Rebecca Ann Dudley

REBECCA DUDLEY, then a graduate student at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on “‘They Do My Spraying for Me’: Black Industrial Farmers, Digitized Landscapes, and Racialized Agrarian Decision-Making in Louisiana,” supervised by Dr. Shanti Parikh. This research focuses on how today’s industrial farming system is rooted in the plantation complex. The grantee is particularly interested in the mechanisms of this racialized economic and social system that endure and are experienced by both white and Black farmers. Using ethnographic methods, this project examines the enduring social and material elements of slavery-based agricultural production that have shaped today’s farm and food industry. The project interrogates these throughlines in the following social domains: familial networks, knowledge production practices, economic disparities including access to capital and landownership, and farm practices including labor, land management, and horticultural techniques. These areas elucidate not only that legacies of the plantation system and racialized social order have been upheld through legal institutions (like Jim Crow laws and their legacies) and policy (like USDA lending practices), but also that the present-day industrial farm system is imbued with systemic racial exclusion, plantation agricultural practices, and racialized identity. Through ethnographic methods of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and a survey of farmers, this research has examined the intersections of knowledge production and political economy, and how these intersections produce a racialized social environment of industrial farming.