The ‘Modern Agriculture’ Illusion: The Scale Myth and Ecological Rupture
I. Debunking the Myth of Western Modern Agriculture
For the authors of *The Migration of Crops in World Civilisations* (hereafter *Crop Migration*), the answer is a resounding no. Co-authored by four scholars of agricultural history, the English edition was first published by Yale University Press in 2023. The authors challenge the Eurocentric, progressivist teleology embedded in conventional historical narratives. This postcolonial critical perspective helps us, to some extent, dismantle the myth of “faster, higher, stronger” – including when it comes to agriculture: Does larger scale inevitably mean greater efficiency? Is higher yield inherently better? Is genetic breeding necessarily more advanced?
One of the book’s authors, Francesca Bray, specialises in Chinese agricultural and technological history and has long contributed to postcolonial critique within the field of Chinese history. By examining the deep interplay between technology and society, she questions the prevailing view that China’s technological lag in the late imperial period somehow justified its subsequent subjugation. As the lead author of the “Agriculture” volume (1983) of *Science and Civilisation in China*, edited by Joseph Needham, she has worked to vindicate ancient China’s biotechnological achievements.
In seminal works such as The Rice Economies and Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, she emphasises the embeddedness of technology within society, culture, and institutions. She observed that East Asian rice-growing societies long ago developed division-of-labour structures bearing the hallmarks of “sprouts of capitalism”, yet these never displaced the intensive smallholder farming model—small plots worked by individual families sustained population growth, technological progress, and the flourishing of commerce and culture. She maintains that mechanisation and scale are not the only viable path, nor do they suit every society.
*Crop Migration* looks beyond simple East-West comparisons; by tracing the movement of plants, it clarifies that Western mainstream modern agriculture, often cast as “far ahead”, is not isolated from the supposedly “backward” non-Western world. Crops such as wheat, tulips, and cinchona—frequently heralded as symbols of the “advancement” of capitalism or modern science—were not so distinctly “Western” in origin; the day-to-day realities of large-scale industrial agriculture are also far less monolithic than popularly imagined. From the small, multi-species rotation plots cultivated beside rubber plantations in South-East Asia, to the tuber crops that supply South American sugarcane labourers with their daily “cheap calories”, the stories in the book expose how global commodity supply chains and large-scale intensive farming are no panacea for development. Rather, they depend on the maintenance of “primitive” modes of production and living to enable the extraction of surplus value.
Having finished this book, I am convinced that it is time to abandon the old debate over whether the West remains the centre. Agricultural history must more directly dissect how large-scale monoculture has continued to expand globally since the colonial era, transforming agricultural landscapes, dismantling rural communities, and reconfiguring the relationship between humanity and nature, while leaving behind a legacy of ruin. It must also ask what forms of knowledge production and institutional arrangements have caused these generational, epistemic, and value-based ruptures, rendering alternative modes of production and ways of life unimaginable.
II. The Plantationocene: Past and Present
Novel terminology serves merely as a discursive tool; for the time being, let us retain the “Anthropocene” to denote the most pressing ecological challenge of our era, one that demands urgent scholarly intervention. In the context of agriculture, however, I propose adopting a more apt concept: the “Plantationocene,” articulated by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. The term “plantation” may evoke distant colonial enterprises in South America or Southeast Asia, yet what these scholars are delineating is an agricultural morphology and logic defined by large-scale monoculture cultivation for commodity markets. This model is now ubiquitous across the globe and continues to expand.
Plantation-style agriculture rests upon drastic ecological simplification and the coerced labour of multiple species. It demands the complete clearance of a landscape’s original inhabitants—forests, wildlife, and human communities alike—before introducing and disciplining the crops (typically exotic or genetically modified), livestock, and migrant labourers required by human markets. Consider a sprawling blueberry plantation: a single plant species is allowed to exist solely to feed the global commodity chain. Off-season production is achieved through resource-intensive processes like climate control and cold-chain logistics. It requires heavy capital investment from external sources, relies on seasonal casual labour, and reduces work to deskilled, repetitive motions.
Plantations degrade soil, deplete water reserves, encroach on wildlife habitats, and frequently trigger outbreaks of crop and livestock disease. The depletion and exploitation of agricultural labourers further exacerbate wealth disparities and social injustice. Scholars have also noted that it was precisely these high-density, single-species plantations, feedlots, and slaughterhouses that inspired the assembly lines of modern industry. The plantation logic reduces complex living organisms to standardised components for control, prefiguring the disciplinary control and alienation of workers under corporate systems. Take the Ford automobile assembly line, for example: car manufacturing was broken down into specialised, repetitive tasks performed at fixed stations, while artificial lighting and shift patterns were designed to sustain a round-the-clock mechanical production rhythm.
