Farming out of place:

Abstract

North American soybean farmers have responded to farmland inaccessibility in the US Midwest by purchasing and operating large soybean farms in western Bahia, Brazil. They have turned to “flexible farming” and flexible crops, labor, and land that are commodified, replaceable, and alienated from social and physical relations. Nevertheless, temporalities of farming survive, redefined in terms of progress and backwardness, and new materialities and models of farming emerge. This emergent agrarianism is flexible in terms of fungible means of production and farmer subjectivities that push the boundaries of “family farming.” The detachment and mobility of things and people in global agricultural production disrupts rural life and generates values and practices as farmers engage with the land and make meaning out of transnational farming. [flexibility, work, land, crops, transnationalism, agriculture, Brazil, United States]

La adaptación de la agricultura familiar a las cadenas agroalimentarias globales. El caso de la fruticultura en el Bajo Cinca (España)

“…Por tanto, no debe entenderse la consolidación de la modernización agroindustrial solamente desde una perspectiva destructiva, sino que los nuevos modelos de relación vinculados al capital crean sus propios procesos de significado sobre la explotación, la agricultura, la profesión de agricultor y el territorio (Ofstehage, 2018). Cheshire y Woods (2013) analizan la emergencia de la figura agricultor involucrado activamente en las cadenas globales de valor y como su agencia individual es clave para la transformación e integración de sus explotaciones agrícolas en las dinámicas agroalimentarias globales.…”

The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory

“…There are many different sorts of communities tied to plantation production (Mintz 1986) but there are clear commonalities. 6 Plantations are often familyowned and produce relationships of fixity where workers make small pieces of land into homes and gardens (Besky 2017) and of flexibility where landowners might choose to disconnect from, sell, or abandon the land as their profit margins dictate (Ofstehage 2018). Modern labor relations developed together and within plantations; migration routes that were originally oriented toward conquest and trade became the supply wagons of the new plantation economy; laboring bodies and families were placed in row houses, settlements, villages, reservations, and company towns; factories in the form of mills, distilleries, and processing plants were designed to work in tandem with plantations.…”

Reflecting on the Plantationocene: the political economy of sugarcane plantations in Guangxi, China

“…Meanwhile, in addition to big corporations, some individual capitalists, both external and local ones, are also observed to be important players in constructing and operating plantations. Compared with corporations, they are dominating plantations of a similar, if not larger, scale and their control power is not weaker and sometimes even stronger under certain contexts (Ofstehage 2018 ; Xu 2018 ).…”