The Myth of “Modern Agriculture”: The Myth of Scale and Ecological Rupture

Having finished this book, I believe that it is time to let go of the old preoccupation with whether “the West is the centre”. The history of agriculture demands a more direct dissection of how, since the colonial era, large-scale monoculture has continued to expand across the globe, reshaping agricultural landscapes, dismantling rural communities and remaking the relationship between people and nature — and what ruins remain in its wake. It also demands that we ask: what forms of knowledge production and institutional arrangement have produced ruptures across generations, across knowledge, and across values, rendering other modes of production and life unimaginable?

II. The Plantationocene: Past and Present

Striking new terms are merely points of entry into a discussion; for now, let us continue to use “Anthropocene” to refer to the most urgent ecological questions demanding scholarly engagement. On the subject of agriculture, I would suggest introducing a more useful concept: the “Plantationocene”, as proposed by Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and others. The word “plantation” may sound as though it belongs to a distant colonial past in South America or Southeast Asia, yet what scholars seek to illuminate is a particular form or logic of agriculture — namely, large-scale monoculture for the purpose of commodity production. This form of agriculture is ubiquitous across the globe and continues to expand.

Plantation agriculture is built upon drastic ecological simplification and the forced labour of multiple species: an entire landscape must be cleared of its original inhabitants — forests, wild animals and human communities alike — and then planted and disciplined with the species that human needs demand (often introduced plants or even genetically modified crops), along with animals and foreign labourers. Picture a vast blueberry plantation: here only a single species of plant is permitted to exist, for the sole purpose of serving a global commodity chain; off-season cultivation is achieved through resource-intensive processes such as temperature control and cold-chain transport; the operation requires heavy investment of external capital; it employs seasonal, temporary workers; and that labour is reduced through deskilling to simple, repetitive actions.

Plantations destroy soil, deplete water, and encroach on wildlife habitats, often bringing disease to crops, poultry and livestock. The exhaustion and exploitation of farm labour also widen the gap between rich and poor and deepen social injustice. Scholars have further observed that it was precisely the single-species intensive plantations, farms and slaughterhouses that inspired the assembly lines of modern factories. The plantation logic decomposes complex living beings into standardised components for control, foreshadowing the discipline and alienation of workers within the corporate system. On the Ford production line, for instance, automobile assembly is broken into narrowly subdivided tasks at fixed stations, with artificial lighting and shift work serving the twenty-four-hour rhythm of machine production.

The reason plantation logic is championed — beyond capital’s drive for profit — lies in the high efficiency of this management model and its promise of a future of “material abundance for all”. But is large-scale industrial agriculture, raising efficiency and output, truly the only way to give the world’s population a more prosperous life? In Chapter Three of The Migration of Crops, Scale, the story of how Chinese tea was transplanted to colonial British India offers a revealing example.

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the tea industry was a dispersed network of small and medium-sized farm households (family-run operations employing seasonal workers), local processors and merchants. At each node of this network, cultivating tea, processing tea and drinking tea were integral to local communities and their customs, while the network itself remained flexible enough to serve a vast domestic market and respond to shifting external demand.

After British plant hunters “stole” Chinese tea plants, they attempted to transplant them to British India and develop a tea industry, attracting substantial investment from home-grown British capitalists. The economies of scale and capital intensity already delivering rich returns to shareholders in the colony’s sugar plantations could also serve as evidence of the British Empire’s superiority and the legitimacy of colonisation. Why not apply the plantation logic to tea gardens?

Yet unlike China’s tea industry, which had long been embedded in the social fabric, India’s tea gardens were human landscapes wrought at breakneck speed: operators typically cleared large tracts of forest in remote areas, tamed the wilderness and hired labourers brought in from elsewhere. Along the way they faced a ceaseless stream of problems — attacks from local wildlife, malaria bred by stagnant water — and for a long time the enterprise was riddled with volatility, unable to yield steady returns. In the end, Indian tea succeeded on the strength of contingencies and marketing: the domesticated wild Assam tea could be processed by machine, cutting labour costs, while successful marketing turned every stratum of British society across the Empire into tea drinkers. Chinese tea of the same era still maintained its decentralised, small-scale cultivation; while it certainly met with setbacks in exports to the British Empire, it actively adapted, bringing out new products such as oolong tea, and was never extinguished by competition.

In this story, the diverse, small-scale growers of China’s tea industry display stability and resilience on both the ecological and the market dimension, and are themselves producers of a rich tea culture. In India, by contrast, the success of the large-scale tea garden was far from inevitable: it was propelled by ideology and market rivalry, its course strewn with setbacks, and ultimately it was a concatenation of accidents that made profit possible.

And yet, as the ideology of capitalism was translated into economic jargon such as “economies of scale” and “increasing returns to the factors of production”, plantation logic was transformed into a template that seemed more efficient and universally applicable. After the Second World War, Western states and international organisations rolled out a succession of development-aid programmes in the Third World, and the agricultural package of “hybrid seed + fertiliser + pesticide + irrigation + mechanisation” spread under the banner of the Green Revolution.

This technological package, too, rests on the same plantation logic of ecological simplification, scale and tight control: pursuing comparative advantage through monoculture and plugging crops into the global commodity market. Despite claims of improving farmers’ livelihoods, these interventions in fact served capitalised agriculture, prioritising urban rather than smallholder needs at the cost of rural community disintegration and ecological degradation.

