Over the past decade, investments in agricultural and food technology startups have grown to previously unknown dimensions. Mushrooming agri-food tech startups that promise to solve critical issues in the agri-food system through technological innovation are increasingly perceived as an attractive new investment opportunity for venture capitalists and investors. This paper investigates how digital agri-food technologies are narrated, constructed, and promoted for financial investment. Through qualitative content analysis of agri-food tech industry reports, articles, and commentaries we trace the logic, rationales, and (...) narratives of this most recent investment rush, and reveal its immanent techno-finance fixes. We conceptualize the agri-food imaginaries produced within the agri-food tech discourse as financialized imaginaries, and argue that they are specifically tailored to construct, incentivize, and legitimize this new agri-food tech space for financial investment. In their attempt to raise money from investors, venture capital firms further fuel this development by discursively creating an ‘agri-food tech investment rush’—similar to the land and gold rushes of the past. Investments in agri-food tech startups, however, are presented to investors as both a profitable investment opportunity as well as a moral obligation, allowing for food production to cope with neo-malthusian and environmental threats. This paper contributes to our understanding of digitization as a socio-technical project, which includes the active envisioning and promotion of desirable agri-food futures. (shrink)

Silicon Valley and its innovation center counterparts have come upon food and agriculture as the next frontier for their unique style of innovation and impact. But what exactly can the tech sector, with expertise in information and communication technologies, bring to a domain in which the biophysical materiality of soil, plants, animals and human bodies have most challenged farmers and food companies? Based on a detailed analysis of all of the companies that have pitched their products at events sponsored by (...) the Silicon Valley-based convener, Foodbytes!, we show that a large proportion of tech-driven solutions are digital technologies transferred from other domains. These technologies at best inform decision-making on the ecological processes of food and farming, but do not provide tools to treat them, and otherwise provide business solutions not even aimed at major challenges in food and farming. Drawing on a small set of interview data, we additionally suggest that tech entrepreneurs migrate to food and agriculture because it seems purposeful, exciting, or lucrative, but sometimes lack a clear understanding of the problems they might solve with their digital technologies. In making our case about the mismatch of problem and solution, we bring into conversation recent critiques of digital solutionism with abiding concerns in agrarian political economy and critical food studies regarding the role of the biological in both challenging food production and spurring technological intervention. (shrink)

An emerging discourse about automated agricultural machinery imagines farms as places where farmers and workers do not need to be, but also implicitly frames farms as intolerable places where people do not want to be. Only autonomous machines, this story goes, can relieve farmers and workers of this presumed burden by letting them ‘farm at a distance’. In return for this distanced autonomy, farmers are promised increased control over their work-life balance and greater farm productivity from letting ‘smart’ robots assume (...) control over the operational environment. Drawing upon the ways that these machines are promoted by manufacturers in various media, we trace the nascent contours of what we term a liberatory sociotechnical imaginary for agricultural automation across three cases—automated milking systems, self-driving tractors, and robotic strawberry pickers. We show how promises for new freedoms and autonomy are flexibly deployed to respond to distinct frictions that farmers, workers, and even farm animals experience in different modes of industrial agriculture. However, underlying these promises is the purposefully understated self-interest of manufacturers, who stand to gain further control over farms if automated technologies assume a central role in agriculture. Through the liberatory rhetoric, we contend, the imaginary seeks to enroll farmers into a socio-technical network that creates new relations of dependence upon the companies who design, sell, maintain, and often retain ownership over automated technologies. While potentially powerful, this imaginary may nonetheless fail to coalesce as farmers, workers, and agroecosystems exert their own agency on automated imaginaries and technological futures for agriculture. (shrink)

The current research examines the emergent literature of Critical Data Studies, and particularly aligns with Michael and Lupton’s (2016) manifesto calling for researchers to study the Public Understanding of Big Data. The aim of this paper is to explore Irish stakeholders’ narratives on data sharing in agriculture, and the ways in which their attitudes towards different data sharing governance models reflect their understandings of data, the impact that data hold in their lives and in the farming sector, as well as (...) their preferences for how data should be governed within agriculture. Seven focus groups were held in 2019 with Irish stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds, including agri-researchers, those working in SMEs, and farmers of varying ages and sectors. The primary activities carried out during these focus groups centred upon asking participants to discuss four different data sharing governance models, and to work their way through a set of value cards relating to these models. Focus group results are studied using an inductive, data-driven form of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006). Five primary themes cross-cut these focus groups: 1) Desire for a data intermediary, 2) Reversing the value chain, 3) Categorisation of data, 4) The common good, and 5) Potential danger in data sharing. These themes are explored in the paper through a detailed discussion of the focus group results, in which the authors track the manifestation of these themes across focus groups, and the ways they sometimes morphed or changed depending upon the participating stakeholder group. (shrink)

The nature of farming is – still – an essentially biological, and thus volatile, system, which poses substantial challenges to its integration into financialized capitalism. Financial investors often seek stability and predictability of returns that are hardly compatible with agriculture – but which are increasingly seen as achievable through data and digital farming technologies. This paper investigates how farmland investment brokers engage with, perceive, and produce farming data for their investors within a co-constructive process. Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’ for investment, (...) I argue, has material and immaterial components: it includes the re-imagination of farming as a financial asset that delivers reliable income streams for investors; and the re-engineering of farmland’s concrete materialities with digital farming technologies. Farmland investment brokers develop investor-suitable farmland imaginaries, underpinned by storytelling as well as the calculative ‘evidence’ of (digital) data. At the same time, digital technologies have become a key tool for transforming farms into ‘investment grade assets’ endowed with the rich data on farm performance and financial returns requested by investors. I conclude that the assetization and digitization of farmland need to be seen as closely intertwined and mutually reinforcing processes and identify key areas for future research on this intersection. (shrink)

