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]

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.…”

Working the Plantationocene

“…In Brazil, North American farmers became managers of capital and dependent on outside finance, even if this financing came more often from neighboring farmers than from Wall Street. They adopted flexible farming as a strategy which minimized belonging, connection, and stability in favor of interchangeable parts (Ofstehage 2018a); they financialized their labor, values, and farm assets (Ofstehage 2018b).…”