Glass Houses
Hello, I Am the River (June 2002)
I am a river that runs down through the canyon
among the meadows. I run through different
places, towns, and cities. I am a gift
for all humanity. When they drink me
they also use me for their lavatories.
I would like for them not to contaminate me,
so I don't contaminate those that live inside me.
Remember that I am the life God gave for
everyone. Take care of me. An unstoppable
river demands it.
--Mario Estrada (trans. Janine Pommy Vega)
At the time of writing this poem, Mario Estrada was a migrant laborer working at the Intergrow Greenhouse outside of Fillmore, NY. It had been constructed in 1998 and was conceived on a scale previously unknown in the state: fifteen acres of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) under glass, no matter the wintertime temperatures. Just a decade earlier Western New Yorkers would have eaten canned tomatoes during the long winter, or rock-hard specimens shipped by rail from Florida. But now a massive indoor growing operation was providing freshly harvested tomatoes to retailers like Wegmans. In the years ahead Intergrow would construct two more glass houses, for a combined total of more than a hundred acres.
Estrada's poem was written during a workshop hosted by the Creative Artists Migrant Program Services (CAMPS) of the Geneseo Migrant Center, facilitated by Janine Pommy Vega. He and other Intergrow employees were living at the Colonial Motel in nearby Oramel, which is where the workshop was held. Perhaps it's just coincidental, but nevertheless illuminating, to read the river's warning: "Remember that I am the life God gave for / everyone. Take care of me." For just below the glass house in the photograph is a methane-powered plant (coal fired back then) whose electricity and waste heat were why Intergrow selected that location. A pound of CEA-raised tomatoes creates about 3 to 3.5 pounds of carbon equivalent emissions discharged into our atmosphere, or six times as much as field-grown tomatoes (Alexander), so it's hard to tell where one greenhouse ends and the planetary one begins. Near the bottom of this aerial photo is the winding route of Wiscoy Creek just before it joins the Genesee River. The creek's cold springs at its source fifteen miles away nurture brown and brook trout, increasingly impacted by a warming climate. What kind of post-natural worlds were Estrada and his fellow greenhouse workers navigating?
Not long after the Intergrow Greenhouse opened, CAMPS director Sylvia Kelly paid a visit there and spoke to the migrant farmworkers. She was so struck by its strangeness that she began writing down the new terminolgy and taking photographs--the idea was to create flashcards for GMC staff to reach across the transparent borders into a new world.
From hooks (ganchos) high above, string lines (cuerda de linea) hung down in long rows. Each line was wrapped around a tomato vine, which were allowed to grow until they were two hands from the gancho; then, the lines were lowered a little more. There were two plants in every cube, loaded on to wheeled carts that moved along rails. Small water lines and drippers were everywhere. Flowers on the plants were pruned to five per bunch (racimo), because this was what supermarket shoppers liked, so a scraper was wrapped around a worker's index finger to remove the other flowers and nubs from the vine.
It must have been difficult to keep up with the new information. Workers were pulling leaves and picking to back--which was removing all the tomatoes from the plants to the end of a row. Some of the language could be translated, like the stickers put on tomatoes (etiquetas) or the stacks of cardboard boxes (cajas) on pallets (paletas) or even the cornerboards that protected the boxes (esquina de tabla). But some of the language seemed to originate in the glass house itself, so whose language was that? White boxes were for premium tomatoes; brown boxes were for seconds. Bottomworkers, also known as leafers, focused on the lower parts of the tomato plants; topworkers on a picker's cart dealt with the ganchos and cuerda de linea.
Twenty years later, CEA fruit and vegetables aren't uncommon anymore--they're the colorful tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, and salad greens in plastic packaging--but they remain exotics, non-native species in seasonal terms. Intergrow workers were among the first to encounter the new millennium, and it is illuminating to read their often supranatural poems from workshops dating to 2001, 2002, and 2003. We might as easily say that the consumers of Intergrow tomatoes live in glass houses as well, grown and harvested by migrant laborers, and the farmworkers' routine experiences with agro-industrial magic are everyone's story.
Works Consulted
-- Alexander, William. "Indoor Farming Is a 'No-Brainer.' Except for the Carbon Footprint," New York Times 21 June 2022. Link to article
-- Kelly, Sylvia. Notes for Greenhouse Vocabulary Flashcards. Creative Artists Migrant Program Services collection, Genesee Valley Council on the Arts, ca. 2000. Link to document