Responsible to whom? Seed innovations and the corporatization of agriculture

Abstract

In this paper, I use historical description to trace the processes by which hybrid seed innovations and their successors – genetically engineered (GE) seed systems – were co-produced with a techno-scientific infrastructure favoring chemical corporations and productivist farming at the expense of small farmers and alternative ways of organizing rural life. Using a discourse analysis method, I also shed light on why historical shifts in seed innovation were largely unmarked by controversy. I retrace the road to GE's success as a cultural enterprise, exploring the likelihood that this success was paved not just with the co-production of technologies and corporate interests but also with cultural descriptions of seeds and farming. Looking at Canadian seed innovation through the lenses of technopolitics as well as cultural studies, as this paper does, serves to underscore the importance of attending to the responsibility of innovations in their design – before the politics of technologies get fixed into material forms, technological systems and into cultural practice.

Keywords:

• seeds
• genetic engineering
• politics of technology
• corporatization
• culture
• discourse

1. Introduction

Genetically engineered (GE) organisms could be considered irresponsible innovations because they were not developed in mutual engagement between societal actors and technicians. Consequently, they do not ‘accord with the values of a wider community' (Guston 2004, 164; Owen, Bessant, and Heintz 2013), in this case with a wide variety of farmers. Farmers who resist GE seeds view these innovations as the site through which corporate values dominate the agricultural research agenda and the rural landscape at the expense of alternative organizations of rural life (see Bronson 2009, 2014; Kinchy 2012). In this paper I apply Langdon Winner's concept of the politics of technology (1986) to bear on an established argument in peasant studies and environmental geography; I then add the layers of techno-political and cultural analysis to argue that hybrid seed innovations were irresponsible innovations because they served a narrow set of private interests at the expense of community and environmental concerns.

This paper draws on the important work of others (specifically Kneen 1992, 1995; Kuyek 2000) to describe how the hybrid seed innovations that came out of early plant breeding networks as well as their successor innovations – GE seed systems¹ – were co-produced with a technoscientific infrastructure favoring productivist farming and corporate interests. Bringing this work into the realm of the critical technology literature allows emphasis on how the irresponsibility of these innovations was embedded into their very design. Innovation design always functions to put parameters around the distribution of resources and power in society and hybrid seed innovations were designed to grow the power of agricultural corporations both inside of science and at the farm level. The rise of hybrid seeds was bundled up with the privatization of seed science and the corporatization of Canadian agriculture.

GE seed systems were not the focus of technoscience controversy in 1974. When scientists first brought the technique for producing GE seeds into public view, there was caution (including among the scientists themselves, see Berg et al. 1974) but widespread public dissent turned on the inability of governments to control the unexpected harms – the risks – of technologies such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (Beck 1992; van Loon 2002). Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and the events surrounding its publication had tarnished the public face of chemicals and their manufacturers. Then the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal further problematized the links between technological science and corporate interest. But the chemical corporations who found themselves under intense public scrutiny in 1984 were by then already tied with public plant-breeding programs whose scientific efforts would enable the expansion of productivist – notably, high chemical input² – agricultural innovations in North America. The particular networks of seed innovation that developed over the mid-twentieth century allowed chemical corporations to become economically powerful and their experts technically advanced, which in turn would allow for what some people consider a biotechnology-driven ‘strategy of domination’ (Kuyek 2000). This paper tells this story through a technopolitical lens.

The paper also draws insight from critical communication and cultural theory (Foucault 1977; Grossberg 1987) to help explain why these historical shifts in seed innovation, which disempowered many farmers, were not marked by more political controversy. Technologies take shape and achieve social stability not entirely out of work done in the laboratory, but also as a result of legitimation processes – continuous social struggles for the control and distribution of meaning, central to which are language. Significantly, these social processes always already connect to power and difference; power works to fix meanings, empowering some possibilities and disempowering others. Within the popular and political discourses of the mid-twentieth century, seed development was represented as ‘good’, its links with chemical corporations (and the attendant anxieties and democratic demands) still largely invisible.³ For most of the twentieth century, dominant discourses about the social implications of hybrid seed innovations described them as liberating tools for farmers, and discussions of the negative social and environmental implications of seed innovations were relegated to the early environmental movement. It was only with the wide-scale application of GE seed systems in the early twenty-first century that social concerns have been brought to the fore, articulating GE seed systems to historic chemical controversies. This paper thus underscores the importance not just of the material politics of innovation objects but also their cultural context, exemplified in the promissory rhetoric that accompanied shifts in seed innovations. Looking materially and culturally at historic seed innovations serves to remind us that if technological devices contain possibilities for ways of ordering human activity (Winner 1986), then by far the greatest opportunities to order society democratically, by attending to a wide array of values, happens before a particular instrument or tool is commercialized. Innovation choices have far-reaching effects because they become fixed: into material equipment, economic investment, legal infrastructure, and, significantly, habits of thought and speech – technologies get fixed into culture.

