Cultivating response: Peasant seed and plant–human collaboration in an agro-industrial heartland

Abstract

Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “response-ability”, or the cultivation of the capacity for response, this paper seeks to understand seed saving and plant breeding as politically and ethically charged modes of interspecies communication. In Brittany, France, a region known for its industrial-scale fresh vegetable production, peasant farmers and organic plant breeders question the modernist plant breeding and agro-industrial paradigm, cross-pollinating ideas to produce new understandings of genotype-environment interaction, biodiversity and heredity. Plant liveliness is understood as politically transformative, constitutive of an agriculture that supports peasant farmer and crop plant creativity and self-determination. In contrast to F1 hybrids, open-pollinated semences paysannes (peasant seed) retain the ability to respond to environmental changes, adapt and evolve over (human and plant) generations. Farmers must in turn engage specific modes of attention, interpreting plant expressions and shaping future generations through rouging and crossing, selecting and saving, watching and learning from their crops. Mutual response is the foundation of interdependence, in which nonconspecific partners adjust to one another’s ways of being and doing in order to labor together. In remaining response-able, farmers reckon with the liveliness and agential capacities of plants, qualities that work against their subsumption into factory-like methods of cultivation. These communicative practices hint at the radical potential for interspecies resistance to monoculture within plant breeding and cultivation, practices that are so often molded by the interests of agro-industrial capital.