Club apples: a biology of markets built on the social life of variety

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Club apples: a biology ofmarkets built on the social lifeof varietyKatharine A. LegunPublished online: 07 May 2015.

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Club apples: a biology ofmarkets built on the sociallife of variety

Katharine A. Legun

Abstract

Club apples are patented apple varieties, often grown by members of a co-operative who plan the production and marketing of the apples. Drawing onethnographic work, this paper will use club apples as a case to demonstrate thatvarieties have shaped the development of the apple industry in ways that resistinstitutional pressures to commodify the biological features of the apple. Clubapples extend social boundaries around varieties in ways that grant growers morecontrol over the market life of the apple and more economic power. Theproductive opportunities availed in the aliveness of biological materials can beseen to shape competition and the contours of economic markets.

Keywords: materialism; institutions; co-operatives; plant patents; markets;agriculture.

Introduction

‘Club’ or ‘managed’ apples are patented varieties that have exclusive growingand selling rights so that they only appear in a limited number of orchards.The SweeTango, for example, was recently developed by The University ofMinnesota and cultivated by members of The Next Big Thing Cooperative, agroup of 45 growers spanning from Washington State to Nova Scotia. The co-operative was organized in 2006 by a grower who received an exclusive licenceto the SweeTango variety. Other varieties, such as the Piñata on the WestCoast and Red Prince from central Canada, are similarly patented and managed

Katharine A. Legun, Department of Sociology, Gender & Social Work, University ofOtago, 280 Leith Walk, Dunedin, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]

Economy and Society Volume 44 Number 2 May 2015: 293–315http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2015.1013743

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through exclusive licences. Cornell and Washington State Universities haveeach released several new varieties to be managed, while grower-led breedingprogrammes have been gaining momentum and notoriety. Club applessprouted in fertile soil and spread quickly, albeit controversially, from coastto coast.

Club apples raise important questions about the world in which we live,particularly questions about the relationship between economic markets, socialorganization and biology. They are marketed more vigorously than othervarieties and negotiate a higher market price; they are grown in organized co-operatives; and they often have distinct grading standards. These aspects ofclub apples are a reflection of growers’ perceptions of what is happening in theapple industry, the food industry and the economy more broadly. They arehistorically, socially and biologically situated and present a new case forconsidering how biology plays a role in shaping the social management of theeconomy.

Club apples can be seen as a response to trends in the food industry thatinvolve increased standards paired with a concentrated and dominant retailsector. Apple grading standards gained momentum in the nineteenth century,when US growers were attempting to develop distant markets after theemergence of a railroad connecting the West to the East (Dimitri, 2002; Jarosz& Qazi, 2000). By 1931, Washington State had established the most elaborategrading standards according to colour and size, and their consistency in qualitymade them appealing to markets on the East Coast (Dimitri, 2002). TheWashington region remains the largest producer and exporter of fresh applesin the United States (US National Agriculture Statistics Service, 2013), withthe Washington Apple Commission an integral aspect of their marketing(Jarosz & Qazi, 2000).

Standards and regulations in agri-food are no longer dominated bygovernment, but are increasingly private and serve retail markets (Busch,2011; Campbell et al., 2006; Campbell & Le Heron, 2007; Fuchs et al., 2011;Fulponi, 2006; Henson & Humphrey, 2010; Konefal et al., 2005). The effectsof standards on food is made ever more salient by the retail mergers of the1980s that had far-ranging effects on the organization of food (Harvey, 2007;Wrigley, 1999). They exert more control over the specific qualities of food, thepackaging of food and the prices they pay and conditions of contracts (Burch &Lawrence, 2005, 2007; Richards et al., 2011). Fairly rigid private standards areinescapable for growers intending to participate in wholesale markets, andmeeting those standards demands modern packing lines able to sort applesaccording to slight differences in colour or size. In this paper, I highlight thatthe physical qualities of the produce on retail shelves are a reflection of theorganization of the industry, in all its standardized and conglomerated glory.These practices support Royer’s (2007) work that suggests co-operatives haveincentives to form in oligopsonistic food markets. Unlike his work thatconsiders forming co-operatives for forward integration into food processing,

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this paper considers how co-operatives are forming in new ways for fresh foodthat pivot on the biology of apple trees.

The structural power of retailers creates incentives for growers to mobilizealternative forms of organization. These incentives are only increased by shiftsin food culture that value food for its departure from an industrialized foodsystem (Campbell, 2009; Goodman, 2004; Goodman & DuPuis, 2002; Guth-man, 2004). Consumers are increasingly seeking authenticity in food throughpersonal contact or the use of territorial indicators (Johnston & Baumann,2014; Weiss, 2012). Campbell (2009) has suggested that these shifts represent adesire to eat ‘food from somewhere’, in contrast to ‘food from nowhere’ (Bovéet al., 2002, p. 55; McMichael, 2005). These efforts are paired with an increasein fresh food consumption that has been observed for over two decades(Friedland, 1994; Le Heron & Roche, 1995). It is not surprising thatdeveloping some kind of branding through varietal boundary making isemerging. This paper highlights the ways that the biology of plants isimplicated in these food structures and participates in their movements.

In many ways, the pursuit of connectedness through individual consump-tion practices relates to the ‘neoliberalization’ of food (Campbell, 2009;Guthman, 2004). Concentrating more information about social relations inproducts enables those relations to be governed by market mechanisms. Thedevelopment of branding in apples through clubs can be seen as an extensionof those movements towards self-regulation and market governance. Ratherthan publicly engaging with retail oligopsonies and standards, clubs aredeveloping privately. On the other hand, they are generating a form ofcommon property around plant patents that are otherwise held privately, andusing them in new ways that socially organize around frictions fromunpredictable and unruly plant biology.

