Who cares for vegetables? : examining the human relationship to vegetables in Dutch greenhouses

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Who cares for vegetables?

Examining the human relationship

to vegetables in Dutch greenhouses

Masters Thesis

Mary C. Graham

(10331581)

Email: grahamary@gmail.com

Supervisor: Dr. Rob van Ginkel

2nd_{& 3}rd_{readers: Alex Strating and Julie McBrien}

20 December 2012

Masters in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of Non-Western Societies 2012-2013 University of Amsterdam

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, this project would not have been possible without the three greenhouse owners, Geert, Ted, and Wim, opening their doors and minds to my presence in their world. They did this without expectation of return, making a friendly effort to give me their time and provide answers that I needed to complete the research. They made me feel free to come and go as I needed and speak to whomever I wished, so they deserve a huge thanks for being so willing to accommodate my requests.

Secondly, I wish to acknowledge all the employees who were so willing – even eager – to provide me with interviews, taking time to meet with me after work hours. Their friendly and open attitudes also went a long way in making the project enjoyable.

Thirdly, thanks to my supervisor, Rob van Ginkel, for his capacity to reply to questions with amazing speed and for the gift of reassurance and consolation when I felt stuck. Much of my understanding of ethnography and anthropology comes directly from the essential feedback that he gave me throughout the writing process. Gratitude also to all the other professors who gave their best recommendations and ideas to assist with the formation of the project and its theoretical background.

Last and certainly not least, huge thanks to my husband for his unwavering moral and financial support throughout the entire process.

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Introduction

…His first greenhouse was right next to his house. It was the smallest, and there were no workers in it today. It was full of pepper plants and peppers, but felt empty. There was a faintly sterile smell – incongruous with the thousands of green, growing plants. We biked to his second greenhouse. He was grateful for his bike, he said, as we biked through it, sweeping past a blur of green plants row after row. Fifty five thousand plants there, he told me. Each held up by a white string. He showed me his generator, which was as big as my living room, maybe bigger. Said it powers not only his greenhouses but many other things in Nootdorp. Then we went to the third greenhouse. Looks the same: anonymous. He knows his workers by name, smiles and greets them, introducing us – mostly young guys, maybe two to three women. Loud music blares over the sound of machines. He showed me how all the machines work; mind-boggling how automated the sorting and packing processes are. It’s like a factory! ‘Where do these thousands of peppers go?’ I asked him. ‘USA, Germany, doesn’t matter.’ – Doesn’t matter? What does matter, then? (Field notes: my first trip to a greenhouse)

Tension has been growing in recent years in the Global North between the public’s demand for quality food products and the rising costs of producing them. In 2007-8 there was an international food crisis, in which prices skyrocketed and brought worldwide attention to the need for more intensive and widespread food production. This prompted an increase in the World Bank’s investments in agribusiness by two and a half times (IEG 2011: x). With this boost in support and the accompanying attention toward agribusiness, agricultural production flourished worldwide, giving hope for providing enough food for the rapidly growing world population.

The rise in demand for high-quality produce has paralleled a rise in costs of energy, but there has not been an equal rise in market prices for that produce. This has meant a state of crisis for many vegetable production businesses in particular: they are

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increasingly unable to meet production costs because they are not receiving enough income for their products.

On the one hand we have food producers striving to deliver top quality products, but suffering (at least in the Global North) because of low income; on the other hand we have a consumer base in large part dissatisfied due to their sense of detachment from the food products, and therefore seeking out alternatives to the food readily available in their grocery stores. The rise in popularity of local food systems such as farmer’s

markets, food cooperatives, community gardens, etc., is fundamentally a reaction to the detachment from food that consumers feel results from agribusiness (Feagan 2007); namely, from the disempowerment they feel when it comes to food choices (Lind & Barham 2004), the disappointment in food quality due to long-distance shipping (Selfa & Qazi 2005), and a sense of loss of social contact around the sourcing of food products – for example, a connection between consumer and producer (Winter 2003, Hinrichs 2000). This widespread reaction of feeling ‘increasingly detached and alienated’ where food is concerned (Feagan 2007:38) prompted me to investigate more deeply the connections we form to something as essential to our existence as food.

Initially I planned to research the connection to food cultivated in a local food initiative in central Netherlands, in a town that had been elected ‘the 2012 capital of taste’ for its focus on local food production, preparation, and consumption.1_{In preparing for that}

project, I researched literature in the field of anthropology of food. Appadurai and Mintz, both renowned anthropologists interested in food, published books in the mid-eighties that popularized the idea that food commodities can take on a symbolic power strong enough to have vast socio-cultural consequences (Appadurai 1986, Mintz 1985). Mintz proposed understanding food products by examining the webs of power and meaning that they in which they are embedded – in other words, we cannot separate a product from the social, historical, and political meanings that it is wrapped in (Lind & Barham 2004: 49). Appadurai suggested that commodities have a social life and can move in and out of the commodity state or the symbolic state; a food product’s exchangeability is determined differently depending on its location and situation (ibid.: 49). Various

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Each year, one town in the Netherlands is named Capital of Taste (Hoofdstad van de Smaak). Amersfoort won the prize at the end of 2011 due to a local group of foodies that called their initiative, Echt Eten in de Eemstad: http://www.eemstadeten.nl/ (April 25 2012)

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anthropologists have since then taken up their ideas, tracing the social lives of particular food items and their movements from commodity to symbol (Leitch 2000, Lind &

Barham 2004, Murcott 1999). Indeed, most studies in anthropology of food involve the creation of this symbolic value. They show that our relationship to food is not simply based on a sensorial experience, but strongly shaped by the symbolic value it holds for us.

What had been happening in Amersfoort was that a group of food enthusiasts were ascribing strong symbolic value to foods produced in their vicinity and drumming up awareness of local food among the general public, thereby give new symbolic value to the place where they lived. However, this particular field proved difficult to access for two main reasons: first, when I went to Amersfoort to meet up with the members of the initiative group, I learned that the initiative had only had funding for one year, and thus would not be continuing to the same extent this year. That meant that there would only be sporadic events as opposed to a full-fledged alternative food movement. Second, I also learned that I would receive no extra funding whatsoever for my fieldwork, and having my budget thus limited, I had to give up the Amersfoort plan in favor of a fieldwork site closer to home. It turned out that I had much easier access to the active field of high input/output vegetable production in South Holland, anyway. Therefore, I undertook an ethnographic exploration of the attitudes toward food production among the growers of greenhouse vegetables there to find out about their levels of attachment or detachment to their products.

