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The technology of corporate farming yields bountiful harvests thanks to new chemicals, biotechnological innovations, and even outer space technologies. Indeed the new technologies of farming actually seem to eclipse the classic tributes to farming as hard work. This is not to say that scenes of field labor have been entirely eliminated, but that the onerous side of the labor seems to have evaporated in an aura (and it is an aura) of sunny technologies framed by new age musics mixed with light, airy techno-pop signifying zen harmony of agriculture and advanced technology. Harmony and bounty coexist in corporate images of agriculture -- which include fields of healthy crops, farmers standing in or near those fields, produce-filled markets.
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In the current crop of ads, this surplus of grains and vegetables and fruits appear to be the fruit of advances in biotechnology and chemical agriproducts. Dow and DuPont ads routinely include images of healthy crops. But we also find these images in corporate ads that we might not think of as related to farm production. Boeing, for example, links the bountiful harvest being picked by traditional Asian agriworkers to Boeing satellite technology.
Siemens, an electronics corporation, includes imagery of an Asian market where a woman holds out her produce to be examined. While new food technologies are shown permitting the continuation of traditional social relations, they also turn crops into a mechanized flow of abundance. |
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