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precision technologies. Often used as a rhetorical device, this narrative has a material effect on the trajectories of an inherently political and normative agricultural transition; with funding, other policy instruments, and (...) research attention focusing on the design and development of new precision technologies. A growing critical social science literature interrogates the promises of revolution. Engagement with new technology is likely to be uneven, with benefits potentially favouring the already powerful and the costs falling hardest on the least powerful. If grand narratives of change remain unchallenged, we risk pursuing innovation trajectories that are exclusionary, failing to achieve responsible innovation. This study utilises a range of methodologies to explore everyday encounters between farmers and technology, with the aim of inspiring further work to compile the microhistories that can help to challenge robust grand narratives of change. We explore how farmers are engaging with technology in practice and show how these interactions problematise a simple, linear notion of innovation adoption and use. In doing so, we reflect upon the contribution that the study of everyday encounters can make in setting more inclusionary, responsible pathways towards sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

The Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy at the heart of the European Union’s Green Deal set out to create a “just transition” towards a sustainable food system, with benefits for all actors. We conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore discourses around power in the food system and farmers’ position in the communication and implementation of the Farm to Fork Strategy. Discourse analysis encapsulates various scientific methodologies for deciphering the meaning behind the creation and communication of different forms of (...) language and identify power dynamics, amongst other aspects. We identified two prior discourses in one of the objectives of the European Union’s new Common Agricultural Policy (2023-27). Our analysis found that the discourses, namely “rebalance power in food system” and “strengthening farmers’ position in value chains,” are marginalized in favour of an innovation-investment discourse, indicative of greater financialization and technologization based on techno-finances fixes in transforming the European Union agri-food system. We argue that entities representing agri-business interests have been influential in the policymaking process and voices representing smallholder and medium-sized farmers’ transformational discourses have been excluded. (shrink)

Robots are widely expected—and pushed—to transform open-field agriculture, but these visions remain wedded to optimizing monocultural farming systems. Meanwhile there is little pull for automation from ecology-based, diversified farming realms. Noting this gap, we here explore the potential for robots to foster an agroecological approach to crop production. The research was situated in The Netherlands within the case of _pixel cropping_, a nascent farming method in which multiple food and service crops are planted together in diverse assemblages employing agroecological practices (...) such as intercropping and biological pest control. Around this case we engaged with a variety of specialists in discussion groups, workshops, and design challenges to explore the potential of field robots to meet the multifaceted demands of highly diverse agroecological cropping systems. This generated a spectrum of imaginations for how automated tools might—or might not—be appropriately used, ranging from fully automated visions, to collaborative scenarios, to fully analogue prototypes. We found that automating agroecological cropping systems requires finding ways to imbue the ethos of agroecology into designed tools, thereby seeking to overcome tensions between production aims and other forms of social and ecological care. We conclude that a rethinking of automation is necessary for agroecological contexts: not as a blueprint for replacing humans, but making room for analogue and hybrid forms of agricultural work. These findings highlight a need for design processes which include a diversity of actors, involve iterative design cycles, and incorporate feedback between designers, practitioners, tools, and cropping systems. (shrink)

Despite increasing attention to the sensors, drones, robots, and apps permeating agri-food systems, little attention has been paid to social media, perhaps the most ubiquitous digital technology in rural areas globally. This article draws on analysis of farming groups on Myanmar Facebook to posit social media as appropriated agritech: a generic technology incorporated into existing circuits of economic and social exchange that becomes a site of agrarian innovation. Through analysis of an original archive of popular posts collected from Myanmar-language Facebook (...) pages and groups related to agriculture, I explore the ways that farmers, traders, agronomists and agricultural companies use social media to further agrarian commerce and knowledge. These activities evidence that farmers use Facebook not only to exchange market or planting information, but also to interact in ways structured by existing social, political and economic relations. More broadly, my analysis builds on insights from STS and postcolonial computing to disrupt assumptions about the totalizing power of digital technologies and affirm the relevance of social media to agriculture, while inviting new research into the surprising, ambiguous relationships between small farmers and big tech. (shrink)

Timely and accurate information is vital to the success of row crop farmers in the United States. Information access is also critical to conservation efforts due to its influence on best management practice adoption. Public information sources like extension educators have been declining in importance for farmers, raising concerns around what information farmers receive on conservation practices and the accessibility of agronomic information. In this study we investigate farmers’ changing information source consultation by broadly considering the agricultural information landscape, exploring (...) whether farmers have displayed clear trends in access between public and private sources and whether certain farmer or operational characteristics predict public or private source access. We utilize data from a 2018 survey of farmers in four Corn Belt states to examine farmers’ information seeking behaviors and predict the number of total, public, and private sources accessed using structural equation modeling with latent variables. Our findings elaborate on the public-to-private source shift and reveal that farmers continue to seek information from both private and public sources, though the frequency, mode of contact, and types of farmers contacting these sources differ. Results suggest public information sources are still influential, but they are accessed less frequently, tend to appeal to farmers with stronger environmental concerns, and have less appeal to older farmers compared to private information sources. Our findings indicate the potential for extension and other public sources to diversify modes of communication to further their reach. (shrink)