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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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Most plants combine sexual reproduction with asexual clonal reproduction in varying degrees, yet the genetic consequences of reproductive variation remain poorly understood. The aquatic plant Butomus umbellatus exhibits striking reproductive variation related to ploidy. Diploids produce abundant viable seed whereas triploids are sexually sterile. Diploids also produce hundreds of tiny clonal bulbils, whereas triploids exhibit only limited clonal multiplication through rhizome fragmentation. We investigated whether this marked difference in reproductive strategy influences the diversity of genotypes within populations and their movement between populations by performing two large-scale population surveys (n = 58 populations) and assaying genotypic variation using random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPDs). Contrary to expectations, sexually fertile populations did not exhibit higher genotypic diversity than sterile populations. For each cytotype, we detected one very common and widespread genotype. This would only occur with a very low probability (< 10-7) under regular sexual recombination. Compatibility analysis also indicated that the pattern of genotypic variation largely conformed to that expected with predominant clonal reproduction. The potential for recombination in diploids is not realized, possibly because seeds are outcompeted by bulbils for safe sites during establishment. We also failed to find evidence for more extensive movement of fertile than sterile genotypes. Aside from the few widespread genotypes, most were restricted to single populations. Genotypes in fertile populations were very strongly differentiated from those in sterile populations, suggesting that new triploids have not arisen during the colonization of North America. The colonization of North America involves two distinct forms of B. umbellatus that, despite striking reproductive differences, exhibit largely clonal population genetic structures.

This article is made publicly available in the institutional repository of Wageningen University and Research, under the terms of article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, also known as the Amendment Taverne. This has been done with explicit consent by the author.Article 25fa states that the author of a short scientific work funded either wholly or partially by Dutch public funds is entitled to make that work publicly available for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work.This publication is distributed under The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) 'Article 25fa implementation' project. In this project research outputs of researchers employed by Dutch Universities that comply with the legal requirements of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act are distributed online and free of cost or other barriers in institutional repositories. Research outputs are distributed six months after their first online publication in the original published version and with proper attribution to the source of the original publication.You are permitted to download and use the publication for personal purposes. All rights remain with the author(s) and / or copyright owner(s) of this work. Any use of the publication or parts of it other than authorised under article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright act is prohibited. Wageningen University & Research and the author(s) of this publication shall not be held responsible or liable for any damages resulting from your (re)use of this publication.

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.

In this paper, I use historical description to trace the processes by which hybrid seed innovations and their successors -genetically engineered (GE) seed systems -were co-produced with a techno-scientific infrastructure favoring chemical corporations and productivist farming at the expense of small farmers and alternative ways of organizing rural life. Using a discourse analysis method, I also shed light on why historical shifts in seed innovation were largely unmarked by controversy. I retrace the road to GE's success as a cultural enterprise, exploring the likelihood that this success was paved not just with the co-production of technologies and corporate interests but also with cultural descriptions of seeds and farming. Looking at Canadian seed innovation through the lenses of technopolitics as well as cultural studies, as this paper does, serves to underscore the importance of attending to the responsibility of innovations in their design -before the politics of technologies get fixed into material forms, technological systems and into cultural practice.

The living labs (LLs) approach has been applied around the globe to generate innovation within and suited to real-life problems and contexts. Despite the promise of the LL approach for addressing complex challenges like socio-ecological change, there is a gap in practitioner and academic community knowledge surrounding how to measure and evaluate both the performance of a given LL process and its wider impacts. Notably, this gap appears particularly acute in LLs designed to address environmental or agricultural sustainability. This article seeks to verify and address this knowledge gap by conducting an adopted scoping review method which uses a combination of tools for text mining alongside human text analysis. In total, 138 academic articles were screened, out of which 88 articles were read in full and 41 articles were found relevant for this study. The findings reveal limited studies putting forward generalizable approaches or frameworks for evaluating the impact of LLs and even fewer in the agricultural or sustainability sector. The dominant method for evaluation used in the literature is comparative qualitative case studies. This research uncovers a potential tension regarding LL work: the specificity of LL studies works against the development of evaluation indicators and a universal framework to guide the impact assessment of LLs across jurisdictions and studies in order to move toward generalizability.