2. Early networks of Canadian seed science

In the early to mid-twentieth century, the Canadian federal government established a national seed system characterized by centralized public breeding programs (Kuyek 2000). While many farm inputs, such as chemical technologies, were being manufactured and circulated by private actors (such as chemical corporations), seed production remained loose and decentralized. Some private seed companies, many family-run, did exist but they for the most part distributed seeds imported from the USA and other countries (Kuyek 2000). According to Kuyek's (2000) historical analysis, there was limited interest by the private sector in plant breeding for Canadian agriculture because of a relatively small farming population spread across a diverse landscape with diverse climatic conditions and therefore less commercial demands (the perennial Canadian problem). But starting in the early twentieth century, the Canadian government devoted money to establishing seed research or plant breeding housed in universities across the country. Public investments in plant breeding were easily justified in this period of strong nationalism (Nader and Wallach 1996) and the social benefits from seed research are ecumenical – stretching across the national economy, farmers, industry, and consumers. It might even be said that investment in public plant breeding was considered a matter of national security, and there was little opposition to it in the prevailing political culture of the early twentieth century.

According to Brewster Kneen's interviews with early plant breeders (1992), a strong spirit of nationalism pervaded this scientific community:

[E]veryone involved [in the development of canola] shared a common culture and concern  …  They were all white males of European/British descent; and, they virtually all grew up on Prairie farms during the depression [sic] and shared a profound and unique experience that their followers, born and raised elsewhere, whether in cities or eastern farming areas, could never know. (33)

Plant breeders easily maintained informal relationships with the practitioners whose livelihoods their work affected since most of them had rural roots and still visited working farms. As well, farmers made up a significantly higher percentage of the post-war Canadian population than they do now (32% in 1931 versus 2% in 2006, see Statistics Canada 2006), and so they had a more visible public profile. Unlike today, when research shows that most kids have no idea where food comes from, the general North American population of the early twentieth century was likely much more aware of the importance of its agrarian base, especially in centers where seed research was taking place. As Kneen's (1992) interviews show, these men (and they were men, to be sure) remained in conversation with farmers, and they worked under the assumption that their science was progressing ‘in the best interests of the farmers and the country’ (33).

The public seed system also formally included farmer's interests: The early seed innovation respected the Seeds Act, which had been established in 1923 to license only those new varieties of seed that proved superior to the best variety already on the market. This proof was derived from farmers' participation in the Registration Recommending Committees, the main institution of this registration system. These Committees ultimately had a significant influence over the shape of the plant breeding system (Gray, Malla, and Ferguson 2001, 6). Farmers in this scientific and political network were seen as experts and they easily took up recognized positions of power in decisions about the production and distribution of seeds: some of them, for instance, were represented on the Canola Council, which was and still is an association advancing the growth and outlook of the canola industry.

Many of the formal plant breeders had been farmers, were still connected to farmers, and most of all, their scientific toolkit and protocol was little different from the average Canadian farmer's – namely, seed selection and cross-breeding. Since the beginning of agriculture, humans have systematically saved seed from each year's harvest to be planted as the next year's crop. This scientific process has always been socially shaped, for we select those seeds for reproducing that reflect particular cultural values and social interests. With the slow institutionalization of plant breeding into scientific laboratories over the mid-twentieth century, farmers lost their primary position as innovators in the breeding process and, over time, the locus of power shifted from farmers conducting experimentation according to community needs and in operational farm fields, to experimental field trials and laboratory testing (Kneen 1992).⁴ Nonetheless, despite a shift in power, North American farmers played a substantive role in seed innovation system as a whole by multiplying, distributing, and saving seeds. In fact, when public programs released new seeds, certain farmers were sent seeds from the plant scientists, and they multiplied seeds through the first several generations. The resulting seed was then distributed to more farmers who multiplied it into ‘registered’ and ultimately ‘certified’ seed, which was sold back to farmers. The certification process involved the patenting of the seed technology, so it was not just certification by an industry-specific body benefiting from the input of farmers, but it also involved the legitimatization (quite literally) of farmers' scientific contributions through the law. Moreover, since the patents on early seed innovations only protected the manufacture of unique seed varieties (they did not dictate seed use), farmers continued to take care of seed commodities – they saved them for themselves or their neighbors for any number of generations depending on the crop and farmer expertise. Lyons and Beglieter (1984) show that even into the late 1970s, two thirds of Canadian agriculture was still supported by uncertified or farmer-derived seed (109). Early plant breeding in Canada was therefore a clear instantiation of the science and technology studies observation that the production and acceptance of scientific knowledge and its products is a process of collective innovation, flowing in and out of experimental and social settings (see Latour 1988).