My focus swung from the alternative food cooperative to the other end of the food production spectrum. My research questions had been meant for the exploration of the disgruntled consumer perception of detachment when it comes to agribusiness

products; what are the complaints about supermarket products that lead certain consumers to source their food elsewhere? What (symbolic) meanings do they want their food to have, and why? However, I decided to bring those questions into the opposite end of the spectrum, modifying them slightly to apply to the farm

entrepreneurial environment: How are food items perceived and valued within the high-input-output context of Dutch greenhouses? Is that environment ruled completely by a sense of detachment and anonymity, or is there possibly more attachment to the product and production process than the consumer assumes?

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Both Appadurai and Mintz maintain that any attempt to understand the commodity situation must address the social relations and politics related to meaning and power that create the situation in which a food product is treated as a commodity or not (Lind & Barham 2004: 49). I therefore decided to engage in an ethnographic investigation of the human situation in which these vegetables are raised: the vegetable greenhouses that are so numerous in South Holland. More specifically, I examine the relationship between the producer and the plants/vegetables, as well as between his employees and the plants/vegetables, in order to determine if either of those two parties attach any symbolic meaning to the food they are engaged in producing.

My intent in this thesis is not to contest existing theory, but rather to provide an innovative ethnographic glimpse into a field as yet virtually unexplored in the social sciences: environments that grow plants and that are at the same time food production businesses. My research zooms in for a close-up look at the relationship between the grower and the vegetable. It is important to clarify that for my research, I am

intentionally blurring the boundary between plant and food. The project could be

categorized as a ‘botanical ethnography’ in that the focus is neither on the people nor on the plants/food, but on the relationship between the two. Many examples of botanical ethnography focus on human relationships to medicinal plants and are thus often situated in a non-western context where societies are more connected to their natural surroundings on a daily basis. This project, on the other hand, having a completely different context, distinguishes itself from such botanical studies and lands itself in the field of ‘anthropology of food’ because the fact that the cultivation of these plants is for the purpose of large-scale food production is central to the study; the questions are not just about how the growers experience, think, and feel about the plants as plants, but rather, how they experience, think, and feel about those plants as food.

This innovative approach to large scale food production has – to my knowledge – not yet been taken in the field of social sciences. There is a lack of literature involving food

before it gains symbolic identity, namely food products in ‘anonymous’ production

environments like the large scale greenhouses. Most studies within anthropology of food focus on the marginal movements that cater to the dissatisfied population mentioned earlier; The Slow Food movement or farmers’ markets or other types of alternative food initiatives have been popular research case studies. Research involving large-scale

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production has generally tended to focus on the financial aspects or taken an angle involving the work conditions within the business. Part of the reason for this is that what counts as food has generally been seen to be socially constructed, and most, if not all of that social construction happens in the spheres of preparation and consumption, not of production (Murcott 1999a: section 2.8). We assume that on the production end, the product has not yet gained a social context – it’s anonymous, as the perceptions during my very first visit to a greenhouse told me (see beginning of introduction). But that first visit happened obviously before I observed and got to know the extent of the social situation those vegetables grow up in, before I got to explore if any meaning is constructed on the production end.

My research intends to fill part of this gap by addressing and answering the heretofore unasked question: does the way in which greenhouse employees relate to the vegetable give it any sort of social life, or does it remain completely anonymous, in a commodity state? It will also include ethnographic descriptions of the social dimensions of the work situation where the identity of the food is formed, which has also until now been ignored within social science, as far as the entrepreneurial greenhouse environments are

concerned.

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Chapter One: Research Outline

This chapter outlines my research question, methodology, theory, and setting. Because I entered my field with little background knowledge of the field itself due to the quick decision to change research settings as well as the lack of ethnographic material to be found on greenhouse entrepreneurial settings, I took with me an array of theoretical lenses as well as methodologies with which to carry out the ethnographic research. I will outline them in this chapter.

1.1 Research question

I chose the ethnographic approach of using case studies because this particular area of the Netherlands is so well-known for its large-scale greenhouse production, and yet I could find very little social scientific research focusing on food production in these agribusiness environments. Case studies offer descriptions of the actual work and social conditions experienced within the workplace; multiple case studies offer a basis for comparison of this data. My case studies for the research were three different vegetable producers in South Holland where the vegetables being produced are for a large export market. I entered the research field with the question: How are food items perceived and

valued by the vegetable growers in the high-input-output environment of the Dutch greenhouses?

As Birke and Hockenhull point out in their introduction to their book, Crossing

Boundaries (2012), investigations that focus on interspecies relationships need

‘methodologies from several disciplinary perspectives’ (Birke & Hockenhull 2012: 7). Thus, using theoretical lenses from Actor Network Theory, anthropology of the senses, anthropology of care, and the labor process theory, I have examined the contours and nuances of the attachment that producers and their employees form to their vegetables in a production environment that is completely controlled and industrialized.

1.2 The theoretical approach

Due to the breadth of my research question combined with the dearth of other published work involving the work inside Dutch greenhouses, I took an explorative ethnographic approach to the research. For guidance on doing ethnographic fieldwork, I used practical

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advice from Ian Cook’s book, Doing Ethnographies (Cook 1995). My research sub-questions were informed, however, by ideas coming out of the four aforementioned distinct sub-fields within anthropology. A short description of each field and the way it influenced my research follows.

Actor Network Theory

Perhaps the most well-known framework for examining relationships – and thus, for redefining ‘social’ to include more than just humans – is the Actor Network Theory (ANT), accredited to Bruno Latour (2005). It entails seeing society as resulting from (not causing) a series of networks among a wide variety of actants, or actors. In the past decade, various social scientists have taken up this perspective with gusto in their research involving human-animal relationships as well as human-plant relationships.2

Specifically, scholars in the emergent niche of Multispecies Ethnography have been exploring a multitude of ways to include non-human species into their research, inspired by the idea that, as multispecies scholar Anna Tsing so succinctly put it, ‘human nature is an interspecies relationship’ (Tsing, quoted in Haraway 2008: 19). The article ‘The emergence of a multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010) outlines the history of anthropological works over the years that have contributed to this genre. From the beginning of anthropology when it was intimately connected with natural history studies to the renewed surge of interest in animals and insects from the eighties on, there have always been anthropologists interested in how human life intertwines with other species. Yet only now is this genre actually being formally recognized and named.