A consideration of the biological underpinnings of economic markets is arelevant and timely contribution to contemporary social theory. There isa growing body of academic literature on materials that is making space for aconsideration of biology (Bennett, 2010; Braun & Whatmore, 2010; Coole &Frost, 2010). As a window into the economic relationships between plants andpeople, club apples can add to this swelling literature, particularly in economicsociology (see Callon, 2008, 1999; Pinch, 2008; Marres & Lezaun, 2011;Swedberg, 2008). Much of this has drawn on actor-network theory andfocused on performativity. Materials get worked into economic action (Callon,2008), and things become shaped with particular intentions for action (Marres& Lezaun, 2011). This paper will build on work exploring the relationshipsbetween materials and economic life by considering how the animacy of plantsspecifically, and biological properties more generally, plays a role in shapingeconomic institutions and markets.

Plants compel actors more continuously and aggressively to craft theirproduce as a market commodity, but plants may also behave with spontaneityand generate unintentional products or conditions of production. Thecompulsion and unprompted opportunities of animate matter are part of

Katharine A. Legun: Club apples 295

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what I call the biology of markets. For apples, the biology of the market involvesthe stress of producing what growers call ‘commodity apples’, where thebehaviour of the apple and the organization of the industry lead to ahomogenization of variety and price. Club apples are an attempt to build anew biology of the market. While agriculture presents a particularly vivid caseto explore the role of plants in economics, all objects can be said to containaspects of unpredictability, and in a sense the line between the biological andthe inert is blurry.

This paper starts by outlining how club apples may contribute to literatureon materials and institutions in economic sociology, and introduces the idea ofa biology of markets. The next section looks at the notion of a variety in appleproduction, illustrating how the plant has participated in the economicstructure of the industry. I will go on to argue that market pressures havecreated instability around varieties, while also homogenizing varietal differ-ences in ways that reduce the market power of growers. In this context, clubapples can be seen as a social-biological alignment mobilized by growers andaimed at reclaiming market power by attaching economic power to varieties.I will conclude by suggesting that the club apple case can be extended outto the contemporary capitalist economy, whereby the management of particulartypes of uniqueness, particularly uniqueness indicative of some sort ofspontaneity, may be increasingly important and have implications for thestructure of the market.

Theoretical background: materials and institutions

In the case of club apples, the traits of the fruit and the tree are the foundationsfor economic reorganization. While the biological materials themselves do notdictate social behaviour, they create spaces for social change, and through theirrelationships with people they may gesture towards a direction for movement,the same way a flood might push people in an elevated geographic directionand prompt particular kinds of associations and conversations. In this way,club apples illustrate the potential power of things that has been suggested bynew theoretical work on materialism (Bennett, 2009; Braun & Whatmore,2010; Callon, 1986; Jackson, 2000; Latour, 2005; Marres & Lezaun, 2011;Swedberg, 2008). Actor-network theory has suggested, among other things,that the types of activities that are performed are the function of an assemblageof heterogeneous materials, rather than the imagination and efforts of a single,human economic actor (Latour, 2005; Law, 2009). Materials shape andencourage action, and hold ‘powers of engagement’ (Marres, 2009). Otherscholars have branched into affect theory, emphasizing the ways that materialsgenerate sensory experiences and feeling, and, in doing so, can be seen to havepolitical reverberations (Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011; Seigworth & Gregg,2010). The shape of things and their functions are suggestive. While a chaircould feasibly serve the purpose of a table or television stand, it cannot be


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ignored that placing chairs in a room invites sitting, and the shape of the chairin relation to the body is not completely irrelevant.

Materials are also political: they create publics and politics by generating anobject through which people associate and disagree, and their substantial andlasting shape in the world is productive and often a site of contestation (Barry,2010; Dewey, 1927; Latour, 2004a, 2004b; Marres & Lezaun, 2011). Some ofthat contestation is about the definition of the material; for example,contestation over temperatures or glaciers and what that means in relation toclimate change (Latour, 2004a). Other times it may be about the types ofmaterials that are assembled and manipulated (Marres & Lezaun, 2011). Theseworks highlight that materials are foundations of political discourse, in partbecause of their implied effects in the future. In the case of apples, theexistence of a variety creates cultivators and non-cultivators, as well as apolitics of economic practices surrounding the variety. These politics provide afoundation for clubs as I describe further in the paper.

The materialist underpinning of discourse and action can add to ourunderstandings of institutions and economic performances. Institutionsprivilege particular activities, and materials are often part of those activities.By implication, mobilizing materials can also be a way to alter an existinginstitutional landscape. Fligstein (2001) has suggested that actors in a marketoften try to maintain existing institutions because they have invested time andcapital based on their structure and gain power through the maintenance oftheir logics. Bourdieu (2005) and Nee (2005) similarly discuss how the formaland informal rules of an economic field determine the ways in which playerscan maintain or alter their position, relative to other economic players. Byaddressing the interests embedded in rules and rule-shaping behaviour ineconomic markets, institutionalism has challenged ideologies of culturally voidefficient rationality. A materialist reading of institutions can add to thisargument by considering how rules can be embedded in the tools ofproduction, and I suggest that particular attention should be paid to therelationship between tools and living materials.

Embedding interests in the tools of production can advance particularinterests and elevate the position of associated market actors. By implication,harnessing new features of a material, or capitalizing on the functions ofmaterials in new ways, actors can change the norms, standards and rulesassociated with an industry in ways that alter the power structure. Along theselines, Pinch (2008) and Legun (2011) have suggested that work on institu-tionalism in economic sociology would benefit from incorporating technologiesand materials into institutional analyses. For apples, clubs emerge against aninstitutional backdrop of grading standards and retail chains which have beenpulling power away from producers in contemporary food systems (Campbell& Le Heron, 2007; Harvey, 2007). Clubs negotiate the distribution of powerin the market. The aliveness of apple trees, and the ability to tease outnew productive relationships between growers and plants that can be


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collectively mobilized, enables those biological materials to catalyze institu-tional economic change.