3. Productivism: the common culture of early plant innovation networks

Incredibly fruitful for research, the tight-knit community of plant breeders meant that there was no apparent need to formalize democratic participation of farmers into seed innovation (Kneen 1992). This informal innovation relationship was ultimately harmful because the efforts of seed science housed in public universities would ultimately come to reflect a set of norms and ideological commitments (like productivism) that better reflected corporate interests and national economic goals rather than a wide representation of farmer interests. Kneen (1992) says it precisely:

The high degree of cultural homogeneity was, according to the records, not tempered in any way by what might be referred to as a larger democratic process  …  This is not to say that the decision was contrary to what might have been decided if some larger democratic process had been operative. But when we come to look at the research agenda today and how it is determined and by whom, to say nothing of who pays for it, we might well wish that long ago there had been instituted some means of ensuring public debate on the subject. (60)

The cultural assumptions and attendant goals of those working formally and informally on early seed science began over the mid to late twentieth century to reflect the logic of productivism, which is still the dominant agricultural expert logic (Buttel 2003). Within productivism, farming is an ‘efficient’ and ‘productive’ ‘business’ enterprise, not a livelihood. Productivity paired with efficiency in this framing is defined by maximizing crop output using the least number of people or the least amount of time (Kneen 1995, 69) with the aim of maximizing national agricultural exports. Remember that the goals of the nation were already established as being synonymous with those of the individual farmer so that, within productivist logic, the situation becomes explicitly economic: farmers produce more to drive the individual and national economy. According to Buttel (2003), ‘The essence of the predominant “productionist” ideology was a doctrine that increased production is intrinsically socially desirable, and that all parties benefit from increased output’ (11).

Cultural expressions of productivism appeared within the Canadian governmental discourse with the 1969 Report of the Task Force on Agriculture. This report was intended to usher in a ‘new era in Canadian agriculture’ defined by a smaller number of farms and with public money playing a diminished role in agriculture – fewer farm subsidies, more relaxed regulatory structures, and less publicly derived technologies. Market forces like ‘competition’ were to play a greater role than national supports in directing late twentieth-century Canadian agriculture. Successful farming became clearly articulated to national economic goals through this policy discourse, and its logic was mirrored in provincial and regional policy documents of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, in 1977 agricultural policy recommendations were made in A Policy for Resource Management of the Eastern Slopes (an area covering Saskatchewan and Alberta) that outlines an expansion of agricultural ‘resources’ as ‘opportunities for development  … with a view to assisting in the economic progress of Alberta’ (4). In the early 1970s, the term ‘globalization’ started to appear in political language and Canadian national policies in general started to call for less government spending, less regulation, and generally less government oversight over the economy (Juillet, Roy, and Scala 1997). In 1972, Eugene Whelan became the Minister of Agriculture in the cabinet of Pierre Trudeau and, according to Kneen (1995), he positioned farming as only an aspect of the agri-food sector, which would adopt a Janus-face: one side looks at farmer and consumer interests, and the other looks after growing the agricultural economy.⁵

The use of innovation in meeting the goals of productivist agriculture is the key. Operating according to a shared set of productivist assumptions and norms, plant breeding teams of the mid-twentieth century started to focus on developing high-yielding hybrid seed technologies to increase overall farm productivity (Kneen 1992). Hybrid seed technologies are produced from cultivating inbred varieties, using repeated self-pollination, and then breeding the inbred plants to produce hybrid seeds. The hybridization process results in genetically uniform plants that show increased yield because of an effect called heterosis (hybrid vigor), which is still not well understood among plant scientists (Duvik 2001, 69). Plant breeding using the hybrid seed – saving seed from hybrid crop for on-the-farm breeding – presents difficulties because this results in extremely variable seed varieties. Dependable hybrid seed is developed from inbred lines, which have to be separately maintained, and therefore hybrid seeds advantaged government plant breeders over farmers. Early plant breeders did not intend for this to happen; one such scientist, Henry Wallace, was motivated to ‘restore the farmers' position in the national economy  … by giving them the same opportunity to improve income by controlling output that business corporations already possessed' (Culver and Hyde 2000, 403).

Interviews with Canadian public plant breeders (Kneen 1992) show that by the 1970s they saw themselves as committed to applying ‘improvements’ in plant science to the productivist ‘problem’ of needing to increase crop production (Kneen 1995). Research teams across Canada (and the USA) succeeded in developing strains that yielded higher, which meant that they had succeeded according to the goals set within productivism. The Canadian government (Statistics Canada 2009) describes the public plant breeding programs which developed canola seed innovations still used today as a ‘success story’ because they ‘increased yields and marketed higher-quality crops that have increased both canola prices and quantities sold to help boost Canada's farm cash receipts for canola’. The government draws a direct line between canola's historic ‘improvements’ and higher yield: ‘ … Since it was first developed, subsequent improvements have produced canola varieties more resistant to disease and weeds, with improved crop yield, quality and shorter maturity time’ (Statistics Canada 2009, emphasis mine). The application of hybrid seed technologies, just like the general post-war application of technologies to agriculture, was enormously successful by productivist measures: from the 1800s until after World War II, the average farm in North America produced enough food to feed the farm and three other people (Boyens 2001). With the application of modern technologies after World War II that figure moved to 11 people and by the late twentieth century it was over 50 (Boyens 2001).

