Greenhouses: Biopolitical Engines of Plant Futures

Horticultural greenhouses play a crucial role in Europe, ensuring the production of affordable and exportable vegetables, but they are under great pressure— including requirements to reduce chemical use in the Netherlands and social unrest about the exploitation of migrant workers^. Such pressures, challenge the current industrial model of horticultural production in the Netherlands, in which new relationships with plants and people are reconsidered and experimented with, though little considered in the literature. For some, control is the goal and technology is king: automatisation, temperature and humidity regulation, and the use of artificial intelligence are seen as the best routes towards greenhouse sustainability. But not everything can be automated. Human workers are essential, monitoring systems and doing the jobs that machines can’t do, such as grafting, planting, picking, cleaning, and repairing. Thinking through the lenses of plant studies and the food-migration nexus, and inspired in theoretical traditions of material-semiotics, this paper asks: How do greenhouse workers relate to the moralising discourse of sustainability as a univocal good? What are the ways of belonging and relating that are forged through working in the greenhouse? What type of skills and expertise are being valued (or denied) within human and more than human relationships in the greenhouse?