The aliveness of the technologies of apple production – their biology – isrelevant for thinking about the economy in a few ways. Firstly, biologicalmaterials require repeated attention and span across economic spaces,industries and actors, and so they demand forms of ongoing culturalmanagement (see Robbins, 2007). Surgery rooms must be kept sterilized inthe face of bacteria, and there are cultural rules about how to do so. Vines mustbe repeatedly removed from the outside of old brick buildings so that the wallsand insulation continue to function. Mould must be continuously bleachedfrom the bathroom ceiling of old character homes or decaying graduate studentapartments. Biologies enlist close, compulsive action and could shape theinstitutional architecture of a market. Using apples as a case, this paper arguesthat they do.

Secondly, things that are alive change and adapt. Actor-network theorystresses that once an object is taken out of the network, it is no longer the samething it was before, and its activities can fundamentally change when placed inanother network (Callon, 1986, 1991; Law, 2009). On the other hand,biological materials become integrated into networks and adapt to them,becoming dependent. For example, Haraway (2003) has articulated how dogsand humans have adapted together in her companion species manifesto,developing notions of significant otherness. While less apparently significant andadaptive, the modern apple is an economic and cultural object that has rulesand infrastructure built around it, particularly around grading standards andvarieties. Maintaining the apple in its form is practical and requires constanteffort, and not simply the same efforts, but continuous efforts to keep them thesame despite their diversity and changing ecological contexts. Even in adrought, apples are produced to be large and juicy. In the face of new pests,apple trees need to be protected. In a cold, overcast summer, apples still needto be red. These changing contexts need not change the apple, as long ascultivation practices adapt and remain in its service. And, importantly,biological things can die. They engage in efforts for survival, but often dependon human action, and this makes them somewhat different from othermaterials. If people do not cater their activities to the interests of the appletrees, the trees could die or change in ways that significantly alter theirexistence. We could stop producing gramophones and start again, 50 yearslater, producing exactly the same item as before. The same is not true forvarieties of apples. When economies are built around a living thing, keepingthe market alive requires keeping that thing alive through compulsive andattentive care.

Thirdly, aliveness generates a sense of unpredictability and unknowability.This vibrancy, as Bennett (2009) would call it, is complicated in the case ofplants. As Marder (2013) suggests in his book Plant-thinking, plants are uniquein their half-animate, half-inert characteristics. Their slow growth and lack ofsentience places them in a different category from animals and materials, and


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can escape deduction into an easy scale of agency, will and interests. They arealive and have no self-consciousness, but they exist on such a massive scale andare constantly engaging with a world that unfolds outside the human gaze.While the degree to which plants could be said to have interests is limited, theydo have effects and affects on people in ways that are not entirely logical,predictable or controllable (see Robbins, 2007; Soluri, 2005). In this way, likeother non-human living things, knowing plants requires ongoing non-linguisticdialogue, experimentation and interpretation that remains contestable andopaque. Yet there is arguably more feedback from plants in regard to theirvibrancy, health and productive potential than other, inert matter, which couldpotentially increase their affect on their cultivators.

Apples provide a lens into the ways that biology figures into markets, and inparticular they highlight the ways that spontaneity and reproduction in biologyfigures into institutions and can provide a vehicle for institutional change. Clubapples are a response to a market biology of commodity apples. Commodityapples, as growers refer to them, are low-price apples that all look the same,because, despite the variety, they have been selected for the same standardizedcharacteristics. The use of commodification in this paper refers specifically toprocesses whereby objects on a market are produced en masse to maximizesales based on an abstract calculation of preference. Those objects areultimately low-cost, and all follow the same aesthetic parameters to appeal tothe broadest consumer audience possible. As such, commoditization can occuron a scale, marked by the extent to which an apple can be accurately measuredaccording to the commercial standards of valuation. Clubs pivot on varietiesand distinctions that biologically thwart or complicate an easy commodificationprocess, while maintaining currency in a capitalist food market. Varietaldifferentiation and plant reproduction has shaped the development of clubsand, in doing so, motivated institutional change. Plants create opportunitiesand constraints for action, and in turn, they shape the development ofeconomic institutions and the context of exchange. Their influence on actionand institutions is how I will be exploring the biology of markets.

Methods

Research for this project began in 2009 and continued over the next three yearswith observations at international and local conferences, attendance at work-shops and interviews with growers, breeders, packers and extension agents. Iinterviewed 37 growers, 19 of whom grew a club or managed variety. Of thegrowers, six also ran substantial packing lines that would also package andmarket apples for other growers. I asked growers a range of open-endedquestions about how they grew and sold their apples. I focused particularly ontheir practices and explanations for why they engaged in them to gain a pictureof the material and institutional world. Their narratives often threaded togetherthe behaviour of apple trees with norms and standards in the industry. I also


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interviewed three breeders, two marketers who worked for large packinghouses, and an extension agent. I conducted 43 interviews in total.

The research was conducted in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio.These states comprise the US Midwest apple-producing region (Roosin,1999). I chose to focus on the Midwest in part because of the relatively smallsize of the apple industry compared to Washington State, which has dominatedapple production since the 1980s (see Figure 1). Farm sizes are alsoconsiderably smaller in the Midwest (see Figure 2). On the other hand, thereis a long history of orcharding in the region. Because of the reduced sizes ofthe average farm, paired with the lengthy production history, the economicinstitutions may be less rigid and markets more varied, making thoseinstitutions more contestable and susceptible to change. The Midwest is alsothe home of the first managed variety, and, at the time of research, a hotbed ofdialogue and contestation.

