Legibility and the Legacy of Racialized Dispossession in Digital Agriculture

Abstract

This paper examines the causes and consequences of legibility as an organizing principle in the design of digital agriculture (DA) systems in the United States. Legibility refers to systems of governance that use simplified understandings of a situation to control and direct action upon it. Legibility in digital agriculture systems occurs at the confluence of two traditions of legibility: the data-driven model common in the design of digital systems, and tactics for the control of nature and labor that have developed in the United States since the foundation of the colonies. Our argument draws from (1) a historical analysis of broader patterns of agricultural technology and racialized land dispossession in what is now the United States and (2) empirical fieldwork that examines the adoption and maintenance of digital agriculture systems in rural New York State. We describe the role that legibility historically has played in the development of agricultural systems in the US, and their consequences for who is able to farm and how. This history raises the questions: What is made legible to whom? In that process, what becomes illegible? While legibility promises transparent and environmentally beneficial control, in our fieldwork we find that the demands of legibility are also restructuring the physical landscape, creating additional invisible labor, producing systems that are brittle to real-world conditions on farms, and creating opaque systems that block people from adapting to their circumstances. In reading our fieldwork together with the historical case, we demonstrate the pressures that are shaping the stakes, subject, and objects of legibility in agricultural technology. As more data-driven systems are used for environmental contexts, the CSCW community needs to extend its ways to understand how data-driven systems impact land, labor, and resources.

Communicating the Benefits and Risks of Digital Agriculture Technologies: Perspectives on the Future of Digital Agricultural Education and Training

“…As for objective two on social equity and food sovereignty, the fact that racialized farm labourers and Indigenous communities were not mentioned at all in the context of farming work identified a major gap, particularly when they are currently at a disadvantage in terms of capital, land, and resources. This ties back to Liu and Sengers (2021) concerns around the settler colonial logics and the erasure of peoples and knowledges through current digital agriculture regimes. It is important to note that land sovereignty, knowledge sovereignty, data sovereignty, and Indigenous food sovereignty are all interconnected issues (Fraser, 2019).…”

“…Of all the different revolutions in agriculture, digital agriculture stands out in its method of collecting large volumes of data (i.e. Big Data), and in how it is designed to take out the extensive knowledge it takes to do farming, and "simplify" the process of decision making through digital agriculture tools (Liu and Sengers, 2021). Digital agriculture is premised on the idea that with the press of a button, evidence-based recommendations will be provided to farmers based on harvested farm data (e.g water, soil, and temperature etc).…”

“…The issues stated above have to do with the concept of knowledge "legibility" as discussed in the literature by Liu and Sengers (2021). In terms of equity and food sovereignty, the work of Liu and Sengers (2021) in the United States on legibility highlights the harm of digital agriculture logic that is premised on both extractive data logics and colonial settler logics upon racialized and marginalized communities. Legibility "refers to systems of governance that use simplified understandings of a situation to control and direct management action upon it" (Liu and Sengers, 2021, 6).…”

Spicy red in Shrimp Town: Smart farming and settler colonialism in Guizhou province

“…A highly digitized form of agriculture is now being branded by official state media and state-run agricultural science departments as highly sustainable, innovative, and efficient in terms of crop yield while improving effectiveness of inputs (fertilizer, land acreage, and pesticides) (Fraser, 2018; Liu and Senger, 2021). Such digital forms of agriculture rely on GPS, satellite surveys, smart farming equipment such as GPS-enabled tractors and real-time sensors that monitor soil parameters, crop status, disease, and weed distribution (Wang, 2001).…”

Critical geographies of smart development

“…Her work provides one example of a growing literature that embeds smart initiatives within postcolonial power relations in urban sites (Datta & Odendaal, 2019; Purandare & Parkar, 2020; Söderström et al, 2021; Watson, 2015, 2016). While critical scholarship often centres the smart city (Kitchin, 2019; Rose et al, 2021; Shelton et al, 2015), emerging research highlights similarities between Green Revolution and data revolution projects to modernise ‘backward’ agricultural economies through technology (Fairbairn & Kish, 2022), locates contemporary digital agriculture initiatives within American histories of racialised dispossession (Liu & Sengers, 2021), and analyses ICTs within intergenerational relationships to living landscapes marked by settler‐colonialism (Duarte, 2017). These accounts embed technology firmly in postcoloniality, settler‐colonialism and racial capitalism, but, collectively, they reify a rural–urban divide.…”