ABSTRACT
One of the financial means that NSW farmers use to hedge against uncertainties in their own crop is to buy wheat futures. In the context of futures they again facilitate fungibility, the seamless flow of information, money and physical wheat in and through something called the global economy. In this chapter we consider what a focus on the farming household, and its interaction with the material plantiness of wheat, can offer to our understanding of how the complex challenges of the next few decades might be negotiated. The tensions are many; between Next Year and several decades hence, between increasing demand for wheat and increasing difficulty maintaining viable farming households, between protein levels in the endosperm of a wheat grain and computer manipulations of the same in Chicago or Singapore. Our entry point to these tightly knotted tensions and challenges is climate change and wheat farming households.