Variety is the socio-biological foundation of the industry

Varieties are biological, social and economic, and the ways in which theydemand reproduction and social organization has significantly shaped theindustry. The modern apple is truly the fruit of an arboreal Frankenstein. Allcommon eating varieties of apples are reproduced by attaching shoots of aparent tree onto tree roots, called root-stocks, both of which have been selectedpurposefully to have particular characteristics. It is extremely challengingintentionally to grow an edible apple from a planted seed. Many common

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Figure 1 Value of US apple production, by State, 1980–2009 (by 1,000 dollars), totalutilized production.Source: US National Agriculture Statistics Service (2013).


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commercial varieties are from chance seedlings. They sprang up randomly.The McIntosh, for example, was discovered in 1811 by John McIntosh inOntario, who found it while clearing land for his farm. The Granny Smith isfrom New South Wales in Australia, and was found by Maria Ann Smith in1868 and cultivated. The first Red Delicious tree grew in Iowa, and was foundin 1880 by a farmer named Jesse Hiatt, who sold the variety to one of the firstmajor North American nurseries. All McIntosh, Granny Smith and RedDelicious apples are direct descendants of the original tree and have beenreproduced clonally. If you planted the seeds of a Red Delicious, a RedDelicious apple would not grow on the branches of the resulting tree, butinstead the fruit would be quite random and probably inedible. One grower Iinterviewed described new apple trees as similar to children, in that theircharacteristics are different from their parents and it is almost impossible topredict what they will look like and how they will behave. In short, an applevariety is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, in any way. It is a product ofgrafting technologies and the social concept of a variety. Cultural practicesaround apple production reflect this reality of reproduction and have changedvery little since the dawn of domesticated apples.

Varieties have been reproduced through grafting for a long time, and as aresult they may look and taste different than their wild predecessors inKazakhstan (Harris et al., 2002), but only because time has generated moreopportunities to select varieties for cultivation. In other words, new varietiesare generally taken from the same genetic stock that they were taken from 500years ago. Genetically, domestic apples are largely indistinguishable from theirwild relatives. Were the seeds of commercial varieties scattered in good soiland abandoned, an apple forest with unique and unpredictable wild fruit wouldemerge (Cornille et al., 2012). Apples have not experienced the same geneticdomestication bottleneck normally associated with other crops (Cornille et al.,2012). There may be only a few varieties that we see consistently on thegrocery shelves, but that consistency is not the outcome of varietal narrowingand natural unavailability. In short, the modern apple is not the fruit of planted

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Figure 2 Average farm size (total apple acres/farms with bearing acres)Source: US National Agriculture Statistics Service (2013).


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seeds, but grows from ongoing human intervention and is truly dependent onthe assemblages of cultivation. Varieties require human labour to reproduce.

In some ways, the need to graft and clonally reproduce apple trees makes theorganization of trees into varieties seem organic, as there is a direct parentalline to an original tree, clearly traceable. On the other hand, the distinction ishighly social. The threads linking one line of trees become seemingly entangledin others, as Harris, Robinson and Juniper (2002) illustrate in their attempt todifferentiate varieties based on genes. It may be socially possible to differentiatebetween varieties, based on the actual exchange of tree wood, but they wouldnot be clearly distinguishable were those histories erased. The distinction thatis made is highly discursive. Even as genetic research has blossomed, thedifferences between varieties can be difficult to pin down and largely a socialand legal matter rather than a scientific one, and these crevices betweenobservable traits must be pushed apart socially by relevant actors; the gaps ofdistinction serving as a gathering space for publics and politics. Varieties createa society by enlisting actors in an agreement that they have been sensiblyidentified and defined, and production can carry on assuming that varietaldifferences are real. They also embed social relations between differentindustry actors into the boundaries around the variety.

The social recognition of varieties legitimates a set of relations that organizesthe biological features of apples in the market. They provide a platform forcrop improvement programmes and trending in apple trees, propelling theactivities of nurseries and breeders. Nurseries have played a significant role indefining and marketing varieties, and yet their economic power has beenhistorically tempered by a lack of control over their products: once sold,varieties could easily and exactly be reproduced through grafting, and othernurseries could reproduce the same trees at a cheaper rate. Prior to the PlantPatent Act in 1930, breeders, such as the famed Luther Burbank, would oftencharge large sums for the sale of the first tree of a variety, knowing that thetree could be seamlessly reproduced after the initial release (Kevles, 2008).The Stark Brothers Nurseries would trademark the name of the variety, asthey did with ‘Starkings Red Delicious’, but this could not prevent the treefrom being reproduced and sold under another name (Kevles, 2008). After halfa century of lobbying, the Plant Patent Act was passed in 1930, largely throughthe efforts of Luther Burbank and Paul Stark of Stark Brothers Nurseries(Fowler, 2000; Kevles, 2008). The act only covered asexually reproducedorganisms, and the patent would only last 10 years.1 And while new varietiesare often discovered and patented by farmers who stumble on a randomseedling, patents further institutionalize varieties, which concurrently increasesthe role of nurseries which sell new trees and manage royalty payments. It alsocreates the legal definitions that propel competition between growers throughvarieties.

Patents enable breeders and those that discover a new variety to mark itsboundaries officially and lay claim to those characteristics. There is no test that


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is done on the genes of the apple. A grower, Ted,2 who had recently filed for aplant patent explained it to me:

There’s a bunch of information that the US Plant Patent Office needs. There’sno real form or anything, just descriptions of everything from the leaves to theblossoms, the apples, the stem. Anything you can measure they want ameasurement of. There’s a color code and so you have to match up the color –the flesh is blah blah white. The skin is blah blah blah red with an undertone ofblah blah blah yellowish, or you know. It’s a very technical document.

