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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research among plant scientists, this paper explores how precision gene editing is used to create plants for future agricultural environments. We argue that attending to the materiality of precision technologies complicates the promissory narratives that surround them.

Paper long abstract

CRISPR-based genome editing is enabling novel plant breeding strategies that aim to replace stochasticity with precision. With the de novo domestication approach, plant scientists seek to transform wild or semi-wild species into resilient, high-yielding, domesticated crops by precisely targeting a small number of key genes. STS studies on gene editing in agriculture have predominantly focused on the controversies and politics surrounding these technologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among plant scientists in Denmark, we instead explore how de novo domestication, as a precision technology, is practically enacted in laboratory work with quinoa cultivars. We show that plant scientists seek to inscribe future climates, values, and strategies into the biological matter of laboratory plants. In doing so they aim to make agricultural futures predictable and manageable by combining CRISPR-based technologies with big-data genomics. This allows for new governmental strategies that focus increasingly on the environmental properties of life forms rather than on plants in themselves, tightening the weave between genes and environments. At the same time, we show that some quinoa cultivars resist gene editing, limiting the performative power of scientists’ imaginaries of future precision agriculture. Attending to these difficulties helps illuminate what happens when precision technologies, and the futures they promise, encounter opposition not only from political actors, but from the plants themselves.