Automated pastures and the digital divide: How agricultural technologies are shaping labour and rural communities

Rotz, Sarah; Gravely, Evan; Mosby, Ian; Duncan, Emily; Finnis, Elizabeth; Horgan, Mervyn; LeBlanc, Joseph; Martin, Ralph C.; Neufeld, Hannah Tait; Nixon, Andrew; Pant, Laxmi Prasad; Shalla, Vivian; Fraser, Evan D. G.

doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.01.023

Cited by 290 publications

(207 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…This will influence agrarian labor conditions and might lead to job losses in the sector (Carolan 2019 ). This in turn might translate into more people leaving rural communities to find jobs in urban centers (Rotz et al 2019 ). Digital agriculture also raises questions of data security and sovereignty as well as farmer autonomy (Fraser 2019 ; Bronson and Knezevic 2016 ; Wolfert et al 2017 ), and might enhance inequalities between farmers (Klerkx and Rose 2020 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digitalization and the third food regime

2020

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This article asks how the application of digital technologies is changing the organization of the agri-food system in the context of the third food regime. The academic debate on digitalization and food largely focuses on the input and farm level. Yet, based on the analysis of 280 digital services and products, we show that digital technologies are now being used along the entire food commodity chain. We argue that digital technologies in the third food regime serve on the one hand as a continuation of established information and communication technologies, thus deepening certain features of the existing food regime such as the retail sector’s control over global commodity chains. On the other hand, digital technologies also introduce new forms of control and value extraction based on the use of data and pave the way for large tech companies to take over market shares in the agri-food sector. Finally, we find that multinational agri-food companies are starting to take on the business models of leading digital tech companies, for instance by developing digital platforms throughout the agri-food system. We argue that this shows that the broader economic restructuring of neoliberal capitalism towards digital capitalism is also making its way into the agri-food system.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digitalization and the third food regime

2020

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“…Fifth, radical innovations promote a new modus operandi in the adopting organizations [35] and the actors connected with them through institutional or market linkages [36]. Arguably, digital technologies and big data change the ways farming is practiced, affecting not only farm labor but also the social dimension of agriculture [9,37,38]. In this vein, the digitalization process also affects all the organizations that are variously connected with farming [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extension and Advisory Organizations on the Road to the Digitalization of Animal Farming: An Organizational Learning Perspective

Charatsari

Lioutas

Rosa

et al. 2020

Animals

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Agricultural digitalization emerged as a radical innovation, punctuating the gradual evolution of the agrifood sector and having the potential to fundamentally restructure the context within which extension and advisory organizations operate. Digital technologies are expected to alter the practice and culture of animal farming in the future. To suit the changing environmental conditions, organizations can make minor adjustments or can call into question their purposes, belief systems, and operating paradigms. Each pattern of change is associated with different types of organizational learning. In this conceptual article, adopting an organizational learning perspective and building upon organizational change models, we present two potential change and learning pathways that extension and advisory organizations can follow to cope with digitalization: morphostasis and morphogenesis. Morphostatic change has a transitional nature and helps organizations survive by adapting to the new environmental conditions. Organizations that follow this pathway learn by recognizing and correcting errors. This way, they increase their competence in specific services and activities. Morphogenetic change, on the other hand, occurs when organizations acknowledge the need to move beyond existing operating paradigms, redefine their purposes, and explore new possibilities. By transforming themselves, organizations learn new ways to understand and interpret contextual cues. We conclude by presenting some factors that explain extension and advisory organizations’ tendency to morphostasis.

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“…As recently as 2016, Bronson and Knezevic, in taking a critical look at how such tools affect the power dynamics between farmers and corporations, noted that "there has been no attention given to Big Data's implications in the realm of food and agriculture" (1). In the years since, a steady trickle of publications has begun addressing this gap: on a "data grab" (Fraser 2018); on the unequal ability between farmers and firms to use data (Weersink et al 2018;Lioutas et al 2019); on digital agriculture's transformation of farmers into consumers (Carolan 2018;Eastwood et al 2019); on the racialized exploitation of labor (Rotz et al 2019); on the embedded norms of digital agriculture (Bronson 2019); and on alternatives (Van der Burg et al 2019).…”

Section: A Digital Agriculture Primermentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Bites and Agrarian Bytes: Digital Agriculture and Extended Urbanization

Ravis¹,

Notkin²

2020

Planning Journal

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Capitalist agriculture faces a crisis. Plateauing yields and profits are driving up food prices, and the ability to continue the traditional practice of expanding into new, un-commodified territories appears to be waning. This crisis is due in large part to the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial agriculture, which systematically undermine the ecological conditions for its own success in pursuit of profit. We investigate how digital technologies are deployed as a potential data fix that does not solve the crisis but merely staves it off. We situate these technologies within the material context of capitalist urbanization, along the way arguing for bringing information back into the neo-Lefebvrian framework of "extended" or "planetary" urbanization. Digital agriculture technologies continue the centralization of economic knowledge and power as they facilitate the transformation of vast territories into "operational landscapes" that provide the material, energy, and labor for a rapidly expanding urban system.

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Automated pastures and the digital divide: How agricultural technologies are shaping labour and rural communities

Cited by 290 publications

References 49 publications

Digitalization and the third food regime

Digitalization and the third food regime

Extension and Advisory Organizations on the Road to the Digitalization of Animal Farming: An Organizational Learning Perspective

Urban Bites and Agrarian Bytes: Digital Agriculture and Extended Urbanization

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