In this school of study, it has been found that attachment between humans and non-human species arises through communication between both actants (Birke &

Hockenhull 2012: 9); an exchange of attention and shared meaning between the two are also crucial for attachment to form (ibid.: 27-32). However much we might love them, plants do not offer us the opportunity for this type of communication. Partly for this reason, most multispecies studies involve animals or insects with only Tsing’s work on mushrooms as a recent example of human relationship to plants (Tsing 2010). Tsing

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See for example D. Haraway’s 2008 When Species Meet, or Birke & Hockenhull’s 2012 Crossing Boundaries about animals and C. Hayden’s 2003 When Nature Goes Public, or A. Tsing’s 2005 Friction about plants

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passionately denigrates agribusiness as being diametrically opposed to her own agenda of celebrating the world of fungi and the active propagation of environments conducive to growing wild mushrooms (ibid.: 191). For her, wild mushrooms open up our senses and poetic/artistic sensibilities because they are unpredictable, even mysterious (ibid.: 194). Unlike greenhouse vegetables, they cannot be controlled. Tsing’s work offers a basis of comparison from which one could question the greenhouse worker’s

attachments to the vegetables that they cultivate. They assist the maturation process on a massive scale; do they also stand in wonder or awe at the mystery of their growth? Does their intimate contact with the plants awaken their senses or have any other psychological effect on them? I will address these questions in the third chapter, titled The Employees.

Kirksey and Helmreich’s description of multispecies ethnography, which is heavily influenced by Latour’s advocacy of giving nature a voice (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010: 555), would put me on the very periphery of this growing genre, because my research remains anthropocentric, does not enter into a discussion about our biological

entwinement with these vegetables, and will not attempt to break down boundaries between the categories of humans and plants. Kirksey and Helmreich maintain that ethnobotanists have recently been seeing plants as social beings who potentially have agency (ibid.: 554); that is not the case in my study. However, insofar as my research investigates the experienced and felt boundaries between the greenhouse worker and the vegetable s/he is cultivating or handling, I am using an actor-network perspective: I place the network – or connection – between human and plant at the center of this study.

Anthropology of the Senses

Several sub-questions in my research come out of anthropology of the senses. Two anthropologists who have published extensively on the importance and relevance of the senses in ethnographical work are David Howes and Paul Stoller. David Howes’ several books (1991, 1996, 2003, 2004, 2009) provide an overview of the approach to the senses within the field of anthropology from its beginnings up to the present. Stoller, on the other hand, visited and researched the Songhay tribe in Niger several times before realizing that his research methods were limited, and without opening all his senses to experience the Songhay life as fully sensorially as possible, he would be unable to

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represent them adequately (Stoller 1997). What resulted was a stream of works from Stoller that address the relevance of the senses in ethnographic work, where he

describes various ways in which his senses became ethnographic tools that opened up new ways of experiencing – and thus, telling about – the culture in which he was immersing himself: ‘The aesthetic awareness of the senses, then, plays a foundational role in experience, which, in turn, is the heart of ethnographic fieldwork’ (ibid: 152). I observed a variety of people working in an environment where any and all senses were being used at any given time: the sounds of machines and the loud radio were prominent in the auditory field, while the look, taste and feel of the vegetables and plants also

played a role.3_{Sight was paramount in all aspects of the greenhouse jobs – every worker}

reported it as a necessity for discerning anomalies in the plants and vegetables as well as for monitoring quality and numbers and the functioning of machines. I went into the field with the question, how do all of these sense experiences of the work – specifically of the plants – contribute to the worker’s relationship with the vegetable? English anthropologist Christopher Tilley completed an ethnographic study on gardening and gardeners in Sweden ten years ago, and wrote an article with an emphasis on the gardeners’ sensorial experiences. While his article provides a good example of how senses are used while cultivating plants, I noted the differences between his research and mine, as his informants were gardeners – people working outside. I will return to these differences in Chapter 3.

The Labor Process Approach

The labor process approach is an originally Marxist perspective that is still widely used with regards to economic and employment analyses. As Harry Braverman described it in his 1974 analysis of the theory, it is‘a theory which is nothing less than the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production’ (Braverman 1974: 86). In his straightforward and pragmatic treatment of the theory as a description of work in capitalist contexts, Braverman presented a cornerstone for a debate that has continued up till now about the nuances of the theory – a debate that has included much criticism

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The sense of smell was conspicuously absent from their awareness: when asked about it, respondents gave puzzled or blank looks, or straight up negative answers such as, ‘no, they have no smell’ or ‘no, I don’t smell them.’

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of Braverman’s limited treatment of a potentially useful approach to labor (Gordon 1998). While my research is not a neo-Marxist analysis of the work done in greenhouses, I do find this approach a useful tool for examining how the greenhouse agricultural practices are socially constructed, as Hebinck and van der Ploeg also point out in their chapter in the book, Images and Realities of Rural Life (Hebinck & van der Ploeg 1997: 202-225): Growing vegetables is a practice that is embedded in technical, social, agricultural, political, and economic knowledge (ibid.: 207). Using the labor approach, Hebinck and van der Ploeg describe work in the following threefold manner (ibid.: 206-7):

1. Work is purposeful action on the part of actors converting various resources into commodities using cultural repertoires and a system of communication that ensures production

2. Detailed knowledge and skill involving the ‘artifacts’ of landscape, weather, crops, and forms of labor, are intimately connected with this work

3. Work is organized around specific social relationships, as well as relationships between people and artifacts.

This perspective on greenhouse production as action embedded in knowledge, skill, and

relationships allowed me to hone in on multiple human aspects of the large-scale

production of a commodity. Primarily, I look at what factors most shape the greenhouse practices, as this approach provides the foundation for the questions regarding the growers’ attitudes toward the vegetable, their knowledge of its growth cycle, and the dimensions and quality of the producers’ relationships with the workers who actively care for the plants. While my investigation into the attitudes towards the plants and vegetables was the main part of my research, I found the relationship between the producers and their employees – how the producers manage the relationship and how the employees react – to be one of the most formative factors in the work situation. I explore this in various sections throughout the paper.

Anthropology of Care

Because I was investigating to the extent to which the people involved in the plants and vegetables care for their product, anthropology of care informed several key questions in my research. As they posit in the introduction to the book, Care in Practice (Mol et al 2010), the act of caring is central to everyday human life and yet has suffered neglect

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from the academic community due to the tendency to regulate the body and its needs to the private realm, rather than seeing it as having scholastic worth (ibid.: 7). Although it has received more academic attention in recent years in other fields such as nursing, according to this book, anthropology, through its qualitative research of care practices, can contribute reminders of the very human aspects of care; such as the fact that care practices are more about embodied actions than about cognitive processes, or the idea that caring shows that ‘to be human has more to do with being fragile than with

mastering the world’ (ibid.: 15). We conceive of the large-scale production environment as being anonymous, impersonal – an environment that Mol et al might see as inhuman for its lack of care, attachment, and fragility. Taking this as a starting point for some of my research questions, I wondered if the people caring for the plants feel themselves touched to any extent by their own caring for the plants. I return to this point in Chapter 3 in the section Plant Care.

