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Paper short abstract

Through ethnography in the Austrian high-tech greenhouse sector, I examine how AgTech aspires to automate agriculture yet remains dependent on manual plant care. I argue that this contradiction produces “techno-racial fixes” that intertwine migrant labor recruitment with imagined robotic futures.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I present a chapter from my dissertation based on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2026) in Austria’s greenhouse agriculture sector. The chapter examines how the future of manual agricultural labor is being re-organized, as employers confront climate intensification and labor shortages. But despite grand promises, the indeterminacy of plant biology and growth rhythms has thus far prevented AgTech actors from fully automating harvesting and plant-care tasks. Manual labor thus remains indispensable. The chapter therefore asks what meanings and futures are being attached to this physicality, and the resulting racialized and embodied dimenions. In particular, I analyze how greenhouse companies increasingly rely on a short-term solution through a new migration chain in which Nepali workers are recruited as the primary manual workforce. Agricultural actors routinely describe these workers as more “heat-resistant" and “enduring", revealing shifting hierarchies of bodily value. Alongside this racial substitution, a mid- to long-term solution is envisioned around full automation. Growers and AgTech consultants describe harvest robots as inevitable, though they oscillate between certainty and skepticism about when such technologies will actually arrive.

Taken together, I think through how these two concurrent tendencies structure contemporary AgTech: a techno-fix, which imagines automation as the future horizon, and a racial fix, which sustains manual labour in the present. Rather than treating these tendencies as isolated responses, I conceptualize their coupling as "techno-racial fixes" - mechanisms through which AgTech is shaped by the contradiction between the aspiration to move beyond the physicality of agricultural labor, and its ongoing necessity.