This paper examines how Finnish farmers relate to glyphosate, a widely used but also highly contested herbicide. By "making fields clean", glyphosate allows farmers to domesticate fields, while they also try to domesticate the herbicide itself by turning it into a controllable tool.
Long abstract:
Drawing on research conducted for my master’s thesis, this paper examines how Finnish farmers relate to glyphosate, a herbicide that is widely used in contemporary agriculture but also highly contested. Working with the concept of domestication, I suggest that glyphosate allows farmers to domesticate fields, maximise harvests, and cope in value chains where they have little power. When using glyphosate, farmers also try to domesticate the chemical itself by turning it into a controllable, knowable and ultimately unproblematic tool. Sometimes these efforts fail, as when glyphosate spills and spreads to unwanted places or fails to produce the clean fields that farmers are after. Despite these risks and limitations, farmers continue to rely on glyphosate to achieve successful domestication. Reworking Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, I suggest that glyphosate has become a companion chemical, constitutively tied into who farmers are and what they do. In the course of continued glyphosate-based domestication, the skills, practices, and knowledges of farmers have changed as they have learned to live with glyphosate and use it to perform feats of successful domestication.