Increased farm productivity, following basic economic theorization on demand and supply, leads to suppressed commodity prices (National Farmers Union 2003). This result meant that as farms started producing more they were getting less payback per unit of output for their input (say, buying hybrid seeds); contributing to this economic squeeze was heightened competition among Canadian farmers and farmers all around the world in the integrated global marketplace (National Farmers Union 2003).⁶ So as ‘efficiencies’ like high-yielding canola seeds succeeded in boosting production, they also rendered many smaller farmers economically ‘redundant’, which is the distinction chosen by national agricultural experts (Boyens 2001). Between 1936 and 1996, Canadian farms got progressively fewer and the average farm size grew from 400 acres in 1936 to four times that size by 1996 (Statistics Canada 2011). Census data show the late twentieth-century rise in ‘commercial farming’, that is, the increase in large-scale farms with revenues greater than 250,000 CDN dollars per year. Smaller family farmers, unable to ‘compete’ by taking on the economic risks associated with increasing productivity (like buying hybrid seed innovations), were incorporated into larger farms.

The incorporation of smaller into larger farms was seen by agricultural policy experts as ‘rationalization’, rather than something to be mitigated (Cochran 1958). The weeding out of whole farm units as ‘irrational’ forces was assumed to be a normal part of the process of becoming competitive as a nation (Kneen 1995). From the 1969 Report of the Task Force:

There will be a substantial reduction in the number of farms. Some will be family farms but all will be rationally managed, profit-oriented businesses. Farm mergers and consolidation will result in much larger units, not primarily for increased production efficiency, but to structure units that are large enough to afford better management.

Those farms not operating ‘efficiently’, not large enough to be ‘best managed', and reap the benefits of economies of scale did nothing to change the statistical outlook on the overall economic productivity of the national agri-food sector and therefore Canada's international competitiveness, which in this system was (and still is) a clear policy goal. According to the Canadian National Farmers' Union, since the 1970s the government's needs have been closer aligned with the demands of the global economy than with those of the individual farmer (National Farmers Union 2003). According to market measures, the agri-food sector has done very well in the last half century. By the late 1980s the agri-food industry (farmers, suppliers, transporters, grocers, and restaurant workers) accounted for roughly 8% of the gross domestic product and one third of national employment (Boyens 2001).

The goals of productivism, however, appear to run counter to the sustainability needs of many individual farmers and farm families, and this is a central theme in the rural sociological literature on agriculture and food (see Friedmann and McMichael 1989; Friedmann 1993; Juillet, Roy, and Scala 1997). A few intellectual critics (Hightower 1973; Berry 1977) and many farm families were vocal early on, suggesting that productivity as an economic measure indicates nothing of the possible longer term effects on rural societies or the natural environment, but these voices themselves were and still are considered irrational, their criticisms ‘overplayed’ (see Ottawa 2001).

Outside of the policy arena, in popular discourse, we can catch glimpses of these cultural shifts. National Geographic published a series in 1972 titled The Revolution in American Agriculture, but the series could easily have been written about Canada. An image from the magazine pictures a ‘Farmer-executive’ as he points purposefully across his ‘long desk’ (an object of totemic significance in his new economic figuration). The hyphen here is telling, drawing a direct line between farmers and business practice with nothing in between – not the land, not his family, and not other farmers who form his community. By the 1970s, as this series shows, ‘successful’ North American farmers were removed from their land by computers (‘the progressive farmer's almanac’), airplanes, big desks, and transient farm workers (‘75 hands’). Polanyi (2001) writes that farmers went from being inseparably interwoven with the traditional community and their land to being ‘ … inseparably connected to market and capital technology and innovation, corporations and banks’ (243). While some farmers had successfully transitioned into this new role, others were decreasingly able to make a living by farming. Even the successful farmer-executive featured in this magazine smiles uneasily, perhaps yet uncomfortable in his new role despite having managed to grow his assets and land base. The disappearance of many individual farms, cumulatively over the twentieth century (and it continues), led to the disappearance of entire rural communities and radically different micro-social dynamics not only between farmers and the land but also among farmers. As an example, many farmers I have interviewed in my case studies (see Bronson 2009, 2014) now prioritize technological investments over having children, and they keep the farm economically buoyant with the off-farm income of women.

4. The growth of corporate power and the privatization of seed science

Innovation, co-produced with the domination of productivist logic, was at the core of the privatization of seed research over the late twentieth century. Although hybrid seed technologies were originally engineered with the narrow goals of ‘improving’ crop yields, in their design they carried with them the opportunity for the consolidation of corporate, largely chemical corporate, power within agriculture and, specifically, within seed research. Hybrid seeds are produced such that they lack in genetic diversity and they are intended to be grown as a monoculture (one variety), making fields in which they are grown vulnerable and dependent on chemical inputs: fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. By planting poly-cultures, farmers have historically maintained genetic diversity, making sure that whatever the year might bring in the form of weather or pests, some of the seeds sown would grow and provide crop. So hybrid seeds increased yields only under conditions requiring mechanical and technological infrastructures such as irrigation systems and, significantly, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (Glaeser 1987; McMichael 2001). For example, western Canadian plant breeders had the good intention of ‘diversifying’ Prairie agriculture in their development of canola seed innovation (Kneen 1992), yet canola came to dominate the Prairies as a monoculture crop that is consequently extremely technology intensive.

Because of their dependence on chemicals, the wide-scale implementation of hybrid seed technologies supported the companies who supply agricultural inputs and the entire technoscientific infrastructure linked to productivist farming strategies. The appetite for seeds paired with chemicals undoubtedly contributed to the doubling of Canadian expenditures on agricultural pesticides between 1980 and 1990 (National Research Council 1993). The products of innovation efforts happening within public institutions such as universities and government laboratories were thus enormously beneficial to the economic goals of the private industry.

