Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 163‘naturally sterile’. In other words, the seed from double-cross corn turnedout to produce low-yielding crops if planted, forcing farmers to go backto the universities and research stations who provided the seed for theimproved corn the year before. By accident, then, rather than by design, apotential new market in corn seed was produced in early twentieth-centuryAmerica. As Kloppenburg shows for corn as well as other hybrid crops,the commercial implications of this were quickly recognised. Severalgovernment plant-breeders sought private investment, resigned from theirposts, and set about producing improved seeds for sale to farmers in newlyestablished seed companies (see Figure 3.2). By the 1930s, having establishedbiological control over the reproduction of most major crops inthe USA, these firms recognised the need for legal control of their seed‘inventions’.The 1930 Plant Variety Protection Act was the result of heavylobbying by private seed firms in the USA. It entitled these firms to full legalcontrol of their seeds so that rival producers could not copy these seedswithout financial compensation.In sum, Kloppenburg’s book shows how and why nature (in this case,seeds) was materially produced as part of conscious accumulation strategyamong capitalist firms. More than merely ‘tampering with’ or ‘disturbing’the biophysical functioning of crops, the seed companies whose activitiesKloppenburg investigates actively reconstituted the ‘nature’ of thosecrops.The consequences of the production of seeds make for an interestingcomparison with the current furore in some parts of the world overgenetically modified crops. On the environmental side, Kloppenburgshowed how hybrid varieties led to monocultures becoming dominant inUS agriculture. Monocultures are croplands of a genetically uniform nature.While high-yielding, these croplands require heavy doses of herbicidesand pesticides in order to protect them against weeds and pests. Theenvironmental knock-on of this has been decades of polluted soils andwatercourses (famously identified by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring).Theseknock-on effects have been the ‘unintended consequences’ of intentionalproductions of agrarian nature. Socially, Kloppenburg’s analysis pointed tothe disenfranchising effects of ‘outdoing’ nature in commercial agriculture.For nearly a century, farmers in the USA and beyond have lost their rightto a previously free,‘public domain’ good.They must now pay often-highprices not just for seeds but also the chemical treatments that must beapplied to engineered crops in order to ensure their healthy growth. Fromthe perspective of Marxists like Smith and Kloppenburg, only time will tell