Out of all sources on anthropology of care, I chose to use this source exclusively because of their inclusion of farming as an example of care. As the editors point out, farming has been left out of care studies until now even though their daily activities have much to do with those in other care studies (ibid.: 9). The stories in the book that include farmers revolve around livestock and not plants, however, it is the basic experience of tending and simultaneously depending on another living species that concerns me here. There is much that is different between caring for animals and caring for plants, but enough similarity to draw some parallels.

2.3 The Field

Before delving into descriptions of my case studies, I will introduce the field with some broader geographical and historical background.

Dutch agribusiness history

The original landscape of the Netherlands, a country now inhabited by some 16.7 million people, was a peat bog that had to be carefully irrigated over the centuries in order to create habitable land.4_{As the towns of South Holland grew (first Leiden and Delft, later}

4_{A 2011 estimate from Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek} http://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/menu/themas/bevolking/cijfers/extra/bevolkingsteller.htm (April 14, 2012)

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Den Haag and Rotterdam), so did the demand for food and by the 17th_{century several}

gardens in and around the towns were producing fruit and vegetables for the city

dwellers (Randstad 1993:13). The mild coastal climate made food production successful, but the crops also needed constant protection from the ocean wind. For a long time, farmers used all manner of walls as protection, since glass was still a material that only the rich could afford (Oerlemans 1992:126). Starting around 1850, as glass became more affordable and accessible, the pastureland – especially in the coastal area between Rotterdam and Den Haag – rapidly gave way to the construction of greenhouses where abundant food could be produced for the growing Dutch population (Oei 2010:17). By 1993, 10,000 hectares of the Netherlands are covered with greenhouses, 70% of whose products are grown exclusively for export to other countries (Randstad 1993:13). Two thirds of the greenhouse area is devoted to the cultivation of vegetables.5_{The average}

vegetable production between 2002-2006 was 42% tomatoes, 30% cucumbers, 22% peppers, and 6% others, such as mushrooms, radishes, and eggplants (Breukers et al 2008: 24). Of these three vegetables alone, the Netherlands had the highest export value of vegetables of any country in the world in 2006 (ibid.: 25). The greenhouses have been improved year by year, and in 2005 an energy-producing greenhouse was built under the supervision of the world-renowned greenhouse horticulture research institute in northeastern Netherlands, Wageningen University. The greenhouse – both as an efficient means for cultivating food for urban areas as well as an alternative-energy-producer – continues to be an exciting focus of research in this country.

An estimated 70% of all greenhouses in the Netherlands are located in and around the coastal area between Rotterdam and Den Haag (Westland) (Randstad 1993:14), which makes it the largest concentration of greenhouses in the world (Pessireron 2006:41). I chose to locate my research slightly inland from Westland, in a town called Pijnacker-Nootdorp on a peat bog landscape (veenpolderlandschap) between Delft and

Zoetermeer. More details on this town will follow, in ‘The field’ section of Chapter 1 (1.3).

Farm Family Entrepreneurs

5_{from Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek}

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Greenhouses are family businesses: traditionally, the owners inherited the business from their parents and trained their children to take it over from them (All-Round 2000: 2), but with the changing market demanding extreme growth in the businesses in order to survive, that paradigm is shifting. I will return to this aspect of family businesses in section 3.2. In 2007, three social scientists in Australia published a study of the move Australian tomato farmers are making from being family farms to corporate businesses (Pritchard et al 2007). As their businesses are pressured to grow, the family members take on more entrepreneurial positions, creating a new conceptual category of farming that the researchers dub ‘farm family entrepreneurs’ (ibid.: 76). This is a form of business that sits in between family farm and agribusiness, where family relations remain at the heart of the business, but the business is nonetheless very

‘entrepreneurial, market-sensitive, technologically oriented, knowledge-seeking, and highly capitalized’ (ibid.: 85). The entire greenhouse sector in the Netherlands arguably falls into this category, as the leaders of the greenhouse businesses are all called

entrepreneurs (ondernemers); even those who run small greenhouses need to be fully involved on a daily basis in the financial and legal process of selling their product (ibid.: 82).

This means that these entrepreneurs hire employees to help them with the work in the greenhouse. Vegetable greenhouses need an average of six workers per hectare per year, and as of 2003, only about 40% of greenhouse employees had part-time or full-time contracts (Vermeulen 2004: 6) – the percentage has likely decreased since then. This means that the majority of greenhouse workers are hired temporarily through a

contracting company, according to the harvesting needs of a particular week (thus, more workers during a busy time). According to statistics from 2005, vegetable greenhouses employed 26,000 people, forty percent of whom were temporary employees (Breukers

et al 2008: 34). These employees range from guest workers from other EU countries, to

longer-term immigrants, to high school or college students in need of extra cash. I encountered this wide range of workers in my fieldwork in Pijnacker. I have included both the entrepreneurial farmers who own and run the vegetable-growing businesses as well as their permanent and temporary employees to an equal extent in my research, because of the differing dimensions of their connection to the vegetable and its growing process: the business owner naturally has a longer-standing relationship with it, as well

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as an extensive knowledge base, while it is the employees who have the most direct contact with the plants and vegetables on a daily basis.

Pijnacker-Nootdorp

The municipality combines the two rural villages of Pijnacker and the smaller Nootdorp – hence, the hyphenated name. It lies in South Holland between the cities of Zoetermeer and Delft.6_{It is built upon a polder landscape that historically had a reputation for good}

peat (Stig 2005). The municipality has undergone its own steady growth, serving as a suburban town to Zoetermeer and Delft as well as to the larger Den Haag, just 15 miles to the west. In 2009, the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) named Pijnacker the best place to live in the Netherlands in terms of health levels, housing prices, recreation possibilities, and safety.7

Figure 1, from googlemaps.com

There are 32 greenhouse businesses, or nurseries, registered in Pijnacker, each of which specializes in one variety of plant, including trees, flowers, decorative plants, cucumbers, tomatoes, or bell peppers.8_{One of these Pijnacker greenhouse owners is famous for}

being the first in the Netherlands to choose geothermal heat as a sustainable heating option (Radio Netherlands Worldwide). Now that Pijnacker’s population has reached 50,000, the municipality is in the throes of formulating a vision of the future of the town’s development – a vision that will be down on paper by the end of 2012.9_Among

the decisions being made that concern greenhouse owners are the decisions regarding

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See Figure 1. 7

From www.pijnacker.com (May 1 2012)

8_{information from}_{http://www.kwekerijen.org/pijnacker/}_{(April 15 2012)} 9_{http://www.pijnacker-nootdorp.nl/135950/Toekomstvisie_2025}_{(April 15 2012)}

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where and with what money geothermal warmth may be made available for greenhouse use: Pijnacker is proudly attempting to hold its position as flagship in the movement towards sustainable energy sources.10

Entry into the field

I gained access to the greenhouses initially via a meeting for area greenhouse owners and affiliates on April 27th_{, 2012. At the meeting I was able to get a sense for the varying}

cultivation values and approaches of farmers in the area. For example, at the end of that meeting three take-home points were formulated as wishes expressed by the

greenhouse entrepreneurs as a group: 1) to work together more; 2) to use the Internet more effectively as a tool for advertising and communication; and 3) to increase contact between themselves and customers. Also at this gathering, I was able to meet a few producers who were open to me doing research in their greenhouses. Soon thereafter, I visited one of the greenhouses and was taken on a tour by the owner (see description at the beginning of the Introduction).

