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Paper short abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research (2021–2026) in East Austria’s high-tech greenhouse sector, I critically examine how technologies of plant care can deepen and naturalize social inequities for racialized workers who care for those plants.

Paper long abstract

This contribution explores how AgTech systems designed to protect and optimize plant life can create harmful conditions for the people who care for those plants. Based on long-term ethnographic research (2021–2026) in East Austria’s high-tech greenhouse sector, I examine how climate-control technologies—such as ventilation computers and thermal screens—are calibrated to accelerate plant growth, manage heat stress, and meet supermarket standards. These innovations are critical for growers facing volatile weather, tight margins, and the pressures of market competition. Yet while greenhouses are engineered to safeguard plant health, they often expose workers—primarily Romanian and Roma migrants—to long hours in sealed, hot, and humid environments. During heatwaves, these conditions intensify, contributing to exhaustion, dehydration, heat stress, and long-term bodily strain. Despite these risks, workers’ heat-related strains frequently go unrecognized in both medical and legal frameworks.

Bringing together anthropological debates on biopolitics - such as "ecobiopolitics" (Saxton 2015) and "agribiopolitics" (Hetherington 2020), and disability and debility (Puar 2018) - this paper asks what forms of life are made to thrive, and at what cost. Rather than assuming cooperation between human and plant wellbeing, I explore how greenhouse technologies can deepen and normalize social inequality—making plant care possible through the slow exhaustion of racialized labor. In doing so, this research seeks to contribute to a political ecology of labor that attends to more-than-human entanglements.