Large-scale agriculture

In the 20th and 21st centuries, agriculture underwent a process of industrialisation that profoundly transformed farms, leading to the development of huge agro-industrial complexes. This article analyses this dynamic as a change of scale, and to this end develops the concept of “scalability work”. This concept highlights both the fact that a transition towards an industrial scale means resolving countless biological, social, technical, economic and political issues, and that such work has no end: it relates not only to the task of scaling up; it also consists in ensuring the perpetuation of large-scale production systems that are based on precarious assemblages and which generate numerous spillovers. Scalability work is therefore a continuous process of articulation, maintenance and repair that is all the more delicate and unstable in the case of the industrialisation of agriculture in that it applies to living organisms.