The greenhouse itself

What kind of environment are these vegetable greenhouses? As a gardener myself, I entered expecting to find something like an enclosed garden: a piece of nature enclosed in glass. As displayed in that beginning quote from my field notes, I was surprised by the near eradication of (my conception of) the Natural through the human and technological management of the environment. Although faced with thousands of tall, green plants, I found it difficult to recognize elements I associated with nature. This reveals my own deeply ingrained perspective that dichotomizes nature with human culture, the boundary between which social scientists have long been debating (see Inglis & Bone 2006).11_{The greenhouse offers us an interesting opportunity to examine those}

10_{http://www.pijnacker-nootdorp.nl/107748/Duurzame_warmte}_{(May 1 2012)}

11_{This discussion has entailed various definitions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and the way Latour defines it,} nature is a realm of objectivity and certainty, while culture is ruled by subjectivity and mere opinion (ibid.: 12); even what we consider scientific fact has been constructed by various networks of actors and can therefore not be entirely objective. He proposes an eradication of the boundary altogether, which Donna Haraway takes up in her coining of ‘natureculture’ (Haraway 2003). I do not intend to engage in the nature/culture discussion. When I refer to ‘nature’ I imply the forces of growth (in plants) and destruction (via weather or plant pathogens/pests). When I refer to the human side of it, the greenhouse culture, I mean the various methods

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boundaries in that it is an environment highly controlled by humans and our technology, yet filled with living, growing plants that depend on factors we cannot yet control, such as the weather and the sun.

Although I did not intend to make this thesis a discussion of that boundary, I was curious as to how the environment was viewed by my respondents, and consequently always included a question in the interviews as to whether they were working in or with nature. It being an open question, it received a wide variety of comments that revealed a

spectrum of attitudes: those who enjoyed working with plants but came from an urban environment had less trouble seeing it as ‘nature’ than those respondents who came from a rural environment and were familiar with home vegetable gardens (which cannot be compared to these large-scale monocultures). The managers, who had a broader perspective on the whole operation, tended to see themselves as working ‘with’ nature insofar as ‘biology is nature’ and they were always dependent on the weather. Coming from a rural environment myself, and being thoroughly unfamiliar with industrial

environments, I readily admit that I was taken aback by the amount of control and order, neither of which I associate with natural environments. By the end of my fieldwork, I came to see the greenhouse as a fascinating and intense intermingling of nature and human culture where neither of those categories’ boundaries is strictly definable. It seemed to me that human culture is, indeed, succeeding – through hard, diligent work – to create an environment in which natural forces are limited and shaped and yet highly (some would argue unnaturally) productive. It is a dynamic interplay that involves risks (for example opening greenhouse windows allows insects inside that could potentially ruin the crop) and dependency on uncontrollable factors (for example the warmth of the sun in a very cloudy, cool climate); but is controlled enough to ensure the producer’s end goal of a reliable harvest. I found one employee’s coinage of ‘artificial nature’ an apt description of this environment.

Case study companies

I chose to do fieldwork in three separate locations for the various perspectives they would provide on differences in vegetable production as well as in the scale of

human beings employ to control and manage those forces of nature: the knowledge, the social connections, the actions, the technologies.

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production. The descriptions that follow offer an illustration of the atmosphere of each of the three of my case study greenhouses. I chose one of each vegetable that is grown in Pijnacker-Nootdorp: bell peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. As stated earlier, all three can be called ‘farm family entrepreneurs’, as none of them are large enough to qualify as agribusinesses or even corporate farms, terms that are laden with critique for being the cause of the demise of the family farm.12_{The smallest of these firms (the cucumber}

company) is the least corporatized, and is also the least equipped to survive in the upcoming years. The largest of them (the tomato company) is well-equipped to meet the future, indeed, is striding forward as one of the forerunners in greenhouse industry in the region.13_{While a more personal introduction to the producers is given in the}

following chapter, I provide a table of statistics here to give an idea of the comparative size and output of the three businesses:

Com-pany Vegetable Hec-tares Approximate # of plants

Kg per year Ave. # emplo yees Energy use Gente-voort Cucumber 1.5 21,000 2,500,000 5 90% gas Sande-land Pepper 8.2 160,000 2,624,000 20 90% gas Duijve-stijn Tomato 13.5 260,000 9,180,000 40 90% geo-thermal

12_{See for example R.F. Prim’s 1993 ‘Saving the Family Farm’ and numerous other articles that denounce} agribusiness and corporate giants for making smaller farms unable to survive the competition in a fast-growing market. For this reason, I try to refrain from using the term agribusiness in conjunction with my case studies. 13_{One example of this is that it is the only one of my case studies that has a fully developed website as well as a} company promotional film. That can be seen at: http://www.gebroedersduijvestijn.nl/index.php?id=77

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2.4 Methodology

I chose to use the following methods during my time in the greenhouses: observation, interviews, a survey, and photography.

During my observation periods, I climbed on carts and ‘traveled’ through the vegetable rows with the workers, watching them work. This way I could see their efficiency and speed up-close and also bear witness to the pride with which they demonstrated their skill. I also observed from on the ground, to see how the whole scene within the

greenhouse functioned throughout the day. I observed the canteen during breaks to see how workers and managers ate lunch and interacted with one another – also to see what social ties existed. I observed the managers at work – the way they hurried here and there, where they held what kinds of meetings, how much time they spent in the office or on the phone, etc. Lastly, I observed a company party – an outdoor barbecue on the company grounds in which all managers and most employees took part. This method was extremely helpful and useful – it took many days of observation for me to get over the shock of being in an environment that felt so foreign to me, and the more often the workers just saw me wandering around or watching them, the more at ease they ultimately felt in talking to me. It also gave me insight into the difference in work mentalities between producer and employee, as the employees were always willing to talk to me while they worked, whereas the people in charge had too much on their minds and were too busy running here and there to take the time to chat or answer questions.