The development of high-yielding hybrid seeds therefore involved the simultaneous growth of the power of private actors within seed innovation: as chemical corporations gained a position of economic security, they gained real power over the development of and access to seed technologies (Kuyek 2000). Pistorius and van Wijk (1999) argue that from the 1930s until the late 1970s there emerged a consolidated ‘agro-industry research coalition’ such that ‘by the 1990s the agro-industry was the predominant actor in defining the national agricultural production strategies and the agricultural research agenda’ (73). Even though other techniques and technologies could have been pursued, even with the goal of boosting crop yield, ‘research in North America has focused almost exclusively on the development of technologies and practices that reinforce the corporate infrastructure surrounding the productivist [industrial] model’ (Norberg-Hodge, Goering, and Page 1993, 63). Seed innovation decisions thus harbored normative criteria insofar as the choices made suppressed alternative research directions; research choices were, in other words, political in the Winnerian sense, meaning that they represented particular arrangements of power in wider society.

Partly as a consequence of the fact that early seed innovation networks did not formalize the engagement between societal actors and technicians, as recommended by advocates of responsible innovation (Guston 2004), hybrid seeds were designed to be responsible to corporate interests at the expense of environmental and community sustainability. For decades, scholars have been pointing to the negative implications of the corporatization of North American agriculture for farmers and the natural environment (Friedmann 1993; Goodman and Watts 1997; Pistorius et al. 1999; Knutilla 2003). At the same time, government advice and agri-chemical corporations have historically been (and continue to be) aggressive in promoting technological innovations as solutions that will ‘make the farm pay’ (see Monsanto's website for examples of this). Here we see the stubborn fixity of the long-standing pairing between a good life and the effective application of science, technology, and industry.

By 2000, in official government publications, the farmer was consistently described as ‘entrepreneur’ who managed the business successfully using all the tools available in the open market (Muller 2008, 396). Many farmers, in a vulnerable position in the increasingly globalized food chain, for the most part accepted this dominant logic of increasing their use of technological innovations in the hopes of increasing productivity and economic security. Significantly, this techno-progressivist discourse is neither limited to governmental expert reports nor to advertising but it also appears among farmer organizations like the Western Wheat Growers Association, which since the 1970s has suggested that farmers will only be able to achieve the efficiencies demanded by the food system by increasing their land base and the size of their machinery (National Farmers Union 2003). In the 1990s, western Canadian farmers allowed marketing cooperatives, like the prided Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, to privatize and to form alliances with ballooning agricultural corporations like Cargill. More than one farmer has told me in interviews (see Bronson 2009, 2014) that ‘The Pool’ became detached from its membership after privatization, allowing the pursuit of productivist strategies, justified by talk of increasing ‘competitiveness’ and ‘efficiency’. Through the late twentieth century, agriculture moved along productivist lines toward consolidation, crop uniformity, and the full embrace of technologies meant to increase farm-level ‘efficiency’ (Norberg-Hodge, Goering, and Page 1993; Pistorius et al. 1999; National Farmers Union 2003).

In contrast to the early (public) plant breeding programs where different kinds of scientific knowledge and the products of that knowledge were freely exchanged, by the end of the twentieth century both public seed researchers and farmers were distanced from the seed research process, which was increasingly focusing on GE innovations. By 1995, as Muller (2008) puts it, ‘Public sector seed development collapsed: the personnel of state-run experimental farms were laid off while enormous amounts of spending were devoted instead to the private sector for the development of new genetically modified (GM) varieties’ (395). With the rise of the new genetics in the late 1970s, processes for producing plants with specific traits were becoming more exacting and the work was more and more confined to the laboratory and its technicians. Farmer knowledge was in this context seen as almost completely irrelevant. According to Kneen (1992), the voice for farmers in canola research had by the twenty-first century become limited to commodity organizations (like the Canola Council of Canada) that ‘ … further served the interests of capital far more effectively than general farm organizations, by creating a competitive environment between commodities that  … created an ideal climate for the sale of agro-toxins, fertilizers and farm machinery’ (Kneen 1992, 21).

Canadian twentieth century shifts in the location of decision-making about plant breeding from the farm to the public laboratory and then to the corporate boardroom are bound up with the larger corporatization of agriculture. The bundle of innovations necessitated for productivist farming were by the 1980s supplied by a handful of corporations (Kuyek 2000). Those industries networked around hybrid seeds became increasingly consolidated and powerful which process was exacerbated by the 1988 signing of the Canada–US Trade Agreement. International trade for food commodities placed North American farmers into more intense economic competition with and increased individual farmers’ risk.

