Tomorrow's harvest: exploring English agriculture's vegetal futures

Booth, Rob (2024). Tomorrow's harvest: exploring English agriculture's vegetal futures. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis explores how agriculture in England is affected by the future in the present. It analyses imaginaries and discourses about the future of farming, as well as the ways in which the materialities of agriculture, particularly its ecologies and technologies, shape future possibilities. This interest in materialities leads to an interrogation of how expectations and trajectories of agricultural change shape and are shaped by people’s relationships with plants in agricultural systems.

Accordingly, this thesis draws on a range of disciplinary traditions and theoretical approaches. Although rooted in human geography it also borrows from political economy, Science and Technology Studies, environmental sociology, philosophy, and history. In bringing together these disciplinary traditions it builds bridges between old and new materialisms by engaging with post-structuralist thought and more-than- human geographies from a Marxian perspective. This combination of disciplinary and theoretical aspects leads to what I call a ‘political ecological approach to the future’. Via this paradigm I offer a novel intervention into contemporary debates regarding both how to understand the future in the present and the relations between humans and ‘nature’.

Further originality is offered by the way this approach informed the semi-structured interviews, participant observation and critical discourse analysis which form this research’s methodology. These methods facilitated the collection of a wide range of empirical data over the course of 2022. This data shapes the three interrelated empirical chapters at the the heart of this thesis. The first concerns regulation and practices associated with novel forms of plant breeding, particularly gene editing. The second examines the emergent field of vertical farming. The third explores the contemporary politics of agricultural scale and how such politics affect and are affected by historically- shaped relationships with different agricultural plants and technologies.

Together, these empirical chapters and the preceding theoretical framework make several key arguments. Centrally, this thesis shows how the future is produced in the present via not just ideas and talk, but also by material practices within agricultural systems. In considering these practices the influence of plants is also explored. I argue that the materialities and capacities of plants shape even the most advanced and intensified forms of contemporary farming in a way that should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, I argue that this does not mean that undue agency should be attributed to plants’ capacity to dictate English farming futures. Rather I look to historicise current relations with plants and how these relations are expressed through novel technologies and discourses which are already influencing the future of English farming. These technologies and their related discourses continue to intensify and stretch an instrumental, alienated, and accelerated way of relating with plants in capitalist agricultural systems. Importantly, I argue that these are realities with deep historical roots, which serve as a reminder of the extent to which the future is shaped and constrained by diverse forms of power in the present, over both people and plants.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):