The plantation logic is championed not only because of capital’s profit-seeking drive but also due to the high efficiency of this management model and its promise of a future of “material abundance”. Yet does the global population require large-scale industrialised agriculture to boost efficiency, increase yields, and secure a more prosperous life? Chapter 3 of *Crop Migration*—“Scale”—offers an intriguing case in point: the story of how Chinese tea was transplanted to British colonial India.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the tea trade operated as a decentralised network comprising small and medium-sized farmers (running family-based operations and employing seasonal labourers), local processors, and tea merchants. At every node within this network, cultivating, processing, and consuming tea were woven into the fabric of local communities and customs, yet the system remained agile enough to cater to vast domestic markets and the ever-shifting tides of international trade.
After British plant hunters ‘stole’ Chinese tea plants, they sought to transplant them to British India to develop a tea industry, attracting substantial investment from British capitalists at home. Capital-intensive sugar plantations, operating on economies of scale, had already delivered handsome dividends to shareholders in the colonies while serving to justify the supposed superiority of the British Empire and the righteousness of colonialism. With this precedent in mind, why not apply the plantation logic to tea gardens?
However, unlike China’s tea sector, which has long been woven into the social fabric, India’s tea estates were artificially engineered landscapes, rapidly imposed upon the terrain: operators typically felled forests across vast tracts of remote countryside, tamed the wilderness, and imported labour from elsewhere. Throughout this process, they faced a relentless string of problems, from attacks by local wildlife to malaria outbreaks triggered by standing water. For decades, the enterprise proved highly volatile, failing to deliver reliable returns. Ultimately, Indian tea’s success owed more to chance and marketing than to design: the domesticated wild Assam cultivar could be processed mechanically, cutting labour costs, while astute marketing campaigns persuaded every stratum of British society to take up tea drinking. Meanwhile, China’s tea industry maintained its decentralised, small-scale model. Though it certainly faced headwinds exporting to the British Empire, it adapted swiftly, introducing new varieties such as oolong tea, and survived the competitive onslaught.
In this narrative, China’s diverse, small-scale tea growers demonstrated remarkable ecological and market stability, alongside a resilient capacity to nurture a rich tea culture. By contrast, the triumph of India’s sprawling tea estates was far from inevitable. It was propelled by ideological imperatives and market competition, fraught with setbacks along the way, with profitability ultimately hinging on a series of fortunate contingencies.
Yet, as capitalist ideology was reframed in economic jargon—speaking of “economies of scale” and “increasing returns to factors of production”—the plantation model was repackaged as a seemingly more efficient, universally applicable blueprint. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Western nations and international bodies rolled out development aid programmes across the Global South. Under the banner of the Green Revolution, a rigid agricultural package—hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation infrastructure, and mechanisation—was rapidly imposed across vast regions.
Underpinning this technological package is the same plantation logic of ecological simplification, massive scale, and rigid control: monocropping is pursued to maximise comparative advantage, seamlessly integrating harvests into global commodity chains. Though touted as a means to uplift rural livelihoods, these interventions ultimately served capital-intensive agriculture. They prioritised urban consumption patterns over the needs of smallholder farmers, exacting a heavy toll through the erosion of rural communities and widespread ecological degradation.
Whether enacted through colonial extraction or post-war development aid, plantation agriculture reduces crop cultivation to a ledger of calculable inputs and outputs. It radically reorganises land, flora, and labour to maximise efficiency and extract profit within commodity markets. It is the globalisation of this production model that charts the past and present of the Plantationocene.
If we have indeed seen that small-scale agriculture—at least partly oriented towards local markets and operating outside the plantation model—benefits both the environment and people, then historians ought to more firmly expose the machinations of the Plantationocene and seek out the forgotten “non-plantation” model:What historical systems of social support, institutions, and cultural practices made “non-plantation” practices viable, and how were they negated? Can we break free from the collective unconscious drive to “grow bigger and stronger”, and renew the “non-plantation” model—rendering it imaginable once more?
