Disciplining land through data: The role of agricultural technologies in farmland assetisation

Abstract

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

Analysis of the Development Trend and Scheme of Agricultural Electrification Intelligence Based on Big Data Mining and OLAP Tool Analysis Algorithm

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Pathways for advancing good work in food systems: Reflecting on the international Good Work for Good Food Forum

“…Techno-centric labor futures would rely heavily upon industries to produce technological equipment (Lakhiar et al, 2018), so they might simply displace dirty and dangerous jobs from food supply chains to other workplaces (Reisman, 2021). At present, innovations toward data-driven digital farming are usually corporate-led, so they tend to serve corporate interests (Birner et al, 2021;Carolan, 2020;Duncan et al, 2022) and rarely seek to advance ecologically diversified or socially just alternatives to industrialized food production (Wittman et al, 2020), risking potentially adverse lock-ins with undesirable consequences (Clapp, 2021). Many of these agri-tech solutions remain inaccessible to global smallholder farming populations or farmworkers (Mehrabi et al, 2021;Rotz et al, 2019).…”

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