Precision Agriculture and Governing Nature

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This award supports a doctoral dissertation research project that undertakes a detailed study of precision agriculture, a digitally mediated approach to farming. That approach is of rapidly growing social and environmental concern; it promises to shape conversations around climate change, food security, and the political and cultural effects of digital technology and big data in years to come. Precision agriculture has the potential to mitigate the environmental effects of farming while helping to increase food production for a growing world population. However, it will likely accelerate the processes of farm consolidation and automation, raising serious concerns regarding labor and economic inequality. Existing scholarly work on precision agriculture tends to focus on technical problems to the exclusion of the socio-cultural and environmental issues this study focuses on. The proposed research therefore creates and advances knowledge regarding the social, cultural, political, and environmental corollaries of this transformation, knowledge that helps shape and highlight the possibilities and consequences of precision agriculture. It will contribute new data and perspectives of relevance to both the scientific and humanities communities while participating in larger conversations about technology, culture, and the environment. The primary objective of this project is to advance understanding of precision agriculture, an approach to farming leveraging the power of digital sensing and big data analytics to evaluate and customize crop management, livestock, and farm operations in extreme detail. It seeks to determine how and why precision agriculture developed, and what consequences is it likely to have. The overarching goal is to produce an empirically grounded history of precision agriculture that pairs discursive and historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in two distinct agricultural regions of the United States, Indiana and New York. The researcher will use multiple methods including participant observation, interviews, archival research and discourse analysis. Research data will be gathered at farms, businesses, universities and trade organizations invested in this approach. He will generate a granular and critically-informed account of precision agriculture that shows how precision agriculture is being designed, used, and understood; the account will, in turn, serve to advance understanding of the drivers and consequences of digital technology in food and farming systems. The research will contribute to broader social goals by folding its findings into larger design, policy, and cultural discussions regarding digital technology, food systems, automation, and ecology.