The Farmhand in the Machine: How Promise Configures Vocation Inside a Vertical Farm

• In Event: Controlling Environments, Growing Plants - II

Abstract

The rapid growth of the vertical farming sector provides vivid examples of how, for some U.S. farmers, their vocation is changing in response to new technologies and a naturalization of venture capital as the driver of innovation. Borrowing strategies from Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial farmers have raised millions to build “plant factories” and other novel farms. Such investments provide for generous research and development budgets used to create sophisticated, proprietary systems of agricultural automation. These systems contour the experiences of plant scientists and farm managers: a researcher at one startup gives his title as “aka, Rocket Scientist & Mission Control.” How is growing lettuce indoors like rocket science? Both fields make claims on shaping the future by generating high-tech jobs and authoring innovations. Thus plant science at an intellectual property-motivated startup becomes a resource, a matrix for producing future efficiencies, whether by modifying plants, machines, or computer code. Management of plant production—in an era of Internet-of-Things-enabled sensors and machine-learning algorithms that monitor “grows,” analyze data, and control lights and other apparatus—leads growers to develop creative forms of care for the technē that maintain plants, their farmhands-in-the-machine: reporting software bugs via the messaging app Slack becomes as important as spotting literal bugs on plants’ leaves. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in New York City, this paper examines the relationship between rhetorics of imagined profits-to-come generated by scaled-up farms, the work of research scientists employed by startup farms to unlock these profits, and the daily management of crop production by growers.

Author

• Wythe Marschall, Harvard University, Department of the History of Science