Environmental for Food Justice

This CGI of the robotic weeding of what surely must be GMO corn was developed for a commercial featuring the herbicide Halex GT, a weed-control herbicide produced by Switzerland’s Syngenta AG. Credit: Kunochan . Lettuce Be WILL GROWERS FINALLY SHIFT TO MORE FULLY AUTOMATED AGRICULTURE? Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | January 22, 2014 I first became interested in agricultural robots around 1997. I had just read the amazing RAFI Communique on Bioserfdom: technology, intellectual property, and the erosion of farmers’ rights in the industrialized world . This is not light reading and the discussion of precision farming in that RAFI [i] report, that I believe was prepared by the inimitable Hope Shand, is what got me thinking about broader applications of harvest mechanization and automation.   The rest of the food system was getting automated, I remember thinking: Why not the harvesting of a broader range of what are currently labor-intensive row crops? Those of us who came of age in th...

Moderator’s Note: We are reposting this set of close-up reflections on the 2013 Burlington Berry Workers’ Strike by a direct participant, the scholar activist Tomás Madrigal, a doctoral candidate in Chicana/o Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Tomás is among a new generation of Chicana/o social science scholars refocusing attention on the conditions and struggles of the working class. ‘Labor studies’ in Chicana/o Studies – perhaps because the field was closely associated with the marxist ‘metanarratives’ – became a neglected research area.  Over the course of much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Chicana/o Studies shifted focus and ‘old school’ topics like unions and strikes became passé and were largely eclipsed by the postmodernist obsession with identity and subjectivity. It is refreshing to see a new generation of C/S scholars like Tomás Madrigal, Raul Garcia, Gabe Valle, Jessica Lozano, and many others return to community-based social action research in support of workers’ self-organi...