Make grow and let sweat: greenhouse technologies and climate risks among Romanian migrant farmworkers in Eastern Austria

Abstract High-tech greenhouses are increasingly promoted as forms of “protected cultivation” capable of safeguarding food production under conditions of climate change. This article problematizes that assumption. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Romanian migrant farmworkers, as well as interviews with growers and horticultural consultants in an Eastern Austrian greenhouse cluster, I examine how greenhouse technologies and social inequities reshape occupational climate risks, and how their impacts on farmworker health are often normalized, downplayed, or institutionally misrecognized. Bringing together biopolitical scholarship and critical heat studies, I argue that the capacitation of plants is linked to the debilitation of worker bodies - a dynamic I describe as “make grow and let sweat”. By foregrounding workers’ embodied experiences, the article contributes to debates on agrotechnology, climate adaptation, and labor justice, arguing that climate-resilient farming can displace its bodily burdens onto migrant farmworkers and their families. These findings show why worker health must be central to assessments of climate-smart agricultural technologies.