Interviews with workers and managers and owners ranged from twenty five minutes to two hours and took place in a variety of settings. They included questions about the details of their tasks, how they felt about work and the workplace (including colleagues and bosses), how they viewed the vegetables and plants, and a few details of their past work history and experience with plants or agriculture. I often came away from

interviews feeling that a lot of my questions involving their relationship to greenhouse work did not bear relevance to what they consciously thought, felt, and experienced. The employees often rather wanted to talk about what it was like to be a foreigner

(buitenlander) in the Netherlands and express their view on life here. Most were quite disgruntled – primarily with the state of the economy but also due to homesickness –

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but saw little way to change their own situation. I conducted all interviews in Dutch and transcribed them verbatim into written documents. One or two follow-ups were

conducted via email and phone.

I added a brief survey on the end of each interview in which the informant had to rate eight items in the order of interest. This was difficult for a lot of the employees to grasp, as they were just not used to ranking things from one to eight. Occasionally an employee refused to rank anything beyond three because he found all eight elements important. The results showed a wide variety of opinions and personalities, but also revealed some interesting points, such as how many elements of the job were as important if not more important than the salary, and overall, how important it is to people that their work be of high quality, and that someone notice and value that quality.

I took photos of the workers handling the plants and vegetables. I find the images of the men caring for the plants to be poignant illustrations of the values that several workers had a hard time putting into words: in some cases a serious, earnest, and intimate contact with the plants that constitutes ‘care for their well-being,’ and in other cases, a one hundred percent devotion of attention to the work to accomplish the outspoken goals and values of speed and efficiency and contribute one’s best to the functioning of the whole enterprise.

Successes and setbacks

Overall, I consider this ethnographic research in the Dutch agribusiness setting as having been successful, despite a few setbacks and limitations. If I were to do it over again, I would include more businesses in my case studies in order to form more of a plausible basis for comparison; although similarities between vegetable production greenhouses exist, each one is so unique in its work system and business methods, that a proper research project would either have to be more specific (for example

concentrating only upon tomato businesses of a certain size) or include several more than three examples. So this research project is limited in the conclusions able to be drawn due to the variety and uniqueness of existing vegetable greenhouses in that area. My initial intention was to work alongside the employees, but this did not go as planned. For one thing, I had not reckoned with the amount of technology used in the

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tasks, actually doing them on my own without supervision would have – according to the managers – cost the company more valuable training time (and thus, money) than they would win from my contribution.

A setback in terms of gathering data was that half of my informants were Polish, who were for the most part reticent or cynical in their attitude towards my research and interview requests. Furthermore, I had to work with a language barrier, since most of them do not feel comfortable in any language except Polish. I surmounted these barriers of language and their unwillingness to give me interview time by translating my

interview into Polish and allowing them to write out their answers on their own time. I then had my gatekeeper, Gosia, translate and dictate them to me orally. While it proved adequate in acquiring answers to basic questions, the limitation in this method was the inability to go back for clarification and follow-up questions – for reasons of

confidentiality I had allowed them to make up pseudonyms.

A surprising outcome with regard to gathering data was the willingness, even

enthusiasm, of all my informants (except most Poles) to help me out in whatever way they could. The managers and owners all demonstrated openness and acceptance

regarding my presence in their workplace, as well as curiosity about and support for my research despite not understanding what it was about.

In conclusion, it proved a difficult and confusing fieldwork period for me because of my initial preparation for an entirely different setting, but also interesting in that it was all new to me and everyone I met was so friendly and open to my presence in their

environment. By getting to know the people in these ‘factories’ and hearing their stories, I was also able to gain an appreciation for what had been for me, especially at first sight, ‘anonymous’ vegetables. I argue that while the majority of these vegetables remain in commodity state throughout their growth, packaging, transport, and sale, the plant care on the part of the employees along with their enjoyment of the vegetable itself does lend a degree of social life to the products. The following chapter includes more details on the set-ups of the businesses as well an exploration of the attitudes and concerns of the producers.

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Chapter Two: The Companies

In this chapter I describe more fully the settings of my fieldwork with a focus on the perspective of the producers, namely the owners and production managers. Specifically, I examine their attitudes towards and values surrounding the product they are

producing. Using the labor process approach to ask questions about the social and mental aspects of their work tasks, work ethics, and values, I gathered data through observation of and interviews with the managers and owners.

2.1 Company histories

Because this research consists primarily of data gathered from my three case studies, they each deserve a fuller description.

Wim van Gentevoort Cucumbers

Quiet, kind, and matter-of-fact, Wim has run his small cucumber business on his own for twenty years to support his wife and children. In his mid-forties, he is married and has four children between ages 12-21. After seven years living in Canada, his father had seen a future in Dutch agribusiness and moved back started his own small greenhouse in Westland in 1958. He began with lettuce, and added cucumbers in 1961. He took a seven-year hiatus from vegetables in which he tried out chicken production, but then went back to vegetables. The biggest changes in vegetable cultivation since that time, according to Wim, are that the vegetables are no longer grown in the ground and the main energy source is no longer oil, but gas.

Wim remembers his father being in the greenhouse constantly, and because he enjoyed working alongside him, decided to do the two-year training to be a grower. Thus, at age 21, he was ready to take on his own business. In 1992 he bought a house in Pijnacker and its adjacent 1.5 hectare greenhouse, the same one he has to this day. Wim, his wife, and his father worked together to build up the cucumber business for two years until Wim’s father retired. From then on, it has been a family business, with the children working alongside the parents in the traditional manner (All-Round 2000: 2). At first, Wim worked ninety hours per week, but through experience and the help of other employees, he now works an average of sixty hours. He works alongside his employees,

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of which there are ten (mostly Polish) in the summer months and only one (German) in the winter months. No interview with the Poles who worked here was successful; however, the two children of Wim who work here regularly were very open to being interviewed.

The work in this greenhouse is long and intensive: harvest and plant care is seven days a week, and all employees do all the jobs – no one is specialized (which stands in great contrast to the larger tomato company). Wim himself stays by the sorting machine where he can see all the outgoing cucumbers, so he can do the quality control. This takes only a few hours per day, and the rest of the work day he can be found among the plants in the greenhouse or doing the bookkeeping in the office in his house. His wife now works in the greenhouse only rarely, helping out with packing when there is a need; when not busy with motherly duties, she is a substitute teacher in the Pijnacker schools. On sunny days between noon and three o’clock it is difficult

to stay in the 30° C greenhouse, especially if actively working – although as the workers testified, the plants do offer a cooling environment that provides some relief. The radio plays pop music, but other sounds are also audible: the rustle of workers moving among the broad leaves, sometimes workers chatting with each other, and now and then, the grinding of windows above opening or closing according to

temperature needs. These plants grow about 10cm per day and produce a daily harvest of cucumbers for three months, which allows Wim to do three plantings per year. I observed the second planting, which lasted from late May until mid-August.