As older political associations among farmers were starting to weaken in the 1980s, some farmers turned toward networks of environmentalists and consumers (Mooney 2000) and explored what they considered to be socially and environmentally responsible innovations like organic seed. While ideologically informed, practical reasoning also motivated many early organic farmers: farming with reduced or no chemical inputs instantly eliminates dependency on these expensive technologies. Minimum processing and decentralized forms of marketing run counter to the ideology at the root of the productivist system (Goodman and Watts 1994; Pugliese 2001) but they also bypass retailers and processers, and so divide any profits between farmers and consumers. Because organic practice is more time-consuming and labor intensive, and because time slots for different agricultural tasks are narrower, a single organic farmer cannot farm the acreage that a conventional farmer can; therefore alternative farming operations have tended in the opposite direction from the majority of Canadian farms. Farmers at the forefront of alternative agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s found themselves working on a smaller land base and also necessarily having to pay closer attention to the soil, experimenting with complimentary cropping in the same field, and revivifying traditional farming skills (Muller 2008, 403). Organic farming and the innovations it uses are therefore, arguably, inherently responsible to local conditions – human or otherwise. Interestingly, qualitative research shows that shifts in farming practice often work to lay bare for farmers the hegemony of productivism and the link between producing food and producing a certain kind of environment, including rural community (see Heaton and Brown 1982; Reif 1987; Fiddes 1991; Barnes and Blevins 1992). As farmers insulate themselves from market dependency on the input side, they also free themselves from the discursive and economic pressures that push them toward economic calculations at the cost of community and family-oriented goals and values (Mooney 1988, 65). It becomes clear over time, for instance, that small farm size bolsters the longevity of traditional rural community because when more farms survive there is continued support for schools and churches and community centers. In becoming independent of chemicals, farmers become untethered from the messaging of chemical corporations, and unsurprisingly many organic farmers express concerns about agri-chemical corporate control over the food system (see Bronson 2009, 2014).

5. From hybrid seeds to GE seed systems

Even though by the turn of the century many Canadian farmers viewed farming as ‘a fight against nature, for which all the achievements of human inventiveness and science should be mobilized’ (Muller 2008, 396) many others had scaled back on chemical use and by the turn of the century major chemical corporations were reporting economic decline. DuPont's sales in 1999, for example, fell by roughly 9% from the previous year (see Kuyek 2000). Agricultural corporate consolidation had allowed for setting high costs for chemicals and many farmers, struggling to pay, turned to generic pesticides or non-chemical strategies (Kuyek 2000). Novartis among other chemical corporations began to concentrate only on existing chemicals known to make money, rather than developing new chemical innovations; in 1998, Novartis publicly stated a plan to cut its product range and reduce the number of new pesticides from three per year to only one (Kuyek 2000).

As chemical corporations divested from chemical research and development, they were refiguring themselves into ‘Life Science’ corporations whose lifeblood is genetic engineering. By 1990, genetic manipulation was advanced enough to allow for the creation of commercially viable GE seed systems. Life Science companies also pursued vertical integration through the acquisition of seed companies (Kuyek 2000). The takeover of the seed industry by Life Science corporations meant that all biotechnological innovation had to (and still has to) pass through these same corporations (seeds are the vehicle for GE innovation). The seed industry's consolidation is arguably the most visible manifestation of corporate consolidation in the agri-food system requiring phenomenal monetary transactions: between 1997 and 1999, transactions by Life Sciences companies in the global seed industry exceeded 18 billion (US) dollars.

Hybrid seeds first translated seeds from public goods into commodity objects and articulated seeds to other agricultural commodities, notably chemical inputs. But now, Life Science corporations, in control of the seed market, inextricably linked seeds to pesticides. Life Sciences corporations market agricultural systems, seed and chemical pairings, ostensibly designed for more efficient and productive crop growth. Farmers can therefore spray a particular herbicide on a growing crop, killing weeds but leaving the engineered plants intact. Monsanto's GE soybeans alone pushed sales of its herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) to extreme levels of profitability in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Monsanto 2001). Other companies followed Monsanto's lead, either through production of their own herbicide-tolerant crops or through licensing arrangements with Monsanto. The focus on engineering seeds to pair them with proprietary chemical use was sound economic logic: according to one estimate, the development of innovations in pesticides costs up to 100 times more in production than the money necessary for the full commercialization of a novel plant variety (Kuyek 2000). By 1999, only two decades after the pesticide corporations had entered the biotechnology sector, 78% of all GE crops planted in the world were engineered for proprietary herbicide tolerance.

Life Sciences corporations secured their dominance not just through the design of the GE seed innovations themselves but also with the legal regime surrounding these innovations. Strictly, Life Sciences corporations have never been granted intellectual property rights over seeds, but they are able to secure rights in the form of patents that cover the unique gene sequences and laboratory process used to create their GE seed. Farmers are only permitted to use seed systems if a license, or use agreement, is first signed which prohibits the farmer by law from saving any GE seeds for use the next year. Planting GE seed without first signing this contract is a patent infringement and is illegal. And the risks associated with trying to clean a field of GE material – either in the event of contamination or in wanting to revert to non-GE strategies – have become apparent (see the Center for Food Safety's (2005) documentation of risk events on their website). Corporations have aggressively enforced their intellectual property regime and justified this as a means of protecting the large financial input into the development of novel plant traits. The Life Sciences corporations have filed thousands of lawsuits against North American farmers on whose property they have found GE material. For the most part farmers settle quietly out of court (again see the Center for Food Safety's catalog of contamination events), with some farmers battling corporations in court (see Bronson 2009, 2014).

