Plants: Crop diversity pre‐breeding technologies as agrarian care co‐opted?

Abstract

Within the realm of international agricultural biodiversity conservation, there has been a surge of funding for "pre-breeding" of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Molecular high-throughput analysis, among other techniques, attempts to discern, document, and digitise the genomic traits of farmer/landrace varieties and crop wild relatives stored in gene banks to render them legible fodder for professional breeding. But pre-breeding necessitates thorough phenotypic evaluation and characterisation to understand the physiological attributes, heritable traits, and responses of a plant through its life cycle, under various growing and climactic conditions. This paper explores the irony that a range of surveillance technologies have been developed and deployed to mimic the agrarian work and skills of observing plants and attending to how they are faring, what they like and do not like over many seasons and contexts. These calls and technologies acknowledge the need for heedful attention to crops, even as they further displace actual farmers and their longstanding modes of selecting and saving open-pollinated seeds each harvest. Here, attending to crops entails remembering and communicating collectively gathered information of and from the plant. Such agrarian expertise of caring for plants has been systematically devalued and de-intellectualised, with gendered implications. Drawing on feminist geographies and political ecology, a landscape of care framework discloses the matrix of human and beyond-human care at work in cultivating agricultural biodiversity. Rather than ushering in a new valuation of this expertise, new pre-breeding technologies and trainings continue to ignore on-farm, plant-based care work and the farmers who do it. Calling out this contradiction could help re-centre such agrarian care skills as the crux to effective agricultural biodiversity utilisation. The proliferation of pre-breeding technologies could signify the co-optation of agrarian care skills or the opportunity to re-centre and revalue them. K E Y W O R D S agricultural biodiversity, feminist political ecology, geographies of care, plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, pre-breeding, science and technology studies

Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography

“…One further theme which vegetal geographers are closely engaging with is that of affect and care, building especially on the work of Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Choreographies of care for plants have notably been examined in agricultural contexts (Graddy-Lovelace, 2020; Head et al, 2019; Krzywoszynska, 2015; Mincytė et al, 2020). Since care in agriculture has typically been focused on animal bodies, these accounts take up the particular challenges presented by the alterity of plants; how agricultural workers learn to be affected by plants over time (Krzywoszynska, 2015).…”

Interstices of Care: Re‐Imagining the geographies of care

“…Garrett Graddy‐Lovelace () asks her readers to ponder a world in which the care of plants is slowly alienated from human hands and transferred to a technologised cadre within international pre‐breeding programmes. Graddy‐Lovelace explores and contrasts the intergenerational and interspecies connections built during the daily work of farmers and pre‐breeders’ efforts aimed at fostering new plant forms.…”

Care as a many‐splendoured topology (including prickles)

“…Garrett Graddy‐Lovelace's () paper, “Attending to plants: Crop diversity pre‐breeding technologies as agrarian care co‐opted?” places an argument that “care between humans entails care for beyond‐human realms” (p. 235). It is made in the context of agricultural biodiversity conservation and, specifically, with regard to the technologising global pre‐breeding industry focusing on the enhancement of genetic resources for food and agriculture.…”

“…As in relationships of trust, constellations of care are easily broken but slowly fixed. Therefore, following Graddy‐Lovelace's () conclusion, working with local actors positioned at the nodes of reciprocal care is the most sustainable, responsible, but also profitable way forward in the long run – for both human and non‐human species – in developing such phenomena as agricultural biodiversity in the relational world.…”

“…In doing so, each of the papers introduces various elements, actors and environments that are fundamentally important in how care unfolds in and affects our lived realities. They emphasise caring agency as always embodied but concurrently involving “deliberately motivated caring actions” (Bartos, , p. 262) and traverse the human–non‐human nexus without blurring it into a meaningless distinction, as Graddy‐Lovelace (, p. 235) portrays: “A landscape of care framework, infused with political ecology, discloses the matrix of human and beyond‐human care at work in what feminist geographers call geographies of responsibility.” These geographies are explored in the collection through relational theoretical frameworks that explode the traditional conceptions of care, which tend to relate it merely with small, mundane, nearby, present, feminine, cute, private, soft, kind and emotional aspects of life.…”