Nature - autonomous learning

162 de-naturalisationSeeds are ‘the irreducible core of crop production’ (Kloppenburg 1988:xi). Farmers need them for virtually all crops and, for this reason, they arean attractive profit possibility for capitalist firms. However, historically, therehas been a natural barrier to a capitalist seed industry developing: namely,the fact that seeds are self-reproducing. In nature, each new harvest yieldsseeds for next year’s crop, meaning that farmers have enjoyed a ready-made– and free – supply of seeds for millennia.As the Marxist sociologists Mannand Dickinson (1978: 467) aptly put it,‘Capitalist development appearsto stop, as it were, at the farm gates’. However, from the early twentiethcentury, this changed. As Kloppenburg shows in fascinating detail, thenatural barrier that seeds presented to the development of an off-farm seedindustry was overcome. Let’s take the case of corn (maize), a crop thathas long been of immense importance within modern agriculture. Unlikeother major crops, corn is naturally open- or cross-pollinated. In contrastto self-pollinated crops (such as wheat), corn plants are the product of aunique mix such that a field of corn is ‘in a constant state of genetic flux’(1988: 95). Clearly, this natural promiscuity poses a major natural barrierfor potential crop breeders: for ‘superior’ corn plants with desirablecharacteristics (e.g. the capacity to withstand disease) are constant admixingwith ‘inferior’ corn plants.So how was corn reproduction controlled? And what were the consequences?Focusing on the USA, Kloppenburg’s answer to the first questionis that the discoveries of geneticist Gregor Mendel fortuitously opened thedoor for the development of hybrid corn: that is, corn bred off-farm withsuperior characteristics. Mendel’s late nineteenth-century experimentsshowed that it was possible to cross-breed strains of a crop in a controlled,systematic way. In the 1890s the US government had created a systemof land-grant universities and agricultural research stations devoted tohelping the nation’s farmers improve the quantity and quality of crop yields.Scientists employed in these universities and stations were soon able toalter the character of most major crops, including corn. As one of thesescientists put it, ‘The . . . breeder’s new conception of [crop] varietiesas plastic groups must replace the old idea of fixed forms of chance originwhich has long been a bar to progress’ (W.A. Orton cited in Kloppenberg1988: 69). Using complex, time-consuming procedures, plant-breederslike Orton were able to produce very high-yielding strains of corn (seeFigure 3.1). Aside from the complexity of producing the seeds for this‘double-cross’ corn, and despite its high-yielding character, it was also