Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. Our existing review of current Big Data applications in the agri-food sector has revealed several collection and analytics tools that may have implications for relationships of power between players in the food system (e.g. between farmers and large corporations). For example, Who retains ownership of the data generated by applications like Monsanto Corproation's Weed I.D. ''app''? Are there privacy implications with the data gathered by John Deere's precision agricultural equipment? Systematically tracing the digital revolution in agriculture, and charting the affordances as well as the limitations of Big Data applied to food and agriculture, should be a broad research goal for Big Data scholarship. Such a goal brings data scholarship into conversation with food studies and it allows for a focus on the material consequences of big data in society.Keywords digital revolution in agriculture, farmers, agribusiness, power, material implications of big data Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. For example, even small-scale farmers are gathering information passively collected by precision agricultural equipment, and many farmers are using information from large datasets and precision analytics to make on-farm decisions. John Deere fits all of its tractors with sensors that stream data about soil and crop conditions and the corporation invites farmers to subscribe (and pay) for access to information that can help them decide, for example, where to plant crops. John Deere tractors are proprietary and the data they collect are not openly accessible to farmers. We can see from this one example that the use of large information sets and the digital tools for collecting, aggregating and analysing them -together referred to as Big Data -has the potential to wade in on long-standing relationships between players in food and agriculture (e.g., between farmers and agricultural corporations). Despite a solid body of critical data scholarship, there has been no attention given to Big Data's implications in the realm of food and agriculture. In this commentary, we argue that current understandings of Big Data would benefit from a focus on their material consequences in food and agriculture, and we lay out suggestions as to how a line of inquiry across the fields of data studies and food studies could facilitate such an improved understanding. Big Data in agriculture?Arguably, farming has been empirically driven for over a century but the data collected was not digital. Agriculture Canada's family of research centres (circa 1920s) meticulously accounted for wheat yields across farms and weather patterns in order to increase efficiency in production. Big Data is different from this historic information gathering in terms of the volume and the analytical potential embedded in contemporary digital technologies. Big Data proponents promise a level of precision, information storage, processing and analysing that was previously impossible due to technological limitations (see D...

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This work examined some assumptions that underpin the conflict between hunters and anti-hunting movement. The moral contradictions of anti-hunting activism are positioned in the complex context of consumer culture, managed environmental protection, and industrial food production. The assumption that environmental groups are by definition opposed to hunting is investigated. Given that both hunters and environmental groups are interested in land conservation, and given the rapid habitat loss around the globe, the question is asked whether joint conservation efforts would prove beneficial not only to both groups' interests, but also to the fragile North American ecosystems and the species that reside in them.

Policy discussions have raised concerns about how big data are used and who has knowledge about the ways in which they are used. These discussions, however, have largely ignored the role that digitization plays in agriculture. Consequently, the digitization of agriculture is unfolding with very little regulatory intervention. Drawing on ongoing research, this article argues that this omission may be critical, and suggests how it can be considered in current policy endeavours. Jusqu’à présent, les discussions sur les politiques ont porté sur comment on utilise les mégadonnées et sur qui détient le savoir sur comment on les utilise. Ces discussions, cependant, ont généralement ignoré le rôle de la numérisation en agriculture. En conséquence, la numérisation de l’agriculture se déroule avec très peu de suivis réglementaires. Cet article se fonde sur des recherches en cours pour soutenir que cette omission pourrait s’avérer critique et suggère comment des initiatives actuelles en matière de politique pourraient remédier à la situation.