III. Seeking the “Non-Plantation”: The Possibility of Care
On plantation grounds, the complex interspecies interactions and dependencies once present are artificially reduced to the barest minimum; only what serves human needs is permitted to exist. Specialised agriculture becomes a mere compilation of external inputs: commercial seeds, machinery, fuel, chemicals, and pollinators are brought in, while ever-higher yields are extracted. Yet, this ecological simplification is fragile and unsustainable.
Chapter Four of this book, ‘Actants’, reveals the complex, agential non-human actors embedded in the history of crops. Modern agriculture’s disregard for this agency frequently leads to catastrophic consequences. Eucalyptus provides a clear example: for landscaping, railway sleepers, mine ‘reclamation’, and paper production, Portugal has engaged in relentless, large-scale monoculture plantings of this Tasmanian species. However, amid a warming climate, the 2017 forest fires swept across Portugal, burning fiercely and proving stubborn to extinguish. The authors even suggest: who defines an ‘invasive species’? Could eucalyptus not be considered an ‘invasive plant’ itself?
The eucalyptus tree—often described as an “arsonist”—manifests non-human resistance to the human urge to control: every organism possesses its own inclinations and preferences, operates according to its own purposes and temporality, and may even exist without any teleological drive. In light of this, multi-species studies and feminist science and technology studies (STS) urge us to confront absolute alterity.
Anthropocene earth-engineering projects, including modern agriculture, proceed from the belief that human rationality can calculate, design, and master everything, thereby enabling limitless growth and expansion. Feminist theorists, however, advance a logic of “care”. They contend that it is precisely the disregard for care that legitimises the violence of the Anthropocene, leaving human relations with both one another and other species stripped down to arrogance and oppression. Traditionally, caring for others has been dismissed as “women’s work”—merely maintenance and repair. Yet, relations of care are indispensable to the intergenerational continuity of human societies. It is precisely within these relations that the caregiver must first attentively heed the needs of the cared-for as an “absolute other”, patiently listen to their perspectives, and offer whatever support and service is possible, even when the cared-for is often the physically or structurally weaker party. Indeed, the English term *care* can also be translated as “compassion” or “concern”; its prerequisite is meticulous attention. Care is both arduous labour and emotional investment, but it is also, fundamentally, an ontology that is less self-centred.
The logic of care has long been embedded within agronomy and agricultural practice. Chapter Five of this book, *Composition*, introduces this perspective. In this regard, China’s historical farming civilisations have made rich contributions.
The Northern Wei text *Qimin Yaoshu* already documents intercropping and companion planting, urging farmers to observe carefully, tend with diligence, attend to the subtle signs in the fields, and respond promptly. In the face of swelling populations and the ravages of natural and man-made disasters, Xu Guangqi, a Ming dynasty scholar well-versed in both Chinese and Western learning, advocated in *Nongzheng Quanshu* for composite, multifunctional farms. Through the interdependence and flexible complementarity of diverse crops and other elements, such systems could withstand shocks and sustain prosperity. Here, human livelihoods depend on a complex web of relationships woven with crops, wild non-crop species, soil, and weather patterns, rather than managing agriculture like a machine by rigidly applying input-output calculations.
The case studies presented in the book suggest that farming methods radically different from the plantation model—and the associated ways of life and cultures—are indeed possible; they were merely gradually erased in the march towards capitalist modernity.
Over a century ago, when American soil scientist Franklin H. King visited China, he witnessed how smallholders achieved food security while preserving soil fertility through meticulous cultivation. He authored *Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan*, hoping American agriculture would reflect upon its relentless extraction of soil nutrients, turn to learn from East Asian experience, and make wiser use of nature’s bounty.
Yet today, those concerned with ecology and agriculture often find themselves looking around in bewilderment, with little to draw upon. Over this past century, how was the ecological wisdom of traditional agriculture marginalised, suppressed, and ultimately lost? And concerning what constitutes good agriculture, and good modes of production and living, have there been alternative traditions of knowledge and reflection in history?
Having unpacked this history, the ultimate question remains: what ought we to pursue, and how shall we proceed? Confronted with the ‘plantationisation of the Earth’s surface’, how do we anchor ourselves in ‘care’ rather than ‘rupture’? In this respect, while a care-centred perspective and historical scholarship can certainly stretch our imagination, theory and concepts alone remain inherently insufficient—after all, even theoretical extrapolations on paper can now be automated by AI. If the term ‘Anthropocene’ was, from its inception, imbued with the aura of an ‘ecological apocalypse’, then a future free from collapse and an Earth spared from plantationisation can only emerge from concrete choices and lived practice.
Author: Qieyi
Editor: Jieni