This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultural chemicals have been encoded as agrarian best practices. I develop the concept of agrarian racial regimes, based on the work of Cedric Robinson, to examine how constructed hierarchies of human worth are made central to the sale and usage of chemicals. A focus on the politics of pesticides in the Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the U.S. South, elucidates the ways in which agrarian racial capitalism has been reproduced through shifting antiblack conceptions of racial difference and technological progress. Two key conjunctures serve to draw these dynamics into relief: the development of the application of pesticides by aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s and the shift toward nearly complete mechanization and chemicalization of cotton production in the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing film and advertisements in this period in the context of the material relations of agriculture and race, I argue that dispossession and toxicity are encoded as best practices through antiblack representations of agrarian whiteness. In the first period, chemicals were positioned as the height of progress through racist depictions of Black workers in the fields. In the second period, in response to Black challenges to white supremacy, the notion of “clean cotton” was deployed to represent Black absence as the height of technological progress and possessive agrarian masculinity. In both instances, racial representation has served to justify unstable and toxic relations of unequal power and profit.

本文探讨了将农药的处置方式和毒性作用编码为农业最佳做法的转变方式。我基于塞德里克·罗宾逊（Cedric Robinson）的工作，发展了农业种族制度的概念，以研究如何将人为构成的等级制度对于化学品的销售和使用至关重要。着眼于美国南部种植园地密西西比三角洲地区的农药政治，阐明了通过改变种族差异和技术进步的反黑观念来重现农业种族资本主义的方式。有两个关键的关头使这些动态变得轻松起来：1920年代和1930年代飞机农药的应用发展以及1950年代和1960年代向几乎完全的棉花生产机械化和化学化的转变。在农业和种族的物质关系的背景下分析这一时期的电影和广告，我认为通过反黑人的农业白人代表，剥夺性和毒性被编码为最佳实践。在第一阶段，通过对黑人工人在田间的种族主义描述，化学物质被定位为进步的高度。在第二阶段中，为了应对黑人对白人至上的挑战，“清洁棉”的概念被用来代表黑人的缺席，这是技术进步和占有性男性气质的高度。在这两种情况下