Here, Ted is almost mocking the document for its combination of depth andinaptitude. All of these measurements are supposed to provide some sort ofphysical definition around the variety – a boundary that identifies the plant as alegitimate whole. Yet, the measurements are messy and serve more of asymbolic than a practical purpose. Bill, a university breeder, similarlydiscussed the problem of socially creating a variety: ‘The requirements to geta patent are, I forget the exact wording, but basically it has to do with a new,unique and distinct variety. Of course – that line – what is truly unique?’ Thelegal use of the patent to secure rights may be less important than the sociallegitimation of a variety that is associated with the document. On the otherhand, even if a patent recognizes an apple tree as distinct, the crux of thatdistinction gets born in the market.

Varieties have different market values. Many of the growers I spoke toreferred to the price of an apple as largely dependent on the variety. At the USApple meetings I attended in Chicago in August of 2012, one of thepresentations forecasting the upcoming apple market focused on the economicdifferences between varieties, displaying graphs with different lines markingthe divergent price histories. Braeburns, they suggested, were decreasing inprice and profitability, while the demand for Honeycrisp was on the up-and-up. Get out of Braeburn, and jump on the Honeycrisp wagon. Similarly, manygrowers planned their orchards based on the market price of varieties andwhether they viewed the variety on a price and demand upslope or a whetherthey were approaching over-supply. They would use varieties as an economicstrategy, balancing between new, distinct and risky varieties, and those theycommonly referred to as commodity apples.

Commodity apples

Competition among growers and interest in improved, more marketablevarieties has been influenced by the swelling retail sector and the productionprocesses it demands, which ultimately whittle down varietal distinction. Theproducers of the apples are largely anonymous, as the relevance of theiridentity is wiped away by packing houses that collect and sort apples frommultiple growers according to standardized measures. Apple grades emerged


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in the United States in the late nineteenth century, partly as a way to developmarkets for Pacific Northwest apples (Dimitri, 2002; Jarosz & Qazi, 2000).Grades enabled apples from more growers in different regions to be sold onthe same market and according to the same metric, and would ensure thatthere was a standard vernacular for apple qualities. The growth of supermarketpower with the mergers of the 1980s (Wrigley, 1999, 2002) heightened the roleof standards and other forms of control over production (Harvey, 2007).Practically, standards in apples drive competition up and the price down, butthey are essential to the operation of contemporary apple markets. They alsoembed those evaluative metrics in the biologies of apples.

While varieties are treated as distinct in the market, the rules of the markethave encouraged them all to follow the same economic trajectories andultimately become what growers call commodity apples. While all apples arecommodities, growers used this term to refer to apples that had been moreaggressively shaped by the market. The institutional organization of applesworks to support a singular consumer vision of apples, chipping at the contoursof varietal differences to create a more homogeneous product. These applesmay begin as popular varieties with high demand, but ultimately becomeeconomically indistinguishable from others as their supply expands and theirpopularity wanes. Commodity apples may have different names, but they havethe same price and become a sort of generic, prototypical apple, and are onlyprofitable when produced in large quantities because they achieve such anarrow margin. One of the key features of commodity apples is the degree towhich the power of variety is dissolved. Jeff, for example, consistently referredto commodity apples in how he positioned himself as a grower. I asked him,‘What’s a commodity apple?’ He replied in a way that highlighted the low priceand standardized apple-like qualities that are valued in the market:

I would say a commodity apple is one that’s kind of a base-price apple in themarketplace that is grown a multitude of places. A lot of times it’s been around awhile. Red Delicious, I would say, is a classic commodity apple. It’s growneverywhere and marketed everywhere and if you ask a person ‘is this an apple’,they would go, ‘oh yes’. I mean it’s very recognizable, but it doesn’t have anyflare to it that separates it from the pack. It’s just a general apple. You’ll seethem in the grocery store; a whole range of three/four varieties all priced thesame. They’re the apples that go on sale when apples are on sale and you’ll seeFuji and Jonagold and Gala, Red Delicious, Goldens and Grannys, all for 99cents a pound this week. And those are, to me, commodity apples. Not thatcommodity apples are bad, but you better have an apple that you can produce alot, and get a high pack out, to make money on a commodity apple. Becausepricing is lower, so you have to make up the lower pricing with quantity. You’vegot to have quantity at the farm and you’ve got to have quantity to pack out.

Commodity apples are plain and fit better into the ideal-typical category ofapple than the specific category of variety. They have the qualities that fit most


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generally with the cultural construct of what we mean by an apple, and theybecome priced based on the scale of where they fit in relation to the idealapple. The ‘pack out’ that Jeff refers to is the proportion of apples that meethigher grading standards, and those standards sort all varieties of apples alongthe same continuum of ideals. Good apples are red and large.

Apple grades have historically sorted apples along size and colour dimen-sions and they largely continue to do so. Modern packing technologies weighand take up to 25 pictures of each apple, scanning the surface for the amount ofredness. Generally, larger, redder apples fetch a higher market price. Morerecently, those packing technologies have been developed to scan also inside theapple for imperfections and measure the internal density of the carbohydratesin the apple. Larger, redder, sweeter and firmer apples are valued more, andthe greater proportion of apples that creep closer to the picture of appleperfection, the more money the grower receives. In short, while a social andbiological distinction between varieties remains, the market tends towardserasing those distinctions through the institution of grading standards.

