Ravaging Agricultural Rhizomes

In a seemingly abstract but symbolically relevant way, the terminology used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus reminded me a lot of a documentary I recently watched called "The Future of Food", so I’m going to explore that connection a little bit. The film is about the agricultural industry, a topic that I normally find intensely boring, but the implications of it were too vast not to hook me.

Deleuze and Guattari explain Structuralism in horticultural terms, with the simplified concept of a tree and its root. The root refers to and grows into the tree, just as an idea is generated from a pre-existing form, from its root. This notion of a unified underlying structure, an order, is challenged by Post-Structuralism, which instead of seeing an idea or book as a root, sees it as a rhizome. A rhizome is like crabgrass: an expansive and complex root system that cannot be ruptured, because it has no singular point of importance or origin. It is an endless and almost unstoppable web of paths with no beginning, end or center. The rhizome is thus also anti-genealogy (to use another plant metaphor) since it undermines the unified notion of a family tree, or traceable, simplified hereditary genetics.

Agriculture, seed hybridization and crop genetics reminds me of the rhizome concept, in that both are always changing in ways that human beings can hardly keep track of. The Future of Food addresses the rather radical notion of patenting genetically modified plants. The individual or corporation that patents a genetically modified piece of corn then own the rights to its all of its offspring and genetic offshoots. First of all, the idea that someone can own a living organism, a strain of corn of a genetically modified mouse, is in itself a questionable legal notion. Secondly, the idea of claiming ownership to a strain of corn is pretty ridiculous, since crops and plants are constantly evolving from generation to generation, and plant breeds intermingle almost unstoppably; tracking them is nearly impossible.

The film chronicles how a small farmer ended up being sued by a big seed corporation called Monsanto, because his soy crop intermingled with their seeds. The farmer never intended for this to happen, but he wasn’t surprised that it did. Winds often carry seeds many miles to other farms (the farmer happened to be downwind of Monsanto land)—not to mention that several Monsanto trucks carrying seeds passed the farmer’s land regularly, and their tops weren’t always fully covered. However, because the farmer’s crop was mixed with the patented Monsanto strain, he needed to toss out his entire seed and start afresh—battling Monsanto in court cost him his entire retirement. The notion that every ensuing generation of the farmer’s seed would belong to Monsanto is absurd, since each generation would be a completely genetically unique strain. But Monsanto somehow legally owned the genetic material of every generation that intermingled with their genetically modified seed—the idea of even tracing this legal ownership becomes almost too intricate to wrap your head around.

The fact is, plant seeds and breeds constantly intermingle, whether or not farmers want them to. And this isn’t a bad thing, hybridization is how vegetable and fruit variation occurs, why food diversity exists in the first place. The unified notion of agriculture as a collection of single strains that can be patented and owned is almost Structuralist in its notion of ownership and territorialization. But the reality of a healthy crop is a complex rhizome-like intermingling of seeds, which results in ever-dynamic genetic mutation and variation. The notion of reducing a crop to a singular, perfectly juicy and bug-resistant gene is a dream, and potentially a nightmare: if the entire supply of vegetables was provided by one company, which used a single genetically patented seed, what would happen if that strain got a disease? Variation in our fruits and vegetables is what prevents things like the Potato Famine in Ireland; the nation was dependent on that singular strain of potato, and when it was exposed to disease, the crop failure wiped out nearly a third of the Irish population. Variation, diversity, hybridization and genetic rhizomes are necessary to keep our agriculture robust. The Structuralist notion of singularity and ownership is stunting, and even permanently damaging, our agricultural industry.