Kwekerij Sandeland

Geert, a cheerful man in his sixties with a bright smile and penchant for teasing, owns four greenhouses in Nootdorp that total 8.5 hectares. One of his sons is production manager for the largest one, while the other son is production manager for the medium-sized one. His grandfather had been a farmer in Nootdorp. His father wanted to have his own greenhouse rather than take over his father’s farm, so he bought land and erected what was, at the time, the biggest greenhouse in the town of Nootdorp, at 6000m². Geert remembers working from five till eight o’clock every morning with his brothers in that

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greenhouse before they went to school. At age 24 he began for himself, buying a house and its adjacent greenhouse on that same street, where he still lives with his wife. After cultivating cucumbers for twenty years, a virus killed off his entire crop one year and despite preferring cucumbers as a vegetable he decided to switch to a vegetable less vulnerable to disease and pests: bell peppers.

That was 22 years ago, at a time when bell peppers were making a great profit, which allowed Geert to expand his company so rapidly. Over the years he bought or erected three other greenhouses on that street (including his father’s original greenhouse) and his children now inhabit the houses adjacent to those greenhouses. The company is thus now made up of four greenhouses. Having ‘rolled into’ the business, working alongside their parents since they were able to walk, his children felt so at home in it that it was a natural choice for them to stay in the company and help it expand.

Geert primarily works in the main warehouse overseeing the machines, computer, and pick-up/delivery area, and thus has very little contact with the plants; whereas his sons work alongside the workers, overseeing the greenhouse work and production. Geert was my main contact person, my gatekeeper. From the beginning, he was very open to

having me around, but had little time to spare me for any extended attention or

conversation. The mood there was always jovial, and the workers were all friendly and open. I was able to interview most of the employees, who were of Moroccan, Turkish, Polish, and Dutch origin. Quite a few of the Poles did not speak Dutch.

My observations took place solely in the two main greenhouses (largest, most modern, and most productive). I will refer to them by their street numbers: #35 and #43. Although #35 is the larger and thus more productive greenhouse, its peppers get transported to the warehouse in #43, which houses

the sorting and boxing machines. There is only one planting, in December, which means that these plants produce peppers approximately from February through mid-November. Pepper plants are slower growing and less productive than cucumber plants, which accounts for the comparatively low production

despite the higher number of plants. _{As in most greenhouses, the pepper plants grow in a}

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Gebroeders Duijvestijn Tomato Company

I received helpful mentoring from the calm and circumspect director of Gebroeders Duijvestijn Tomaten, Ted Duijvestijn. He invested interest in the exact topic of my investigation, spoke several times with me, took me on two extensive explanatory tours of the warehouse and greenhouses, and even took me along on one of his regular

excursions to the research greenhouses in Bleiswijk.14_{The tomato firm is a large}

production unit of three greenhouses with an attached warehouse where tomatoes are sorted, packed, and picked up (this is a separate company, called Logi-4).

Ted, who, in his mid-forties, is the oldest of the four Duijvestijn brothers who run this tomato business in Pijnacker, told me the story of the company. His father’s father was a vegetable grower since 1935, using coal to heat his greenhouse. Ted’s father also trained to become a vegetable grower, and subsequently started on his own with his own one-hectare greenhouse. He heated his greenhouse with crude oil until he switched to gas in 1970. He grew tomatoes and cucumbers until he razed his greenhouse in order to build a new one with the newest techniques; from that time on (1980) he specialized in tomatoes. Ted was 16 at the time, and being finished with school, began working for his father. Little by little, his father gave responsibility over to his sons without much

discussion, until at age 21, Ted realized that all responsibility was on his plate. His father was sick and took an early retirement by selling the business entirely to his sons..

Gebroeders Duijvestijn was made official in 1997 when Remco, freshly graduated, joined the oldest two brothers running the business. They had a 4.5 hectare greenhouse in Westland at the time, and it was so successful that they seized the chance to expand in 2003: they sold the greenhouse in Westland and bought land in Pijnacker, where they erected a 10.5 hectare greenhouse. In 2004 Ted realized he was suffering from severe burnout, and hired many new workers to do all the various tasks he had been trying to juggle. This is when Ad, the current greenhouse manager, came on board. After

undergoing a nearly fatal forklift accident in 2008, Ted began a long-term plan for the future of the company. Since that time, a new greenhouse has been erected adjacent to

14_{Wageningen University sponsors greenhouse research in a neighboring town to Pijnacker. Several growers} meet there regularly to investigate the newest growing techniques as well as greenhouse innovations.

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the first, a geothermal heating/cooling system has been put in place, plans for a windmill are in the works, and the brothers are making steps to let go of the business within ten years, transitioning from a family business to a regular business.

The workers I had the most contact with were Turkish Kurds who have lived in the Netherlands and held their job here for many years. Besides interviewing the four brothers, I also had several interviews with managers – a plant-health manager, a greenhouse production manager, and the boxing-shipping manager. Five or six Poles agreed to interviews, of which one was a sorter. My gatekeeper at this site was Gosia (a Polish woman fluent in Dutch), but I only had contact with her in the last part of my fieldwork due to our differing schedules. Being a custodian and mediator between managers and workers, she did not have a lot of time for me, but she was helpful in mediating contact between me and employees, scheduling interviews, and also

translating the written Polish interviews. I found this an adequate way of surmounting the language barrier with the Poles (see ‘successes and setbacks’ section). The language skills among the Turks varied to a great degree, which demonstrated itself in how coherent and in-depth their interviews ended up being – some were better than others. Like the other greenhouses I had seen, a five-meter wide cement pathway separated two halves of the greenhouse, and workers rode carts up and down the long rows. Kas 2, the second greenhouse, was attached but separated by a wall. Between this greenhouse and the outside were rooms that contained necessities for the greenhouse function: the old generator, which is now being used less and less, vats where the fertilizer is prepared, and so on. There is also a second canteen there where workers of that greenhouse usually spend their breaks. If one walks the length of kas 2’s cement aisle, there is a sliding door at the end that leads into a third greenhouse. This is the newest and smallest greenhouse, being only three square hectares.

This panorama shows the central cement aisle on the right and the many paths of tomato plants planted in rock wool and set upon a system of pipes that send them water, fertilizer and warmth. The preponderance of vines relative to leaves is due to the fact that it is late in the season.

