Tiny trees for trendy produce: Dwarfing technologies as assemblage actors in orchard economies

• New dwarfing technologies embody new political economies in agriculture.
• Orchard landscapes are customized reflecting neoliberal trends.
• A type of flexible specialization has emerged in the Midwest apple industry.
• Technologies both reproduce economic structures and participate in economic change.

Apple varieties boom and bust as the vogue for new flavors cycle through the market. Dwarfing rootstocks, an old but freshly blossoming orchard technology, allows growers to intervene in trees in new ways and keep up with shifts in consumer demand. They cultivate customization in apple orchards and facilitate emerging neoliberal trends in food systems. However, the rootstocks do more than entrench actors further into the whims of the market—they also shape economic agency in ways that have multiple expressions. Drawing on work on actor-networks and assemblages, this paper considers how technologies play a role in contemporary food politics through their material characteristics and the performances they inspire. Using apple production in the American Midwest as a case study, this paper discusses the ways that rootstock technologies both reproduce current power structures and conventional organizational forms in food, while providing a platform for an alternative type of assemblage. In doing so, it contributes theoretically to conversations about the role of materials in economic politics and substantively to an optimistic vision of the future of food.