Not only are the economic distinctions between varieties whittled away bygrading and sorting processes, but the biological distinctions between applesare reduced through cultural and biological practices. The pressure to producethis idealized apple can be seen in the proliferation of red sports or red strains.Red sports happen when a tree’s limb mutates slightly so that the apples that itproduces are generally redder. It is a biological tendency that has been workedinto the institutions of the markets. A scion, or new shoot is taken from themutated limb and grafted, and the resulting tree is a redder version of theoriginal variety. It can be patented and sold to growers to make it easier forthem to produce higher proportions of redder apples and meet the highergrading standards. Mulling over any nursery catalogue reveals a wide selectionof freshly patented redder versions of old varieties, and the most commonnarrative around the plight of the ever-redder apple is in the Red Delicious.‘Red Delicious’, Bill, an apple breeder explains, ‘is my least favourite apple inthe world. It’s the result of over 200 mutations that have been discovered. Itwas originally found on a broken-down farm in Iowa and it was probably about30 per cent red at the time and now 200 mutations later, you can’t find a partof that apple that’s not red. It doesn’t mean it’s ripe, but it’s red’. Grant, agrower very involved with a managed variety, made a similar claim:

The trading partners said make them redder, and make them so they don’tshow bruises. They didn’t say anything about the flavor. The modernWashington Red Delicious apples, most of them, are never little green apples.They start out as red apples after the blossom forms. And they’re grass greeninside so you could pick them months ahead of time. Well, not months, but theinternal maturity has no relationship whatsoever to do with eating quality. Sothat is happening with Gala, and we now have all of these red strains of Galawhich are all inferior in terms of eating quality.


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The introduction of red strains propels the commodification of apples forwardbecause it causes varieties to look increasingly the same as other apples. It alsoplaces more pressure on growers to run along a production treadmill ofcontinuous replanting, while affirming the legitimacy of the standards andretail markets. The growers take all of the risk, but the standards are generallyoutside of their control. Russell, a midsized grower, described how standardsfor colour in a variety can influence participation in a market:

Jonagold is originally a green-yellow apple with an orange cheek, and thebreeders got hold of it and turned it into a red apple, and so now … I told youwe had Jonagold and we took them all out. I had two or three varieties ofJonagold and they were the best possible apples, but it was at a time whenJonagold was going redder and redder, and when I shipped them to the packinghouse, they went ‘well, what did you do with the red ones? Did you take allthose for yourself?’ So now, to hell with them. That’s my marketing angle. Sothat comes all the way back to the very first question, how do you make it as anapple grower? We have a lot of interest in direct marketing.

The only way to avoid the pressure to replant red strains may be to dodge thedominant supply chain altogether. In the apple industry, and particularly inmainstream supply chains where apples pass through a packing line, destinedfor large retailers, there is a pressure to create sameness across apple varieties.

The standards that organize the apples into value categories are largely thesame across varieties, even though those characteristics are partly what makedifferent varieties unique. These are the characteristics that get written onpatents to identify a variety as distinct, and yet the apples that grace the bins ofthe produce aisle look increasingly similar in terms of size and colouring. As avariety becomes popular, it slowly adopts the same price as other apples. It alsoincreasingly looks the same as other apples, as it becomes redder and is thinnedto be the same large size. Standards facilitate the translation of a highly variableproduct into a commodity that can be valued along with more apples frommore disparate places. The modern marketing chain also means that moregrowers are selling a less variable product to fewer buyers. There is adissolution of variety in a way that is an expression of market power, and at thesame time a challenge to the negotiating power of growers, who use varieties tomanage their position in the market and buffer against tense competition.

The maintenance of variety and the emergence of club apples

Most varieties exist on a scale of commodification depending on where they arein their supply–demand curve, so growers stay profitable through replantingnew varieties and trying to stay ahead of the curve. The Honeycrisp apple wasthe prototypical ‘premium apple’ in my interviews. It had been increasing inprice for two decades, but had only recently reached the levels of popularity


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and fame that it was currently experiencing. Apart from its high price, growersin the Midwest referred to the Honeycrisp as being a significant variety forseveral reasons, many of which had to do with its biological traits. One of themost important characteristics of the variety is its preference for a particularMidwest climate. The apple does well with cold nights, which makes it lesssuitable for Eastern Washington than Minnesota, Wisconsin or Michigan.While the large apple-producing region in Washington had certainly begun togrow the Honeycrisp, many of the growers were sure that they would beunable to produce a fruit with the same flavour and eating quality as theMidwest. The quirks of the trees, including a tendency to calcium deficiency,and a relatively fragile skin on the apple, also made the variety much morelabour-intensive. The result would be a protective barrier against competition,particularly in the Midwest where the apple had established a regional fameand following. Of particular importance to the celebrity of Honeycrisp is thetexture of the fruit that is claimed to be significantly different from otherapples. The apple has larger cells that make it juicier when eaten (Mann et al.,2005). Some growers argued that the new and unique texture of Honeycrispwould make its distinction from other varieties persist for longer in themarketplace. Growers describe it as a saving grace for regional orchards. ‘Forus, for all the orchards around here’, Ben explained, ‘if it wasn’t forHoneycrisp and then for people’s desire for regional-seasonal fruit, most ofthe orchards would have gone out of business. I have no doubt about that’.The Honeycrisp is considered to be an apple that significantly changed appleproduction in the Midwest, and, while it was openly accessible, it set the stagefor clubs.

The Honeycrisp is just a contemporary example of the persistent signific-ance of varieties. Other varieties, such as the Gala or Zestar, fall somewherebetween the premium apples and the cheap commodity apples in myinterviews. Growers received a higher price and considered them a morepopular apple than the Red Delicious or McIntosh. To some degree, the levelof distinction an apple has depends on the time it has spent on the market.Even though different varieties may become more similar with marketpressure, the fact that the supply and demand curves remain differentfor each variety gives growers an opportunity to leap away from simplelarge-scale commodity production, while still being able to participate in awholesale market.