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2.2 Family Businesses

All three of my case-study companies are family businesses, which is the case among most greenhouse businesses in the Netherlands (Vrienden 2003:13). There is much to be gained as a business when family is involved. For one, working with family enhances teamwork, for there is a unique level of trust inherent in family relationships (van Ginkel 2009: 161). As each of my respondents said, when questioned about the advantages of

working with family members, ‘you always know where you are with each other.’15

Additionally, it has been found that family companies can more easily pool their resources, which ensures quick growth. Family members are often more willing to be paid less, for example, which saves costs, but pooling resources can also be understood as sharing skill sets and knowledge, which invariably strengthens the leadership of the business (ibid.: 162). The tomato company, Gebroeders Duijvestijn, was a prime

example of this. Since they teamed up officially in 1997, each of the brothers has executed his personal skill set in taking on a portion of the company leadership. The division of labor has allowed fast and successful growth.

There are also documented disadvantages to working so closely with family. According to a study of Dutch family businesses, researchers found that they can suffer from rigidity and resistance to change caused by the search for stability, which is needed to support a family; change can be challenging for a family business, and yet necessary to thrive with changing times (Eick et al 2006). It is also common for there to be intense emotional issues that disrupt family collaboration within a business. Communication can be fraught with judgments and emotions that would not be present between individuals not related to each other (Flören 2002: 36). One Duijvestijn brother said that ‘the

disadvantage is that you can get irritated more easily because you say things to each other that you wouldn't say to others,’ but subsequently added, ‘That can be an

advantage, but definitely also a disadvantage. Yeah, it's pretty woven together. You have to find a good balance’ (Ronald, interview). As Ronald pointed out, the intimacy of

15_{Not precisely translatable from the Dutch, there is an implicit trust implied in this phrase: ‘Je weet wat je aan}

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communication can also be an advantage. The van der Sande brothers, for example, stated that they call each other an average of twenty times per day. When asked if there were disadvantages to working so closely with each other, they could not think of any.

Pascal: Well, maybe that we see each other constantly… Joeri: But in our case, that’s really not a problem. (interview)

But this family might be an exception to the general trend. The fact that thousands of family firms have liquidated each year in the Netherlands since 1980 testifies to how hard it can be to work with family (Flören 2002: 87). I will elaborate more on these difficulties in Chapter 4.

Geert’s wife was expected to work alongside him as he built up his business, as was Wim’s wife. This is common to family firms (Ginkel 2009: 165) – according to Flören’s research of family farms, ten years ago, spouses work an average of thirty hours per week in the family business (Flören 2002: 79). However, this expectation seems to be changing. It is rare for Wim’s wife to be needed anymore in the greenhouse, and neither Geert’s wife nor his son’s partners are ever to be seen on the premises of Sandeland. As for the wives of the Duijvestijn brothers, while their mother did work alongside their father when they were children, their wives have not had to work in the company to the same capacity. This has to do with the growth of the company. As the businesses

increase their corporate identity and activity, moving further into Pritchard’s definition of ‘farm family entrepreneurs’, they take on more non-family employees, leaving their wives – and in many cases, their own children, free to choose to what extent they work in the business. In the Duijvestijn case, the wives of three of the brothers have chosen to work an average of eight hours per week, mostly in administrative capacities. One has now stopped in favor of doing volunteer work elsewhere, and Remco’s wife has always worked for her brother in his potted plant business. In the Gentevoort as well as the Sande cases, both wives were glad to pursue their own interests of teaching and caring for the handicapped when their help was no longer needed in the greenhouse.

The ramifications of this business expansion and the resulting change in identity that family agricultural businesses are going through will be explored further in Chapter 4, when I look at strategies that the businesses are making to meet the challenges of the present and future.

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2.3 Work division

The division of tasks within a company is more or less complex depending on its size. The smaller a company, the more likely it is that each employee is capable of doing all the necessary tasks; whereas the larger a company, the more specialized the employees are. In this section I will explain the various tasks common to these companies and lay out how the tasks were divided in each case. I do this purely through description in order to form a foundation for the analysis of the companies and individual tasks that I undertake . in following chapters.

Twisters/Toppers: This task involves standing on a cart with adjustable height so that

one stands at eye level with the tops of the plants. The carts can be controlled by a button at one’s feet, and I usually saw the carts moving at a steady speed down the rows while the twisters worked. They pluck off the suckers, then

twist the top of the plant around the string. Depending on the speed of the worker, each plant takes between two and four seconds. Their contact with the plants was the most intimate of all the greenhouse workers, as they were the only ones who described their task as “caring for” the plants. At the end of the season, their task was to ‘top’ the plants, which entailed cutting the top off of the growing plant so as to allow more energy to go to the ripening of the last vegetables of the season.

Lowerers: This task involves standing on a cart with adjustable height so that one

stands at eye level with the wire to which all the strings (each supporting a plant) are attached. The lowerer takes a bundle of string in each hand, twists his wrists so that a section of string loosens and thus lowers the plants (ten cm), and deftly sets the bundles of string back onto the wire. He thus lowers two plants every two seconds, and has the least contact with the

plants/vegetables of all the greenhouse workers. This is only necessary for tomatoes, which grow on vines.

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Leaf Cutters: The leaf cutters walk on the ground through the paths with a small, sharp

knife in hand, cutting first the plants on one side, then turning around at the end of the row and cutting the plants on the other. They cut all the leaves off of the bottom portion of the tomato plants, leaving them in the pathway to dry. I only encountered the leaf cutters and lowerers in the tomato company, where these tasks were necessary due to the way the plant grows: like a vine. Both tasks make harvesting more efficient by uncovering the fruits and ensuring they are at the appropriate height.

Harvesters: Harvesters use a cart, but in varying ways: in

the tomato greenhouse they pushed the cart ahead of them and tossed the colored fruits into it with both hands. When the container was full, they would send it on its way – the carts would automatically follow the route into the

warehouse to be sorted. In the cucumber greenhouse they pulled the carts behind them, cut cucumbers with one hand holding a knife, gathered them in the other hand, and when they had two or three in hand, they set them into the boxes on the cart. When the boxes on the cart were full, they would leave those carts on the cement aisle where another worker would pick them up and take them back (via tractor) to the sorting machine in the warehouse area. In

the bell pepper greenhouse, the workers stood on top of the carts (whose movement and speed could be controlled by the foot), cut the pepper with a knife, and tossed them into the container. When the containers were full, they would hoist them up (via a chain hanging from above) and empty them into a larger container, which would then be taken (via tractor) into the warehouse to be sorted.

Sorters: Sorters stand or sit along the sorting

machine and watch for faulty vegetables, sorting them into separate bins. For tomatoes, that means either too green or too red; for bell

peppers it means too small, misshapen, or having soft spots; for cucumbers it means being too

Note the tomatoes on the right side are all green as the harvester walks down the row picking only from that side, whereas the left side is full of red tomatoes that will be picked when he turns around and walks back up the row

Who cares for vegetables? : examining the human relationship to vegetables in Dutch greenhouses