Digital technologies are being developed and adopted across the agro-food system, from farm to fork. Within decision-making spaces, however, little attention is being paid to political factors arising from such technological developments. This review draws from critical social sciences to examine emerging technologies and big data systems in agriculture and assesses some key issues arising in the field. We begin with an introduction and review of the so-called 'digital revolution' and then briefly outline how political economy is effective for understanding major challenges for governing technologies and data systems in agriculture. These challenges include: (1) data ownership and control, (2) the production of technologies and data development, and (3) data security. We then use literature and examples to consider the extent to which the political and economic landscape can be shifted to support greater equity in agriculture, while reflecting on structural challenges and limits. In doing so, we emphasise that while there are significant systemic tensions between digital ag-tech development and agroecological approaches, we do not see them as mutually exclusive per se. This article intends to provide decision-makers, practitioners and scholars from a wide range of disciplines with a timely assessment of agro-food digitalisation that attends to political economic factors. In doing so, this article contributes to policy and decision-making discussions, which, from our perspective, continue to be rather technocentric in nature while paying little attention to how digital technologies can support agroecological systems specifically.

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Agriculture stands on the cusp of a digital revolution, and the same technologies that created the Internet and are transforming medicine are now being applied in our farms and on our fields. Overall, this digital agricultural revolution is being driven by the low cost of collecting data on everything from soil conditions to animal health and crop development along with weather station data and data collected by drones and satellites. The promise of these technologies is more food, produced on less land, with fewer inputs and a smaller environmental footprint. At present, however, barriers to realizing this potential include a lack of ability to aggregate and interpret data in such a way that it results in useful decision support tools for farmers and the need to train farmers in how to use new tools. This article reviews the state of the literature on the promise and barriers to realizing the potential for Big Data to revolutionize agriculture.

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Digital agricultural technologies are promoted for increasing productivity, environmental sustainability and transparency in farming. Critical perspectives on digital agriculture are necessary to frame opportunities and challenges for agricultural communities. However, the ways in which digital agricultural technologies are contributing to land financialisation-bringing land into the global market exchange-remains unexplored. Historically, farmland has been difficult to incorporate into global markets; the complex environments of family ownership have made farms difficult to condition, discipline and control, which has deterred investors. While the outright ownership of farmland has been unappealing to investors until recently, land ownership is becoming increasingly attractive due to technological change and shifts in land management. We use a responsible research and innovation framework to examine the movements in land via digitalisation asking: Who benefits and who loses due to these processes? And what are the consequences? We bring together the agro-food financialisation scholarship, critical data studies and responsible innovation literature to bear on an analysis

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