NIL ALT

Nil’s journey and practice in food justice and agriculture labour research has been developing over the last decade as the same time of our friendship with her. We have been talking, thinking and growing together over the years although sometimes in different geographical places. Her current research is on agricultural labour practices in orchards in Turkey. We invited Nil to Looking at the Garden Fence to share her research in the context of art as opposed to academia with hopes that it will inspire new communities.
cherry orchard in the background visible partly through an arch of leaves in the foreground. the background is very dry and sunny looking however there are dark clouds in the sky signalling rain is coming
Sweet cherries crack open when the surface of the fruit splits under pressure. Prolonged contact with rainwater results in cracking which can have severe economic impact. Therefore, cloudy, or rainy days generate a lot of stress during the harvest, adding on to the existing tension between the workers and the management. Harvest season is a stressful time for growers, exporters, and workers. It is during the harvest season that an entire year's work culminates into a few critical weeks. Unsurprisingly, labour control is also at its peak during this time, with managers mobilizing various gendered and racialized discourses and practices to get workers work faster, harder, and longer.
a flat plastic stencil/tool specific to measuring cherries. there are partly visible holes on the tool and the holes read 34 and 30 on two of them. on top of the tool reads “alibre des cerises en mm” and a company logo with the letters Ctifl. there is a single cherry inserted in a whole measuring 34 mm and the cherry fits in perfectly.
The cherry tree can only produce a specific quantity of fruit. This quantity can consist of either a large number of small fruit, a small number of large fruit or, preferably, a medium number of medium to large fruit. Given the complexity of the social and ecological context in which agricultural production is enmeshed, this optimum balance is difficult to achieve. Yet growers develop numerous ways to manipulate cherry trees into producing a desired fruit size range. As a result, today's commercial orchards are more uniform, and the yields are more predictable than in the past. In addition, orchardists have established more control over climatic factors with protective measures and treatments.
a pantone of 5 shades of cherry colours visible. the pantone is very well used, cinrkly and has some water/sun damage on it. it reads “Cerise” on the text. Each colour page of the pantone also has a hole to be able to view the cherry with the colour pantone
Sweet cherry exporters must build the orchard infrastructure necessary to meet strict contractual requirements intended to ensure 'quality' standards. After all sweet cherries are extremely perishable. The standards concern fruit color as well as firmness and taste. These qualities that seem intrinsic to sweet cherries are in fact constructed through highly disciplined and exploited human and non-human labour.
pantone of 5 shades of cherry colours visible. the pantone is very well used, cinrkly and has some water/sun damage on it. it reads “Cerise” on the text. Each colour page of the pantone also has a hole to be able to view the cherry with the colour pantone
Orchard manager showing off his cherries.
Proud orchard managers kept asking me to take pictures of their cherries. During the harvest, they took pictures of their best cherries daily and sent each other these pictures on WhatsApp to brag about the size and colour of the cherries. This act felt like a competition underpinned by the manager's masculinity.
cherry trees being harvested in an orchard on a sunny dry day. there are one or two people per tree on six or seven trees. there are lots more trees in the back. each harvester has a ladder made from thin metal pipe, and metal buckets. each person is leaning into the tree to harvest.
The orchard management team often referred to their love for nature and cherries. When talking about their relationship to nature, they seem to think of themselves, in their jobs, as agents who merely "interact with, interfere with or even alter the natural world" (Castree, 2002, p.191), not showing any awareness that their interactions with cherry trees and the orchard at large produce new landscapes not only physically but also socially. While being fully aware that biological processes inside and outside of the tree are both integral and internal to the cherry production process, their view of the cherry pickers, predominantly women, were rather viewed as separate from this process.

