Critical Data Studies explore the unique cultural, ethical, and critical challenges posed by Big Data. Rather than treat Big Data as only scientifically empirical and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that Big Data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages. Assemblages is a concept that helps capture the multitude of ways that already-composed data structures inflect and interact with society, its organization and functioning, and the resulting impact on individuals’ daily lives. CDS questions the (...) many assumptions about Big Data that permeate contemporary literature on information and society by locating instances where Big Data may be naively taken to denote objective and transparent informational entities. In this introduction to the Big Data & Society CDS special theme, we briefly describe CDS work, its orientations, and principles. (shrink)

We describe how the set of tools, practices, and social relations known as “precision agriculture” is defined, promoted, and debated. To do so, we perform a critical discourse analysis of popular and trade press websites. Promoters of precision agriculture champion how big data analytics, automated equipment, and decision-support software will optimize yields in the face of narrow margins and public concern about farming’s environmental impacts. At its core, however, the idea of farmers leveraging digital infrastructure in their operations is not (...) new, as agronomic research in this vein has existed for over 30 years. Contemporary discourse in precision ag tends to favour emerging digital technologies themselves over their embeddedness in longstanding precision management approaches. Following several strands of science and technology studies research, we explore what rhetorical emphasis on technical innovation achieves, and argue that this discourse of novelty is a reinvention of precision agriculture in the context of the growing “smart” agricultural economy. We overview six tensions that remain unresolved in this promotional rhetoric, concerning the definitions, history, goals, adoption, uses, and impacts of precision agriculture. We then synthesize these in a discussion of the extent to which digital tools are believed to displace farmer decision-making and whether digital agriculture addresses the biophysical heterogeneity of farm landscapes or land itself has become an “experimental technology”—a way to advance the general development of artificial intelligence. This discussion ultimately helps us name a larger dilemma: that the smart agricultural economy is perhaps less about supporting land and its stewards than promising future tech and profits. (shrink)

This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop (...) scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved. (shrink)

Current debates in science and technology studies emphasize that the bio-economy—or, the articulation of capitalism and biotechnology—is built on notions of commodity production, commodification, and materiality, emphasizing that it is possible to derive value from body parts, molecular and cellular tissues, biological processes, and so on. What is missing from these perspectives, however, is consideration of the political-economic actors, knowledges, and practices involved in the creation and management of value. As part of a rethinking of value in the bio-economy, this (...) article analyzes three key political-economic processes: financialization, capitalization, and assetization. In doing so, it argues that value is managed as part of a series of valuation practices, it is not inherent in biological materialities. (shrink)

Recent technological and methodological changes in farming have led to an emerging set of claims about the role of digital technology in food production. Known as precision agriculture, the integration of digital management and surveillance technologies in farming is normatively presented as a revolutionary transformation. Proponents contend that machine learning, Big Data, and automation will create more accurate, efficient, transparent, and environmentally friendly food production, staving off both food insecurity and ecological ruin. This article contributes a critique of these rhetorical (...) and discursive claims to a growing body of critical literature on precision agriculture. It argues precision agriculture is less a revolution than an evolution, an effort to shore up and intensify the conventional farming system responsible for generating many of the social and environmental problems precision agriculture is presented as solving. While precision agriculture advocates portray it as a radical, even democratic epistemological break with the past, this paper locates truth claims surrounding datafication and algorithmic control in farming within deeper historical contexts of the capitalist rationalization of production and efforts to quantify and automate physical and mental labor. Abjuring the growing cultural tendency to treat algorithmic systems as revolutionary in favor of social and historical dimensions of precision agriculture, can help re-frame the discussion about its design and use around real, socially and ecologically oriented change in farming, and so ensure that the possibilities and benefits of precision agriculture are as evenly and effectively shared as possible. (shrink)

Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. This renewed interest in land necessitates asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘whatisland?’ To reach a more profound understanding of the uniqueness of land, and what distinguishes land from other resources, this symposium suggests the notion of ‘land imaginaries’ as a crucial lens in the study of current land transformations. Political-economy, and the particular (...) economic, financial, or political interests of various actors involved in land projects do not directly result in, or translate into, outcomes, such as dispossession and enclosure, increased commodification, financialization, and assetization, or mobilization and resistance. All these processes are informed by different imaginaries of land—the underlying understandings, views, and visions of what land is, can, and should be—and associated visions, hopes, and dreams regarding land. Drawing on a variety of case studies from across the world, crossing Global North/South and East/West, and including contemporary and historical instances of land transformation, this symposium addresses the multifaceted ways in which implicit, explicit, and emergent understandings of land shape current land transformations. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes the assumption that land is becoming increasingly scarce and that, therefore, farmland values are bound to rise across the globe. It investigates the process of land value creation, as well as its flipside: value erosion and stagnation, looking at the various mechanisms involved in each. As such, it is a study of how the financialization of agriculture affects the process of land commoditization. I show that, for farmland to be turned into an asset, a whole range (...) of conditions have to be fulfilled, presenting a typology of asset making in the context of farmland. Asset making, like commoditization, is a process of assemblage, and it is less straightforward and less stable than generally assumed. Further, I argue that ‘asset making’ is not a one-way process. The article is based on an analysis of global data on land values and the case of farmland investment in post-Soviet farmland. (shrink)

