VITALGREENHOUSE


VITALGREENHOUSE is a five-year, ERC-funded research initiative (2024–2029) that brings anthropological and ethnographic insight into the complex world of industrial greenhouse agriculture. From the nurseries of the Netherlands to the greenhouses of southern Spain, we investigate how growing practices, other than human dynamics, and technological systems intersect to shape food production in Europe.

By observing what happens inside the greenhouse, from seed to harvest, from human to insects, we aim to map the social, technological, and environmental entanglements that shape this sector. In Europe, greenhouses are under pressure to adapt to changing needs. The push to enhance horticultural productivity, coupled with concerns about land,  biodiversity loss, and chemical exposure, is challenging Europe’s traditional industrial production model.  The ERC-funded VITALGREENHOUSE project will apply ethnographic methods to investigate how scientists, growers, workers, and environmental groups enact various forms of sustainability. It will also develop an analytical framework that views sustainability as a relational practice, while also conceptualising greenhouses as vital landscapes.

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    Research
    Greenhouses as Vital Landscapes: 
    Sustainability, Relationality, and the Future of Food
    VITALGREENHOUSE analyses sustainability transitions in European horticultural greenhouses. It investigates crop cultivation in greenhouse horticulture as part of a vital ecological landscape in which relationships between multiple plant and animal species are central and in continuous negotiation. VITALGREENHOUSE project aims to investigate greenhouse industrial agriculture as sites embedded within a long history of human-environment relations, integrating questions of landscape exploitation, digitalisation, toxicities, and human and non-human labour. The project seeks to generate new critical perspectives on planetary transformations and advance theoretical debates in critical infrastructure studies and multispecies relations.


    The Research Question: This project investigates how sustainability is conceived and practised in diverse and competing ways within the greenhouse. To answer these questions, the project deploys an innovative combination of multisited ethnography and more-than-human ethnography.


    Greenhouses as Vital Landscapes: The research team will compare how sustainability is imagined and performed in two European industrial greenhouse hubs, the Netherlands and Spain. VITALGREENHOUSE departs from envisioning greenhouses as contained and controlled, and instead reconceptualises them as vital landscapes, sites alive with experimentations, transforming and transformed by their surroundings. Thus, instead of seeing the greenhouse as a technological fix, or presuming sustainability as a universal value, Ibáñez Martín’s approach brings together vital aspects that are usually kept separate,su ch as the ways growers are required to adoptand experiment with new technologies, workers’ skills and daily practices in caring for the wellbeing of the plants and its ecologies, how people in everyday work and life settings seek to know, evaluate, and respond to toxic exposure in and around the greenhouse, and and the collaborations with other-than-humans such as pollinator bees.


    The research team is composed of:
    1. Rebeca Ibáñez Martín
    2. Fenna Smits
    3. Maya Lane

    Rebeca Ibáñez Martín
    As Principal Investigator of VITALGREENHOUSE, Rebeca will examine the portrayal of greenhouses in the Netherlands and Spain as solutions to food provision amidst unpredictable climate change. The fragility and complexity of these infrastructures highlight the ethical dilemmas surrounding the production of food for export. Which lives are worth supporting? Which vegetables are worth growing? Greenhouses draw our attention to the financial and ecological issues surrounding agricultural practices, as well as to their durability and their unintended socio-ecological effects in a world in crisis.


    Fenna Smits
    Fenna's work focuses on toxicities in greenhouse agriculture. Greenhouses have become a focal point of public concern regarding toxicity, particularly in both countries, where European industrial agriculture is most concentrated. Growing unease centres on the toxic effects of pesticides used in these areas. The public debate is often framed in oppositional terms: on one side, greenhouse growers emphasise their adherence to legal limits for pesticide use based on food safety regulations; on the other, critics highlight ecological and health consequences. These polarised debates reveal deeper tensions between economic interest, food security, and concerns about ecological and public health. During the twentieth century, dominant toxicological thinking held that “the dose makes the poison,” supporting cost-benefit approaches that assumed risks could be minimised by keeping concentrations below established thresholds. This paradigm is now challenged from within the scientific community. Eco-toxicologists emphasise that the problem lies not only in the individual chemicals but in the combined and cumulative effects of legally permitted low-dose concentrations. Pesticide traces extend far beyond the sprayed crops and greenhouse walls — they have been detected in birds and eggs, household dust, present in breast milk and used diapers, and even on doormats. These mixtures are understood to interfere with the biological functioning of both human and non-human bodies, suggesting that exposure occurs through everyday practices such as breathing, eating, and skin contact with contaminated surfaces or materials. 

    With her work, Fenna aims to get insight into how people in everyday work and life settings seek to know, evaluate, and respond to pesticide exposure. It does so by examining and contrasting knowledge practices across diverse institutional and domestic contexts surrounding greenhouse hubs in both countries.


    Maya Lane
    Maya is situated in the ‘multispecies relations’ work package, which aims to explore the role of multispecies entanglements in configuring, challenging and shaping sustainability practices in and around the greenhouse, as well as their impact on food futures. 

    This strand of the project asks: How do multispecies relations in the greenhouse shape and change sustainability? Which multispecies relations are celebrated, and which are discarded, and what notions of sustainability arise from these entanglements?




    Last Updated 24.10.37
    @VITALGREENHOUSE 2026

    This project has received funding from the European Union’s ERC
    Starting under grant agreements # 101115557.