Selling Seeds, Selling Communities: Re-Seeing Agronomy and Conventional Agricultural Seed Development and Exchange in Rural Kansas and Missouri

Abstract

This qualitative research explores agri-food issues in contemporary, conventional hybrid seed production and exchange, particularly the sales of high-earning corn and soy hybrids ubiquitous on the farms practicing conventional growing techniques in Northeast Kansas and Northwest Missouri. Data for this project is drawn from on-site interviews conducted with sales agronomists working in the NE Kansas and NW Missouri agricultural region. The project asks about the materiality of the hybrid seeds and how sales agronomists see, interact with, and describe seeds, chemicals, and other services to farmer clients. The research reveals a hybrid seed package that bears multiple meanings across different networks of individuals alongside agronomists, a population of non-farming rural community members who feel the losses in population and community resiliency associated with large-farm agriculture but who also feel committed and responsible to the individual wellbeing of their farmer clients. The research also reveals a growing prevalence of precision agriculture services offered by sales agronomists. Drawing from the work of Bennet’s vital materialism (2010) and contemporary revisions of the Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage (DeLanda 2016), this research suggests that automated precision agriculture methods reveal a food regime which distributes agency between many participants, conversely delimiting individual autonomy of the farmer-owner. I suggest that the problems preventing higher numbers of farmers from adopting ecologically sustainable practices may not be individually ideological or economic, but rather problems of agentic capacity, of who/what makes a difference in contemporary agricultural assemblages.