According to portfolio managers, agriculture in general, and farmland in particular, can be considered an emerging asset class. Specialized financial vehicles, such as private equity and mutual funds, are emerging and competing to attract potential investment in this asset class. In recent years, there has been significant development of such vehicles targeting South Africa’s farming sector. These innovations are led by a group of market intermediaries who endeavour to “re-shape” South African farmland as an opportunity for institutional investors. These “pioneers” (...) engage in a multifaceted mediation process between global financial investors on one hand, and the South African agricultural sector on the other. Drawing upon an empirical study of such intermediaries in South Africa, this paper analyses the concrete mechanisms that facilitate this particular form of commodification. The paper presents and compares the intermediaries, giving particular attention to their structure, governance mechanisms and asset allocations within this “market in the making”. It describes how intermediaries develop different paths of asset valorization to unlock the “financial value” of South African farmlands. But, it also highlights some of the difficulties faced in the process of translating between international investors and local managers, questioning the “land-asset fiction” that is materializing through the subordination of farmland to the needs of financial society. (shrink)

Environments are increasingly becoming technologized sites of data production. From smart cities to smart forests, digital networks are analyzing and joining up environmental processes. This commentary focuses on one such understudied smart environment, smart forests, as emerging digital infrastructures that are materializing to manage and mitigate environmental change. How does the digitalization of forests not only change understandings of these environments but also generate different practices and ontologies for addressing environmental change? I first analyze smart forests within the expanding area (...) of smart environments, and then discuss five digital practices that characterize smart forests. Based on this analysis, I suggest that forests are not only becoming highly digital environments but also that forests are transforming into technologies for managing environmental change. Smart forest interventions therefore expand the scope of what could count as a technology, especially in the context of data-oriented planetary governance. (shrink)

While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation (...) to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised. (shrink)

This article explores the emerging intersections between the shift towards higher quality food consumption in China and Chinese investment in overseas farmland. Based on an ethnographic study of a Chinese company acquiring one of Australia’s largest dairy farms, the article argues that the linkage between imported Australian milk and perceptions of safety and quality has served as a powerful driver of Chinese investment in overseas farmland—a linkage that has largely been overlooked by literature on China’s role in the global land (...) rush. Drawing on the notion of ‘quality imaginaries’, the paper shows how images of Australian farmland as natural, pure, and geographically isolated have been mobilized by the investor company to position itself as provider of fresh, premium milk in the Chinese market. While such place-based qualities constitute a prized advantage, ironically, they also present a looming risk as the investor company struggles to reconcile fresh milk’s perishability with the farm’s location at the ‘edge of the world’. Thus, the case study not only demonstrates how cultural meanings tied to food and eating shape the ways in which investors imagine land’s affordances and possibilities but also draws attention to land’s materiality as a factor that both facilitates and destabilizes investment in farmland. (shrink)

This article looks at how imaginaries of land and climate play a role in farmland investment discourses and practices. Foreign farmland investors in the fertile black earth region of Russia and Ukraine have ‘celebrated’ soil fertility while largely ignoring climatic factors. The article shows a centuries-long history of outsiders coming to the region lured by the fertile soils, while grossly underestimating climate which has had disastrous implications for farm viability and the environment. Comparisons with historical and contemporary literature on other (...) regions suggest that the underestimation of climatic risks by newcomers is remarkably prevalent in resource frontiers. (shrink)

Achieving food security at a global scale while protecting the environment, as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goals, will require a complex process of collaboration and the integration of analyses at multiple scales. Agricultural and land use models are increasingly being used to bridge the global/local divide, particularly as a means to envision future land access, use and management in different agricultural production systems. This special issue contributes to our understanding of global modeling, governance and land use change. Specifically, it (...) provides insights into the question of: how do the ways of knowing and governing affect the politics of environmental protection and agriculture? The papers in this special issue bring reflexive questions of knowledge production, public policy and civic engagement into the epistemic spaces of scientific and technological development, both as a means to improve the way we model and to understand the implications of governing by models. (shrink)