Whether taking the form of colonial exploitation or development aid, plantation-style agriculture abstracts crop cultivation into computable inputs and outputs, thoroughly reorganising land, crops and labour in order to raise productive efficiency and chase profit on commodity markets. The globalisation of this mode of production constitutes the past and present of the Plantationocene.

The Plantationocene spells “rupture” and “control”. In modern agriculture, the use of fertiliser and machinery has decoupled livestock rearing from crop cultivation, reducing animal husbandry to factory farming; herbicides and insecticides wipe out field insects; as for crops that need pollinators, bees can be raised separately and carted in during pollination season as “worker bees”; vertical farming and plant factories are even beginning to imagine doing without soil, that “great nuisance”. Nor is the severing confined to ecosystems — foreign labourers are cut off from the land and from the children left behind in their home villages, while their labour faces the ever-present threat of displacement by machines.

Within the boundaries of the plantation, the complex interspecific interactions and dependencies among organisms are artificially reduced to a minimum: only what humans require is allowed to persist. Professionalised agriculture becomes an assemblage of external inputs — commercial seed, machinery, fuel, chemicals and pollinators fed in, ever-higher yields pumped out. And yet this model’s ecological simplification is fragile and unsustainable.

Chapter Four of the book, “Agents”, lays bare the complex, agentive non-human actors woven into crop history; modern agriculture’s disregard for such agency often courts disaster. Eucalyptus is a telling example: driven by aims as varied as landscape design, railway sleepers, mine “reclamation” and paper-making, Portugal planted this species from Tasmania, Australia, in unbroken monoculture on an immense scale. Yet as the climate warmed, wildfires swept across the country in 2017, blazing for days without relief. The authors even hint: who gets to define an “invasive species”? Is eucalyptus not itself an “invasive plant”?

The “arsonist” eucalyptus manifests non-human resistance to the human urge to dominate: every organism has its own tendencies or preferences, its own purposes and its own temporality — indeed, it may exist beyond purpose altogether. Multispecies studies and feminist science and technology studies argue that we must take absolute alterity seriously.

The Earth-engineering programmes of the Anthropocene, modern agriculture foremost among them, assume that human reason can calculate, design and master everything, thereby delivering unlimited growth and expansion. Feminist theorists, however, have proposed a logic of “care”, holding that it is precisely the neglect of care that legitimises the violence of the Anthropocene, reducing our relations with others — human and non-human alike — to nothing but arrogance and domination. Traditionally, caring for others has been denigrated as women’s work, as mere maintenance and repair. Yet relationships of care are indispensable to the intergenerational continuation of human society. It is precisely within these relationships that the carer must first attend closely to the needs of the cared-for as an “absolute other”, listen patiently to what they have to say, and offer them every possible form of assistance and service, even when they are often the weaker party in terms of strength. In fact, the English word “care” can also be rendered as “solicitude”; the precondition of care is attentive, careful regard. Care is both arduous labour and an emotional outpouring, and, more profoundly still, an ontology less centred on the self.

The logic of care has long been woven into agronomy and farming practice. Chapter Five of the book, “Composition”, introduces the perspective of care, and in this regard China’s historical agrarian civilisations offer a rich inheritance.

The Northern Wei text the Qimin Yaoshu already records mixed cultivation and companion planting, exhorting farmers to observe closely, tend their crops with care, and note the subtlest signs in the field so as to respond in good time. Faced with a swelling population and the shocks of natural disasters and man-made calamities, the Ming-dynasty scholar Xu Guangqi, versed in both Chinese and Western learning, advocated composite, multi-functional farms in his Nongzheng Quanshu: through diversified crops and mutually dependent, flexibly complementary elements, farms could withstand shocks and sustain prosperity. Here, people’s livelihoods rest upon complex networks of relationship with crops, wild organisms other than crops, soil, weather and other factors — rather than managing agriculture like operating a machine, rigidly applying input–output formulae.

The cases in this book remind us: agricultural methods radically different from the plantation — along with the whole constellation of ways of life and cultures bound up with them — are possible; they were simply erased, little by little, in the march towards capitalist modernity.

A little over a century ago, the American soil scientist Franklin H. King visited China and witnessed how smallholders, through intensive cultivation, secured their food and clothing while preserving the soil. He wrote Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, hoping that American agriculture might reflect on its unbounded extraction from the land and instead learn from East Asian experience, making good use of nature’s gifts.

And yet today, those who care about ecology and agriculture often feel utterly adrift, with nowhere to turn for guidance. Over the course of this century and more, how was the ecological wisdom of traditional agriculture demeaned, suppressed, and ultimately lost? As for what constitutes good agriculture, good production and good living — is there still, in history, an alternative body of knowledge and reflection to draw upon?

Yet after all this deconstruction of history, the final question still stands: what should we pursue, and what should we do? Faced with the “plantationisation of the Earth’s surface”, how do we dock at “care” rather than “rupture”? In this regard, although the perspective of care and historical inquiry can enrich our imagination, theory and concepts remain pale — on-paper deductions can already be left to AI. If the word “Anthropocene” has carried the scent of an “ecological apocalypse” from the very start, then a non-apocalyptic future, a non-plantationised Earth, can only be born from concrete choices and real practice.

Foodthink author

Qieyi

Attuned to the world of multispecies entanglements, fond of visiting markets and baking bread.

 

 

 

 

Author: Qieyi

Editor: Jieni