeds, machinery, fuel, chemicals, and pollinators, to output ever-increasing yields. However, this ecological simplification is fragile and unsustainable.
Chapter four of the book, “Actors”, reveals the complex, agentic non-human actors in the history of crops. Modern agriculture’s disregard for this agency often leads to catastrophic consequences. Eucalyptus is a prime example: for the sake of aesthetics, railway sleepers, mine “reclamation”, and papermaking, Portugal has relentlessly engaged in the large-scale monoculture of this species from Tasmania, Australia. Yet, as the climate warmed, the forest fires of 2017 swept through Portugal, refusing to be extinguished for a long time. The authors even suggest: who defines what an “invasive species” is? Is the eucalyptus not, itself, an “invasive plant”?
The “arsonist” eucalyptus manifests the resistance of the non-human against the human desire for control: every organism has its own inclinations or preferences, its own purpose and temporality—they may even exist without any purpose at all. In response, multi-species research and feminist studies of science and technology point out that we must confront this absolute otherness.
Anthropocene geoengineering projects, including modern agriculture, operate on the belief that human rationality can calculate, design, and control everything to achieve unlimited growth and expansion. However, feminist theorists propose a logic of “care”, arguing that it is precisely the disregard for care that justifies the violence of the Anthropocene, leaving humans with nothing but arrogance and oppression toward others and other species. Traditionally, caring for others has been dismissed as “women’s work”—mere maintenance and repair. Yet, relationships of care are essential for human society to endure from generation to generation. It is within these relationships that the caregiver must first carefully attend to the needs of the cared-for as an “absolute other”, listen patiently to their thoughts, and provide as much assistance and service as possible, even when the other is often the weaker party. In fact, the English word “care” can also be translated as compassion or concern; the prerequisite for care is meticulous attention. Care is both arduous labour and emotional investment, and more importantly, a less egocentric ontology.
The logic of care has actually long existed in agronomy and agricultural practice. Chapter five, “Composition”, introduces the perspective of care. In this regard, China’s past agrarian civilisation has contributed richly.
As early as the Northern Wei dynasty’s *Qimin Yaoshu* (Essential Techniques for the Peasantry), mixed and companion planting were recorded, requiring farmers to observe carefully and tend with precision, noting subtle signs in the fields to react in a timely manner. Facing growing populations and the impact of natural and man-made disasters, the Ming dynasty scholar Xu Guangqi, who integrated Western and Chinese knowledge, advocated for composite, multi-functional farms in his *Nongzheng Quanshu* (Complete Treatise on Agricultural Administration). By ensuring a diverse range of crops and other factors remained interdependent and flexibly complementary, farms could resist shocks and maintain prosperity. Here, human livelihoods relied on forming a complex network of relationships with crops, non-crop wildlife, soil, and weather, rather than managing agriculture rigidly through input-output formulas as if operating a machine.
The cases in the book remind us that farming methods vastly different from the plantation—and the associated lifestyles and cultures—are possible; they were simply erased during the progression toward capitalist modernity.
Over a hundred years ago, the American soil scientist Franklin H. King visited China and witnessed how smallholders used intensive cultivation to ensure food security while protecting the soil. He wrote *Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan*, hoping that American agriculture would reflect on its limitless extraction of soil fertility and instead learn from the East Asian experience to make better use of nature’s gifts.
Today, however, those concerned with ecology and agriculture often feel adrift, with no models to draw upon. Over these hundred years, how was the ecological wisdom of traditional agriculture demeaned, suppressed, and ultimately erased? In the history of what constitutes “good” agriculture, production, and living, do alternative forms of knowledge production and reflection still exist?
After this historical deconstruction, the final question remains: what should we pursue? What should we do? Facing the “plantationisation of the Earth’s surface”, how do we anchor ourselves in “care” rather than “rupture”? In this regard, while the perspective of care and historical evidence can enrich our imagination, theories and concepts are ultimately pale—deductions on paper can now even be handled by AI. If the term “Anthropocene” carried the scent of an “ecological apocalypse” from the start, then a non-apocalyptic future and a non-plantation Earth can only emerge from concrete choices and authentic practice.
Author: Qieyi
Editor: Jeni