The Making of Agri-Logistical Landscapes: Production and Circulation in the Lincolnshire Fens

This paper describes and reflects on the making of an ‘agri-logistical hinterland’ in the Lincolnshire Fens. This region of Eastern England is an interesting vantage point to think about the role of logistics in the production of economic life. In recent years, scholarly interest in this agricultural landscape has centred on migration from Eastern Europe and overwhelming support for ‘Brexit’. My doctoral research here examines how workers are produced across the supply chain – in field, factory and logistics spaces.

I explore how the changing political economy of the capitalist food system has reconfigured social relations of production, circulation, and re-production locally. I examine how logistics has come to play a central role in this agricultural economy. Since the 1970s, a process of super-marketization and supply chain capitalism has made the area into a ‘value added’ passage point for global production chains. I explore the forms of work central to the movement of goods, and how supermarket logistical definitions of quality have come to ‘industrialise’ the workforce.

Agro-logistical landscapes contribute to, and complicate, our sociological understandings of post-industrial economic life. Unlike neighbouring deindustrialised regions of England, this is an agricultural area with a different trajectory of industrial development. They also present a different case to more typical studies of Amazon or ports and shipping containers. Sociologists from Raymond Williams to Vron Ware have called for us to move beyond a rural-urban divide to better understand historical processes key to contemporary sociology.

This paper introduces some preliminary findings from my PhD research into ‘entangled livelihoods’ in the agri-logistics industry here. I reflect on what the intensification of an agri-logistical regime means for local firms and workers. I try to think about the region spatially (a shadow ecology?) but also what this means for classed and racialised formations of labour.