The use of pesticides in agriculture emerged in dialectical relation to technologies of war, while technologies used as weapons on US wartime enemies were partly transferred not only to agricultural pests but also to farm workers in the wake of war. The first experiments in crop dusting were performed by the War Department, and their military origins continued to shape the industrial uses of pesticides and responses to it for decades. According to historian Edmond Russell, “In the first half of the twentieth century, the science and technology of pest control sometimes became the science and technology of war, and vice versa. Chemists, entomologists, and military researchers knew that chemicals toxic to one species often killed others, so they developed similar chemicals to fight human and insect enemies. They also developed similar methods of dispersing chemicals to poison both.” Russell concludes that the institutional links between agriculture and the military were complemented by a shared set of metaphors based in “annihilating” or “exterminating” pests.

The military origins of pesticides have also informed their uses in California, where corporate growers have treated labor like the enemy. Which is not to suggest that the literal aim of pesticide use has been to exterminate workers but rather that their widespread deployment is part of a larger militarized industrial formation that treats technology as weaponry and imagines worker well-being as the potential enemy of future profits.