Doctoral Dissertation Research: Financial Investments and Digital Technologies in Industrial Farming

博士论文研究：工业化农业中的金融投资和数字技术

• 批准号: 1918118
• 负责人: Gary Wilder
• 金额: $ 1.95万
• 依托单位: CUNY Graduate School University Center
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-11-15 至 2022-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1918118&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Financial; Investments

In the past two decades, startup companies all around the world have deeply transformed everyday lives with digital technologies. Recent research has raised awareness to the multiple effects of these new businesses and the technologies they develop. They have impacted multiple sectors, such as the hospitality industry, transportation, logistics, and retail. Moreover, these startups work with venture capital and private equity, attracting aggressive investing behaviors. Although we typically associate these transformations in urban spaces, startups are now becoming important in the rural world. Agricultural startups develop software and hardware that promise farmers to increase their productivity, reduce environmental pollution, and create better working conditions. This research aims to investigate the impacts of startups and digital technologies on agricultural production, on economic transactions and on the everyday life of rural actors. Understanding contemporary agrarian transformations is critical for developing programs and policies that create balanced economic conditions. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in scientific methods of rigorous data collection and analysis, the project would improve scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in formulating policies around the use of digital technologies in the agribusiness sector.Ana Flavia Badue, under the supervision of Dr. Gary Wilder of the City University of New York Graduate Center, will explore the socioeconomic and political impacts of industrial farming digitization by startup entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. This research will be undertaken in Brazil, where hundreds of agricultural startups have emerged in the past two years. As Brazil is among the largest producers of agricultural commodities in the world, the transformations that occur in the country are relevant to understand the impact of digital technologies and of new business models in the rural sectors across the globe. This research will be composed of (1) archival research to map how technologies in the past shaped industrial agriculture; of (2) interviews with startup founders, farmers who adopt digital technologies and financial investors who work with agricultural startups in order to understand the motivations, interests and perspectives of different actors engaged with agrarian transformations since the emergence of agricultural startups; and of (3) observation of events and farms to identify the everyday impacts of the technologies and investments on industrial agriculture. Gathering data in loco is an opportunity to observe how changes take place in real time. This research raises awareness to potential unexpected outcomes generated by the recent changes in industrial agriculture, such as global and local inequalities, uneven power relations and economic dependency.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在过去的二十年里，世界各地的初创公司已经通过数字技术深刻地改变了日常生活。最近的研究提高了人们对这些新业务及其开发的技术的多重影响的认识。它们影响了多个行业，如酒店业、运输、物流和零售业。此外，这些初创公司与风险投资和私募股权合作，吸引了积极的投资行为。虽然我们通常将这些转变与城市空间联系在一起，但创业公司现在在农村世界变得越来越重要。农业创业公司开发软件和硬件，承诺农民提高生产力，减少环境污染，创造更好的工作条件。本研究旨在调查初创企业和数字技术对农业生产、经济交易和农村参与者日常生活的影响。了解当代农业转型对于制定创造平衡经济条件的计划和政策至关重要。除了为人类学研究生提供严格数据收集和分析的科学方法培训资金外，该项目还将通过向投资于制定农业综合企业部门使用数字技术政策的组织广泛传播其研究结果来提高科学认识。Ana Flavia Badue在纽约城市大学研究生中心的加里怀尔德博士的监督下，将探讨初创企业家和风险投资者对工业化农业数字化的社会经济和政治影响。这项研究将在巴西进行，在过去的两年里，巴西出现了数百家农业初创企业。由于巴西是世界上最大的农产品生产国之一，该国发生的变革对于了解数字技术和新商业模式对地球仪农村部门的影响具有重要意义。这项研究将包括（1）档案研究，以绘制过去的技术如何塑造工业化农业;（2）与创业公司创始人，采用数字技术的农民和与农业创业公司合作的金融投资者进行访谈，以了解自农业创业公司出现以来从事农业转型的不同行为者的动机，兴趣和观点;（3）观察事件和农场，以确定技术和投资对工业化农业的日常影响。就地收集数据是观察变化如何在真实的时间发生的机会。这项研究提高了人们对工业化农业近期变化所产生的潜在意外结果的认识，如全球和地方的不平等，不平等的权力关系和经济依赖。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。