In their advertisements, the former agri-chemical corporations like Monsanto and Dow Crop Sciences have consistently offered their products as technologies that will allow a farmer to ‘clean’ his/her field of weeds (Levidow and Tait 1991). The visual force of this promise is extremely powerful because it lines up with the productivist image of a successful farm – huge acreages of single-crop fields – itself drawing on longer standing cultural norms of technological control over nature (Merchant 1980). Within a dominant productivist cultural climate, a neatly maintained lawn around the farmhouse as well as farm fields that are visibly free of weeds are the markers of ‘success’ and thereby community status.⁷ Even though GE crops are marketed as reducing farmer reliance on pesticides, the empirical data are more conflicted (see Sydorovych and Marra 2007; Muller 2008; Bembrook 2012). Farmers who try a biotechnological strategy have found themselves locked into it because of GE's legal environment combined with its persistence on the land (i.e. the difficulty in completely ridding one's field of genetic material). This may partly explain the vast acreage of GE crops in North America (Statistics Canada 2011), despite an unclear picture on the advantages, even according to productivist measures like yield (see Gurian-Sherman 2009).

Life Sciences corporations not only bought seed companies but also smaller Life Science research firms and genes themselves. By the end of the 1990s, 10 corporations held ownership as patent-holders over 38.3% of all agricultural biotechnology patents (Kesan 2007, 138). By 1999, Monsanto alone had accumulated approximately 650 plant-related patents that would become necessary for future seed research and, by 2004, Monsanto had an almost 30% share of all research and development in the biotechnology industry. Corporate concentration in twenty-first-century seed innovation was enabled by research devoted to mapping genomes and charting identifying gene functions; once a function is identified as potentially useful it is patented. The Life Sciences industry has been uniquely situated to profit from the ability to patent genes because ownership and control of biotechnology patents is largely determined by access to the necessary and prohibitively expensive technologies such as gene sequencing machines. In Science in the Private Interest (2003), Sheldon Krimsky offers case studies showing that, in the process of forming connections with industry in order to fund big science projects, universities have sacrificed their larger social responsibilities because funders demand the rights to negotiate licenses from subsequent discoveries and, significantly, to conceal technological and scientific risk assessment from the products of this research (also see, e.g. Thompson, Baird, and Downie 2001). This situation of irresponsible innovation is exaggerated with GE, where corporate tentacles stretch far and wide: The World Bank estimates that the Life Sciences industry now controls over 80% of research and development in all of agriculture (Krimsky 2003).

6. Responsible innovations require upstream mutual engagement

The politics of seed innovation – both historic and present – has sustainability impacts on both farm communities and the natural environment. Taking an ancient historical view of seed innovation (from the beginnings of plant domestication) we see that seeds were altered by ‘farmers’ according to a community needs, and this experimentation was carried out in operational fields, not experimental field trials or laboratories. But as innovation moved away from farm fields and eventually into the laboratories of genetic engineers, both farmer knowledge and expertise, and the desires of smaller farmers, their families, and the communities within which they were contextualized, lost relevance. Today, science working toward novel GE seed varieties includes the work of all sorts of off-the-farm actors from pipettes in laboratories to corporate investors, and it was in the early twentieth century that this expanded seed science network began to coalesce (Kneen 1992). Now firmly situated within a neo-liberalized global political system, GE research is almost entirely focused on export crops used primarily for animal feed and industrial food processing, rather than local food security, including the livelihoods of smaller farmers. The statistics are incontrovertible: four crops – soybeans, maize, canola, and cotton – alone accounted for over 99% of global acreage planted with transgenic crops in 1999, and they are all grown to be refabricated into fuel, animal feeds, or processed human food (Winson 1993). As Shiva (2001) puts it, through their commodification, plants, and animals have become ‘instruments for commodity production and profit maximization’ (29). Given the historical politics of seed innovations, it is unsurprising that agricultural research efforts continue to be tailored to the interests of former pesticide corporations and to maximizing their advantage in the global food system.

It is easy to see why in the majority of popular and academic analyses agricultural transformations are made sense of as a consequence of corporate control over seeds. Mooney says, ‘Whoever controls the seed controls the food supply' (1979, 4). Hybrid seeds and GE seed systems appear exemplary of Winner's (1986) political technologies, in that they were designed in ways that engendered the reproduction of a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to their ostensive primary uses. These innovations were designed to reorder power and authority in agricultural science and the rural environment more broadly. The twentieth-century history of seed science reveals that the technological deck was stacked in advance to favor particular economic and political interests – namely, the growth of a ‘competitive’ neo-liberalized national economy and enormous power concentrated among a handful of agricultural (mostly chemical) corporations.

