How Like a Leaf: Vital Energy in Greenhouse Infrastructures

ABSTRACT:While commercial greenhouses are built as architectures to temper (climactic) precarity, this article argues that precarity abounds in the ripening conditions they enfold. Contemporary greenhouses harness the energy of the internet of things, precision agriculture, and artificial intelligence to manage inputs and outputs for optimal growth. Such growth, however, is often premised on the exploitation of racialized and gendered labor, an overlooked "greenhouse effect" of its model of agricultural production. The article examines how, as media, greenhouses compress space and time in the interests of yield, drawing from the vital energy of laborers, largely insourced from the Global South, and plants themselves. It concludes that the diffuse modalities of (human and nonhuman) sensing in the greenhouse nevertheless hold the potential to propose different networks of ripening. Arguing for a method of "non-citizen sensing," the article asks how we might make readable the data derived from the laboring bodies in these spaces and their capacity for sensing precarity.