The distinction between varieties grants leverage to growers, and thisleverage became particularly apparent in the spontaneous eruption of theHoneycrisp. If there were only Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and GrannySmith apples, it would be much more difficult for Midwest growers to staycompetitive when other regions like Washington State have a climaticadvantage for low-cost large-scale production. Varieties also buffer a race tothe bottom by providing more options to consumers and growers, and thefoundations for diverse kinds of flavours and characteristics that growers canharness. The wildness of tree reproduction enables growers somewhat to resist


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tendencies towards more rigid, industrialized commodity production. Yet, thebooms and busts growers experience with trending in varieties, and theseemingly inevitable transformation of premium apples into commodity apples,reduce the economic power that can be harnessed through varieties.

Once an apple leaves the farm and the packing house, it becomesanonymous. While the economic trajectory for each variety from high demandto over-supply is somewhat accepted, growers often lamented that the over-supply caused cost cutting that compromised the quality of the apple, and theresult would be that consumers would come to dislike the variety, and possiblyapples more generally. Bad apples ruin the bunch. Once an apple has reachedits peak demand, the pressure to produce larger, redder apples at a lower costcan exacerbate that downward price slope, and growers can quickly become leftwith trees that are completely unprofitable. Paul, a grower who also ran a largepacking line, explained the problematic nature of the economic life of varietiesto me:

The problem is, we have tremendous horsepower to produce anything in theagricultural environment so if we’re just looking at apples, there’s hugehorsepower to take anything and produce it to levels that are beyond thedemand. The old model, the main flaw was that a good variety, if it was makingmoney, would attract people to put it in to the point where the demand was notable to meet the supply. The supply was bigger than the demand. Every varietywould go through that economic curve where, if you’re on the front end of it,you made money. If you planted on the tail end, you’re now in the over-producing line and so every variety of any quality typically was destined tobecome non-profitable … All of the investment of putting in a new varietyalways falls on the grower. It’s a long term – you don’t even get production forthree years, four years, five years, so you’re planting products in orchards thatare, these days, in the $20,000 an acre establishment costs and so you’re puttingin varieties that take that level of investment and you are going to be the onethat suffers, in the end, if it is going to be a very successful variety.

If commodity apples are a reduction in the economic power of varietaldistinction, clubs are a heightening of those distinctions in the marketplace tochannel market power towards growers and variety owners. In doing so, theyalso gain some grasp on the booms and busts of variety by controlling thenumber of people growing the apples as well as having a more co-ordinatedentrance on the market.

The Next Big Thing Cooperative formed in 2006 when a grower in theMidwest won the right to manage the SweeTango variety from University ofMinnesota. The apples would not be sold until 2009, but rippled through theindustry. The club would be followed by the EverCrisp apple, released in 2012by a group of growers in Ohio; Lady Alice, which was found in 1978 as achance seedling but was not marketed until 2013; and the DS-22 (currentlyawaiting trademark), developed and managed by growers in Wisconsin and


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Minnesota (Brown & Maloney, 2013). Branding schemes had been popping upin the industry internationally, with, for example, the International Pink LadyAlliance, originating in Australia in 1999, although these often operated asmarketing corporations rather than co-operatives.

The club apple licences that were mentioned in my interviews mandatedthat growers become part of a co-operative that would discuss and establish aprice. They would also have conversations and varying agreements around thequalities of the apples and red strains. For example, one co-operative only solda single grade of the apples, completely undercutting the mainstream gradingsystems. While that grade would be based on size and colour, growers wouldcontrol the parameters of the grade, and there would be no premium forredder apples within the category of saleable apples. Moreover, clubs oftenhave a rule about red strains. For one club, the contract stipulates that any redstrain becomes the property of the co-operative, and members can decidewhether to release the strain. Another leader in a club stated that they woulddecide what to do with a red strain should it appear, but they would be veryresistant to its propagation. Overall, the clubs try to prevent the commodifica-tion processes normally associated with production by creating social bound-aries around a variety, and using those existing social and biological differencesbetween varieties to expand the distinctions and gain economic power. Thisrenegotiation of power through varieties is a challenge to the standardizationprocesses that institutionalize highly competitive relations among growerswhile reproducing the privileged positions of retailers.

The expression of economic power enabled through clubs is visible inaggressive marketing strategies that turn varieties into brands. Grant, forexample, described to me how managed varieties began and suggested that thebranding would enable growers to gain more power in the marketplace:

Growers are going upside down right and left. Many of us in the industry …

We developed the notion that what we really had to do was elevate ourselvesbeyond the commodity marketplace. We had to start to behave like brands. Wehad to see to it that we had the power of reaching through the retailer to theconsumer to create true consumer brands and then try to bring some of thatbenefit back to the growers and also try to bring some of that benefit back to thepeople who were developing new varieties.

‘Reaching through the retailer’ is an expression of gaining more economicpower by being more active at the point of sale. For Grant and other growers,that power is accomplished via the biological and social institution of variety.By further institutionalizing a form of competition based on variety, ratherthan standards that increasingly place growers in a single competitive pool anderase varietal distinctions, growers have more control over the terms ofexchange and their relative positions in the industry.

