Reproductions

<italic>Reproductions</italic> reflects upon what many scholars consider the beginning of the story—a plant’s reproduction and how it shapes the cropscape associated with that plant. Its history of technology perspective emphasizes the ways production inheres in all processes of reproduction, highlighting the different technologies involved in reproducing a cropscape in place and extending its reach in space and time. It considers three successive phases of crop reproduction. “Breeding” takes germplasm as the cropscape component that best reveals the socio-material components of the cropscape. “Blendings” shifts the focus from field to processing. The cases of soy sauce and port wine offer two unconventional accounts of the deep lineages of commodity production and how they wove into modern global markets. “Reclaiming Waste” uses historical cases of the sorting of valuable from non-valuable to ask how technologies and taste (cashew), the politics and science of racial justice (George Washington Carver) or the talismanic power of heritage as post-industrial redemption (Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems) have served to reverse established categorizations of waste, and how such loopings and recuperations over the history of cropscapes have again and again disrupted linear trends, in material change, in models for the future, and in the telling of histories.