From home to farm: Household and labour brokerage practices in Turkey's commercial agriculture

This article advances understandings of labour exploitation at the lower end of commercialized agricultural markets, focusing on the experiences of seasonal migrant farmworkers in Turkey. Bringing feminist social reproduction into dialogue with labour regime and critical agrarian scholarship, we examine how household and labour brokerage practices sustain an informalised and fragmented labour regime that straddles production and social reproduction, comprising those activities, relations and resources necessary to sustain life. The analysis draws on qualitative data collected across two major agricultural producing provinces in Turkey between 2017 and 2023. Our findings demonstrate that migrant farm work relies on a continuum of exploitation extending across the farm and the home. Central to this process is the mobilisation of farmworkers' own material resources to survive in makeshift camps, alongside the devaluation and appropriation of women's and girls' unpaid and underpaid labour. Labour brokers govern this continuum by mediating recruitment, retention, and remuneration through the performance of patriarchal family relations, the distribution of advance payments, and gatekeeping access to essential services and resources such as water, food, and healthcare. By internalizing the costs of social reproduction within farmworker households, this regime sustains otherwise untenable labour arrangements, with depleting consequences for farmworkers themselves. By foregrounding the social reproduction dynamics underpinning agrarian labour regimes, the article contributes to rural studies debates on neoliberal agricultural restructuring, migrant farm work, and the gendered organization of work, offering insights relevant to commercial farming contexts in the global South. • Commercial agriculture relies on multiple forms of exploitation beyond the farm. • This article examines households and labour brokerage in Turkey's migrant farm work. • Migrant farm work relies on households' resource transfers and patriarchal norms. • Women and girls bear disproportionate costs, and their work is routinely devalued. • Brokers govern labour through patriarchal relations, advances and resource access.