The growth of club varieties has the potential significantly to change theindustry. They represent a new set of institutional rules, founded on


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biologically produced material distinctions. Those rules remain nebulous andcontested, and the future of clubs in the industry is a site of discourse anddisagreement. There is no set limit on the number of varieties that can exist,and yet the degree to which the market will bear new varieties is a site ofsignificant contestation among growers, illustrating the ways that the new rulesare politically fraught and may challenge prevailing interests among producers.In particular, there was anxiety about developing variety-based competition,such that growers will have an interest in the failure of a club apple to whichthey were denied access. Some growers were concerned that if a varietybecomes popular, those who do not have access will be at a competitivedisadvantage, and the premium varieties that they currently rely on could losevalue more rapidly. ‘If someone asks for a SweeTango, I tell them to try theHoneycrisp or a Gala’, a grower, Frank, said to me. ‘I say, don’t waste yourtime with a SweeTango. Why would I want to market the SweeTango, when Ican’t grow it?’ As a solution, some of the newest clubs have developed a moreopen access arrangement, where cultivation only requires membership in afairly flexible and open co-operative. The anxiety around the clubs demon-strates the ways that these new biological and social alignments do not resolvetensions between markets and plants, but align them according to new rulesthat may serve the interests of particular economic actors who have theresources to access more niche markets. The materials that grow in the gapsbetween plants and markets can provide the foundation for a new institutionalorder to be mobilized, negotiated and challenged.

Conclusion

The development of clubs relates to the institutional architecture of the appleindustry and the politics of production. The institutions and politics are alsogrounded in the biology of apple trees. The ways that the production and saleof apples has developed and been standardized into grades has materialreferences and material implications. Those grades take political shape whenthey conflict with varieties, which have a long cultural, social and biologicalhistory. The story of the apple industry is driven as much by plants as it is bypeople. That is not to say that biology is deterministic, but rather that there aremoments when materials engage in actions of a non-human initiation, andthese actions have implications for the performance of economic action.

The participation of plants in the politics of the industry builds uponnew work focusing on materials and the economy (Barry & Slater, 2002;Callon, 2008; Marres & Lezaun, 2011; Pinch & Swedberg, 2008). Materials cancreate economic publics by being a site of conflict, and that difference anddisjuncture breeds discourse (Latour, 2004a). Plant life and the animacyof biologies add to our understanding of economic materials by bringingattention to unpredictable non-human forces, evident in the role that seeds andgrafting play in varieties and red sports. Apple varieties and their compulsory


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re-creation generate tensions with economic trends, and that tension keepsemerging and demands to be continually placated through grafting andreplanting and developing new agricultural methods. As a result, collapsinggrowers into a single, competitive group requires considerable ongoing effortand is unstable because those growers can pivot off the spontaneous creation ofnew varieties.

Clubs are born of a disjuncture between biology and the social structure ofthe market that grants growers room to mobilize for more power. In the case ofclubs, that disjuncture enables growers to change the rules of production. Thebiology of the apple, and the resistance apples offer to the whims of themarket, creates opportunities for growers to have more control over theirmarket position. While there are pressures to industrialize apple production byorganizing it around the idealized large red apple, and a single scale ofmeasurement with a range determined by a version of the perfect apple, thedifferences that exist biologically mean that new varieties will always confrontthe model of perfect production. And yet, varieties are just an example of theways that biologies influence markets. Things that are alive will act, and, by thenature of the changes that occur within living things and around living thingsby non-human volition, there will always be a dissonance in the ways they areorganized by stable institutional features in the economy. The perpetualliminal spaces of biological and social relationships are the sites of institutionalpolitics, and generate what I have called the biology of markets.

The relevance of the biology of markets to sociology lies in its relation to themanagement of the environment and in ways that the liveliness of materials hasbecome an affective force on the market. As the environment increasinglyshows signs of change in response to human activities, the need to recognizethe role of plants in the economy can help bring attention to the logic andeffects of market norms and policies. There may be no way to resolve thetensions between markets and non-human living things with any finality, butthere may be ways appropriately to consider the non-human in proposals foreconomic change. With the introduction of clubs, markets are not going tosynch naturally with available apple varieties, but making those marketsrespond to available apples will take an ongoing effort. Trees will also neverrespond seamlessly to the market. Even if the market were entirely stable andthe prices for apples set, fluctuations in the conditions of production wouldalways require intervention, creativity and experimentation. We could makesimilar claims for most markets in some way, given that no exchange occurs indead space.

In food economies, there has been a recent emergence of interest in foodfrom somewhere, much of which brandishes the residues of productionimperfection in the form of warped shapes, unconventional colours, andunique flavours. At the same time, there is an increase in do-it-yourselfculture, only exceeded by the fervour for commodities made on a small runwith some imprint of material spontaneity and human hands in the finishedproduct. Many clothing labels note slight imperfections in their items due to


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unique dyeing processes or fabric behaviours. ‘One of a kind’ has become amodern shopping mantra. In many ways, this could simply be expansion ofcommodification into new markers of authenticity. On the other hand, it maymark an anxiety about the abstraction of consumption into a highly standar-dized, replicable, homogeneous experience. Crafting apple markets to maintainthe social traditions of biology may be part of a larger contemporary desire tobring the vibrant biological underpinnings to the forefront of economic life.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jane Collins, Jess Gilbert, Joe Conti, Keith Woodward,Loka Ashwood and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful commentson earlier drafts on this paper. A special thanks to Michael Bell, MadeleineFairbairn and Zenia Kish for their support and advice throughout the researchand writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1230494]and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number752-2009-0169].

Notes

1 Notably, sexually reproducing plants and their seeds could not be protected underpatent law until 1970 and, while the Act of 1930 played a part, these two kinds of cropshave a markedly different history of patent use (see Kloppenburg, 2005).2 All names in this paper are pseudonyms chosen by the author.

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Katharine A. Legun is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Otago,New Zealand, where she teaches in social theory, environmental sociology andeconomic sociology. Her current research looks at the relationship between(biological) materials, economic agency and market institutions. She completedher PhD in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the results ofher dissertation work are represented in this paper.


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http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/18237/1/isu317.pdf

http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/18237/1/isu317.pdf

http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1825



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