January 16, 2023 | Reflections
It’s early September in the Yakima Valley at 3:30 AM and it’s in the 40s (Fahrenheit) outside. In the arid climate of central Washington this time of year, temperatures drop significantly while still peaking often upwards of 100 degrees, though today the high will be in the low 90s. I’m staying in a Super 8 Motel south of town right by the Toppenish ridgeline, and the only thing open is a roadside Denny’s Restaurant where I’m eating eggs and hash browns while checking notes for my first field visit of the hop harvest.
I arrive at the farm just as the sun rises and the operation is buzzing. In the fields, 18-foot hop bines are cut from trellis wire and then trucked to the central area of the farm where they are picked, kilned, and baled in a labor intensive, highly mechanized process that must be coordinated in a tight timeframe. Many operations pick 24 hours a day and employ hundreds of seasonal workers in addition to their year-round staff to pick the entire harvest during a little over a month. On-farm automation and mechanization is a central component to this process. In a niche industry like hops, the practices of individual farms are far less uniform than those industries with standardization resulting from powerful input or implement companies whose product designs obligate specific use cases.
Figure 1: Farm A’s Picker from outside with waiting hop trucks. Photo by the author.
This isn’t my first time on Yakima hop farms, I have been doing work with hop growers on the lessons their practices have for understanding farmer driven innovation for the last couple years (See studies published in 2020 and 2022). However, it was my first time on a farm during harvest, and our goals for this project are to specifically relate how change in hop growing, through climate change and technological change, may have impacts on farmworker health and wellbeing. After this period of field observations, me and my colleagues at NFMC will conduct interviews with farm operators/owners and farmworkers to map relations between materials, people, and institutions. The aim is to better understand how farmworkers are impacted by the decisions of these growers specifically as relevant to automation. Our research in this area is ongoing, but after returning from fieldwork, a few reflections are rising to the surface, piquing my curiosity moving forward.
Innovation in agriculture, especially labor intensive agriculture, is always in tension with ecological, planetary, and human limitations as technologies designed in the field, lab, or entrepreneur’s basement interact with dynamic farms in embedded places across time. In the case of hop harvest, the tight relationship between cutting hop bines in the field and separating hop cones from plant ‘waste’ material at the harvester demonstrates this effect quite effectively.
Figure 2: Farm A’s Picker from inside with Daunhauer Frontend. Photo by the author
At each operation a lineup of trucks appeared at the less efficient of the two tasks—making one of the two tasks fast-paced and more arduous. One could say ‘worse.’ In Figure 1, a lineup of hop trucks waits at the picker at one farm, and in Figure 2, you can see workers quickly stringing hop bines onto the front end of a harvesting apparatus at the same farm, a high-contact, repetitive, fast paced, and demanding task. Lastly, in Figure 3, you can see an alternative hop picker on a neighboring farm that replaces the labor of nearly ten workers with a single operator. In the case of the former farm, stringing hops is made a worse task—as field cutting easily moves at a quicker pace than stringing and harvesting, resulting in frequent ‘organic’ breaks. However, in the case of the latter farm, fieldworkers are obliged to work much faster, with fewer breaks, to keep pace with the automated front end of the farm’s harvester. In each case, a new ‘worst task’ is made—automation doesn’t merely remove tasks—or make them efficient, but augments and remakes the quality of work around the innovations pursued.
What is striking to me about this, is the experience that automation and mechanization–a socio-technical force conceptualized as de-corporializing agriculture–has distinctly embodied outcomes for farmworkers. STS researchers in agriculture have productively examined automation, digitization, and mechanization in agriculture, from robotics to precision tech to mechanized harvesting (examples of this research include work by Bronson, Carolan, Gardezi and Arbuckle, Legun and Burch, and Rotz et al). In each case though it is essential to remember that labor is not erased, but augmented, and that the tasks being augmented are not always made better or worse. Put differently, the impacts of how innovation is pursued, conceptualized, adopted, and implemented have profound impacts on the embodied experience of work. While agriculture may be entering a policy and technological transition, where visions of ‘climate-smart’, ‘vertical’, ‘digital’, or ‘precision’ agriculture are commonplace, presenting a vision of a sanitized, roboticized, agricultural future (a robust strand of inquiry including work from Agrimonti et al, Barnes et al, Carolan, Comi, Klerkx et al, and Rotz, et al).
Figure 3: Newer Perrault-Style frontend at Farm B. Photo by the author.
The present, at least, remains inextricably corporeal and embedded in places where food is grown. A key question for me, more so now than at the start of this project, is how industry changes towards automation have impacts on the embodied experiences of those who actually grow food on hop farms and elsewhere. Put differently, some bodies are doing the work and understanding that experience, producing research alongside these populations, will be key for a more adaptive, equitable, and sustainable agricultural future.
Acknowledgements: This research is funded by the Frank and Betty Koller Trusts, and has received additional support from colleagues’ at the National Farm Medicine Center (NFMC), Dr. Florence Becot and Dr. Casper Bendixsen. Research was conducted in the Yakima Valley region, which is the sovereign land of the Yakama Nation.
Matt Comi is the Koller Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Farm Medicine Center in the United States. His work is motivated by a goal to support more sustainable, healthy, and equitable food producing systems on a warming planet. This blog post is based off his dissertation research, which focused on the innovative practices of hop farmers in the US Intermountain West and Midwest as a case example to explore the intersecting social worlds of innovation, agriculture, and ecosystems.
Works Cited
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Published: 01/16/2023