JENNIFER CLAPP CONVERSATION | CANADA FOUNDATION FOR INNOVATION by Innovation.ca

"In particular, I’m looking at agricultural, machinery, I’m looking at the fertilizer industry, I’m looking at the seed sector as well as agrochemicals, like pesticides and herbicides.
And I’m interested in how these inputs became, first of all, commodified, because if you look, two or three hundred years ago, we didn’t have a private seed sector, for example. We didn’t have a lot of the machinery that we have right now. We didn’t have a commercial fertilizer industry, and we certainly didn’t have agrochemicals.

I’m looking at how those elements of what we consider conventional farming today became conventional. How did they become commodified? How do they become market goods? And then how did they get controlled by just a handful of companies? So each of those sectors actually has three or four companies that kind of dominate most of the market."