What does it mean to care in industrial agriculture?

Diana Mincytė (), Aistė Bartkienė, Renata Bikauskaitė, Ieva Šakelaitė and Pia Piroschka Otte
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Diana Mincytė: City University of New York
Aistė Bartkienė: Vilnius University
Renata Bikauskaitė: Vilnius University
Ieva Šakelaitė: Vilnius University
Pia Piroschka Otte: Ruralis - Institute for Rural and Regional Research

Agriculture and Human Values, 2025, vol. 42, issue 3, No 9, 1347-1359

Abstract: Abstract The paper examines contradictions, limits, and possibilities of agri-care in industrial production. It synthesizes current scholarly debates to identify four pathways for generating caring agriculture: (1) the ethical contagion approach in more-than-human ethics; (2) reciprocal responsibilities and enchantment grounded approaches in Indigenous, religious, and spiritual forms of care; (3) care motivated by aesthetics, values, and ethics in human-centric approaches; and (4) justice driven care grounded in political economy critiques of agrarian capitalism. Drawing on feminist studies, we add a fifth approach centered around the ethics of care and social reproduction to foreground industrial agricultural production in reproductive and care labors. In doing so, our approach highlights the gendered dimension of care and suggests paying closer attention to unequal, historically and geographically situated social relations in care politics. The social reproduction approach underscores the systemic role that care plays in capitalist society by linking caring through industrial intensification with the exploitation of care work in domestic, farm/workplace, and community domains. Central to our reading of the feminist care approach is relational agency, which affords interactivity, mutuality, non-commodified experience, and biospheric egalitarianism in agri-care engagements, raising fundamental questions of whether these qualities can align with the logic of industrial production. From the perspective of social reproduction, even the limited instances of care in industrial agriculture contribute to reinventing and advancing the late capitalist food regime.

Keywords: Agri-care; Ethics of care; Industrialization; More-than-human ethics; Labor; Social reproduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10460-025-10709-0

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