The orchard team members described their relationship to the cherry trees through notions of nature's unpredictability and supremacy. This was because pollination and fruit set in sweet cherries played such significant roles in yield and fruit quality, yet both were unpredictable and varied dramatically from one harvest to the next. As well, cherry picking, done with bare fingers to prevent damaging the fruits or accidentally removing fruit spurs that blossom into next year's cherries, required a certain level of delicacy. So, the orchard management team, all of whom were men educated in horticulture, took it upon themselves to 'protect' the divine yet fragile fruit (and the tree) from the picker's crude hands. In situations where the pickers cause injury to the stems or break the fruit spurs, the members of the management team literally lost it on the pickers, once taking it as far as threatening to make a woman picker apologize from the tree. The management team referred to the trees as their kids that they raised through hardships. It was hard to ignore the patriarchal undertone in such interactions.

When the harvest is near and the fruits are still not sizable enough, the orchard management team interfered with the biological growth process by applying chemical agents that instigate compressed bloom for fruit maturity. After all, the earlier cherries went out on the market, the more profits the company made. In that context, they used metaphors of induced labour. Just as labour was artificially induced by administration of medical treatment to women's bodies in the case of induced labour, the management team saw themselves as doctors who sped up the birth process for the hence feminized cherry tree. The masculinity that permeated the relationship between the orchard management and the cherry trees was an illustration of how rooted dynamics of gender were coopted into capital's constant need to control and discipline labour and nature.
two figures on a box looking machine with a 20 foot inverted cone shape reacing towards the sky. there are a dozen large gas tanks around the figures who seem to be installing a pair of the tanks to the cone machine.
Rain-induced cracking before harvest is the most significant reason for crop loss in sweet cherry production, resulting in enormous commercial losses.

Capital's constant need to control and discipline labour and nature manifests in quite absurd ways. This grotesque machine is a hail-cannon. Since rain or hailstorm can inflict dramatic damage on cherries, the growers use this device when they see gray and heavy clouds signaling a potential hailstorm or, as I witnessed during my orchard visit, a rainstorm. I took this picture when the orchard manager decided to switch on the hail cannons to split apart the rain clouds. In the above photograph, members of the management team are taking instructions from their manager on the phone as to how many acetylene gas tanks are to be used.

These tanks were expensive. Therefore, the decision to use the hail-canon was a serious one, adding quite a bit of stress on top of the existing anxieties the management team had been demonstrating. After all, they had to be accountable to the company's management for each decision they took throughout the harvest.
That day, the hail-cannon sent loud and repeated sonic blasts into the air every a few seconds for about 15 minutes. These waves travel through the cloud formations, creating a disturbance. Manufacturers claim that this disturbance disrupts the growth phase of hailstones. The orchard team argued that the anti-hail cannon also worked for disrupting the formation of rainstorms by splitting apart the clouds. When I asked the members of the management team their opinion as to whether or not the hail cannon really worked to avoid rain, they invariably told me that they believed that it worked. "You can never know for sure what really worked" said one of the team members, "but we must do whatever we can to avoid rain during harvest".
In the meantime, the local farmers were not content with the use of these weather-altering cannons. They thought that these cannons prevented ordinary rainfall on their fields affecting acres of crops. In fact, they filed a lawsuit against the company which later resulted in the company's favour as the expert meteorologist dismissed the hale-cannon's ability to avoid rainfall.

While these devices frequently engendered conflict between farmers and other neighbours when used, every party involved acknowledged that there was not much scientific evidence for anti-hail cannon's effectiveness. Yet, the orchard management, despite their neighbour's discontent, fired the cannons because they could not afford risking rainfall during harvest season and took all measures available to them.