But social and cultural processes also shape technologies, not merely the other way around. The story presented in this paper retraces the road to GE seed success as a material–cultural enterprise, showing that this success was paved not just with the co-production of science and corporate interests; the social shaping of GE seed systems also involved cultural changes in the logic and language of seeds, which came to be described as ‘technologies’ to be used in ‘solving the problem of crop production’ (Kneen 1995). In the case of the GE seed system they were (and still are) represented as ‘value added’ tools used to ‘clean fields’ of unruly weeds in the ‘business of farming’. The individual habits of farmers, their perception of ‘the land’, their concepts of self, their ideas of space and time, their social relationships, and political affiliations are all wrapped up in the course of agricultural technological development. Neo-liberalism is not just a political economic set of strategies but also a source of utopian thinking about society (Harvey 2007) where the market form and unfettered competition function as a means for spelling out the social relations and the behavior of individuals – the desire to out-do one's neighbor, for example, by occupying a bigger and bigger acreage.

In looking backward through the opening provided by this paper, to a time before ‘productivity’ was the agri-cultural norm in Canada, we can see how the adoption of technologies and the technological innovations themselves were constructed within a system of changing beliefs. That GE seed systems now dominate the agricultural landscape of North America has as much to do with our beliefs about science, technology, and progress as to the advances in the molecular genetic technique. The 1939 World's Fair proclaimed that science ‘finds’ and man merely ‘adapts’ which technologically deterministic phraseology suggests that the world is to be transformed inevitably by disembodied processes called science and technology with no one apparently doing the transforming. But experience tells a different story: of instances where agricultural decisions were taken by certain people and not others, where directions were decided upon in particular political economic contexts and, importantly, cultural climates. Although he does not focus on language, Kneen's social history of canola (1992) shows that the translation of seeds to ‘certified’ seeds and then to hybrid seed ‘commodities’ and then to GE ‘seed systems’ was supported discursively: each of these innovative turns was positioned in the legitimizing discourses of political advice as one that ‘improved’ crop varieties by ‘boosting’ ‘productive’ ‘output’ and contributing to ‘clean fields’ and uniform fields.

If technological devices contain possibilities for different ways of ordering society (Winner 1986), then the time to heed this truism is during the innovation process, before the particular tool is introduced. Social ordering gets fixed over time and into complex technological systems, legal infrastructure, and, significantly, in habits of thought and speech and vernacular existence. The story of Canadian seed innovation perhaps reminds us that the ‘up-stream’ (Wynne 1982) and formal involvement of wide variety of voices and values may have allowed for the shaping of agricultural innovations that would be attuned with the values of a wider agricultural community. In this way, this paper not only speaks of history but also of ongoing processes of knowledge production within agriculture, where scientific and social knowledge and technological innovation continue to play together in complicated patterns that bear on power relationships in society. The rationale by which seeds were reduced to commodities and farmers to businesspeople with no wider democratic influence over the process of agricultural development parallels the rationale which structures contemporary agricultural science. Farmers are removed from contemporary agricultural decisions – from research to policies – with dire consequences (see Bronson 2014).

Notes on contributor

Kelly Bronson is currently the Acting Director of Science and Technology Studies at St. Thomas University. Her past research has been in ethnographic studies of technological engagement and use. She is currently developing a public engagement ‘lab’ whose first empirical project engages citizens, engineers and planners on the issue of alternative energy technologies.

Notes

1. GE seed systems are seeds that have been GE in a laboratory to function with a proprietary herbicide. For instance, The Monsanto Corporation's Roundup Ready canola is engineered to withstand the spraying of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, which allows the farmer the advantage of unselective spraying.

2. Productivism is a belief that measurable economic productivity and growth ought to be the motivating purpose behind human organization; in its application to the organization of agriculture, productivism is characterized by a system which is intensive, expansionist and based on the expansion of world trade in food. This means large farms growing all of the same crop (or nearly) and the use of high technological inputs like chemical pesticides and GE seeds systems in order to increase output for export. Manufacturers of GE seed systems claim that they allow reduction in pesticide use but the science is not straightforward (see Sydorovych and Marra 2007; Muller 2008; Bembrook 2012).

3. Of course techno-progressivist and solutionist narratives almost always accompany new innovations (see Rheingold 1993).

4. I recognize that shifts in control over biological resources is a long-standing problem beginning with the colonial project though my focus here is on public versus private science within the western model of plant science and agriculture.

5. This remains the dual mandate of Agriculture and Agri-food Canada to this day. From their website:

AAFC Provides information, research and technology, and policies and programs to achieve an environmentally sustainable agriculture, agri-food and agri-based products sector, a competitive agriculture, agri-food and agri-based products sector that proactively manages risk, and an innovative agriculture, agri-food and agri-based products sector. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) helps ensure the agriculture, agri-food and agri-based products industries can compete in domestic and international markets, deriving economic returns to the sector and the Canadian economy as a whole.

6. The worldwide competition among farmers has intensified to today. Despite a 2011 UN report suggesting that global production must increase in response to food insecurity some countries show dramatic increases in production and remarkable surplus (EU, for example, produces 42% more wheat than in 1980). As Daryl Kraft, head of the economics department at the University of Manitoba, says, ‘The pie is not growing. And there are more countries scrambling for a piece of it' (quoted in Boyens 2001, 12).

7. I know this from my ethnographic interviews with Prairie grain farmers using organic strategies (Bronson 2009, 2014). Many of these farmers told me that one of the most difficult things to endure in the transition from conventional to organic is the social censure that accompanies a heterodox field full of weeds.