Another complaint about the anti-hail cannons came from the cherry pickers themselves, due to the noise emitted by hail cannons. The orchard management had fired the anti-hail cannon without informing the cherry-pickers beforehand. Hearing these explosion-like sounds all of a sudden, some pickers who had no previous experience with the anti-hail cannon noise, ran towards the vans that transported them to the orchard. Mind you, armies used sound cannons to terrorize populations into submission during times of war. The fact that the extremely loud anti-hail cannon was activated without informing hundreds of cherry pickers working across the orchard demonstrated once again how the invisibility of labour in agriculture was reproduced by the everyday choices of the management team.
an elementary school age kid with a visible face, wearing long pants, shirt and sandals, holding a bucket for harvesting cherries standing next to a ladder three times their hight next to a cherry tree on a bright sunny day.
Teenage boys were often tasked to climb on top of giant ladders to pick the cherries on the higher branches. This boy in the picture told me that he had had a fear of heights before he began cherry picking but that he was fine with it now. "What can't be cured must be endured," he said. He also asked me if I was a traveler and invited me to Urfa, his hometown in southeastern Turkey.
an elemantry school age kid wearing a long dress, head and mouth wrapped under fabric, looking at the camera. they are standing on a ladder harvestin cheries from a tree
Girls worked on the lower branches. They were the most hard-working at the orchard. They looked after their younger siblings, gathered dry branch wood to start a fire and cook breakfast and lunch, and it was them who poured their family members tea after lunch. This girl asked me if I was a nurse or a dentist. I was confused by her question and asked her why she thought I would be either. She said people who came to see them were usually there to give them vaccinations or to check their teeth for cavities.
six preschool/kindergarten aged kids smiling, waving and holding up their fingers to the camera, making toys out of fruit crates.
These are the youngest who cannot be left behind by their families because let alone daycares, the seasonal migrant workers do not even have proper housing. They spend half the year living in tents without access to basic services such as water and sanitation. They also skip a couple months of school at the beginning and end of the harvest season during which they travel from province to province, harvesting different crops between May and November.
a pile of full plastic bags and cloths covering vessels, and a small cooking stove attached to a propane tank in the foreground, shaded by the cherry trees in the background.
High value crops like sweet cherries that traverse international food and labour markets are produced by the work of people and nature. The relations that comprise these two domains (i.e. nature and human labour) are complex reflections of how today's global capitalism is embodied within local networks. Heavily dependent on the availability of migrant labor and state-funded agricultural research, agribusiness sector mounts upon everyday struggles of worker families with different ethnic and national backgrounds. Across these differences emerge a common thread. In addition to picking cherries, women are the ones who feed their families, attend to their kids and remain the constant target of the disciplining gaze of both their family patriarchs and the orchard management.
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Nil ↗ was born in Istanbul, Turkey a while ago. She has always been interested in food and how food shapes and is shaped by communities. After attending the chef training program at the Istanbul Culinary Institute, Nil migrated to Vancouver, BC in 2011 and has spent the next 4 years working as a cook, designing and delivering cooking and gardening workshops newcomers at the Kiwassa Neighbourhood House, teaching the Growing Kids program at the Tillicum Elementary School and performing coordinator and community organizer roles the Farm to School British Columbia Regional Hub. In 2015, with a desire to understand more about food systems, Nil moved to Montreal to do a master's at the Department of Geography, Environment and People, which led to her current enrollment in the PhD program in Human Geography at the University of Toronto. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on export-oriented sweet cherry production in Western Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among large groups of cherry-pickers marked with gender and racial diversity, her work unveils how fresh foods like sweet cherries find their way to the supermarket shelves. Following cultural and ecological interactions between humans and non-humans, Nil hopes to tell a story that renders visible the typically invisible web of uneven power relations at the cherry orchard.

My doctoral research aims to trace the conjoined dynamics of rural social differentiation, environmental change and migrant labour in Western Turkey. The Aegean littoral positioned on the eastern side of the Mediterranean Basin is at the heart of both current forced migration flows and Western Turkey's re-emerging export-driven fruit production. Thus, the region presents a unique context where heightened vulnerabilities of food production and deepened social contradictions of the global food networks co-exist.

In my work, I situate the recent global food production trends in the context of uneven development regimes and today's forced migration flows. I do so for a more holistic analysis of agro-migration developments worldwide. As far-away relations have increasingly come closer and complicated our understanding of place and space, linking food consumption trends in Europe with the transformations in agricultural production in Turkey offers an analytical tool for understanding similar global trends elsewhere.