FW-HTF-P: Anticipating Risks and Benefits of Precision Agriculture (PA) or the Future of Agricultural Work and Workforce: A Multi-Stakeholder Research Agenda

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Precision agriculture comprises a collection of data-based agricultural technologies and practices that use localized farm data, at the appropriate time and location to make better farming decisions. Technological transformations, such as precision agriculture can improve economic productivity and environmental sustainability but can be disruptive to the future of agricultural work and the workforce. Some agricultural jobs will be lost since the tasks can be more efficiently performed by machines and algorithms. However, many jobs will flourish and augment worker productivity and quality of life. The overall goal of this planning grant is to comprehensively examine the risks and benefits of precision agriculture technologies to the farm or operation-level workforce in the near future (10-15 years). Workforce examined in this project will include self-employed farmers, farm and livestock operators, hired farm workers and agriculture support professionals in South Dakota and Vermont. Planning discussions with stakeholders from the industry, government, academia, workers and non-profit non-farm organizations will help to create understanding and appreciation for an inclusive and responsible approach to workforce and technology development initiatives. The longer-term benefits of this project include prioritizing, designing, and updating precision agriculture technologies and workforce development initiatives that can potentially reduce risks (and augment benefits) for agricultural workforce.The long-term intellectual merit of this project includes (1) identifying and strategically linking multi-sectoral stakeholders to enhance understanding of the science of work and workforce development (e.g. how people learn new skills or augment skills to new work roles and contexts); (2) help evolve new areas of precision agriculture technology research (e.g. system designs that focus on data privacy, trust, and accessibility), and (3) foster development and modifications of participatory stakeholder approaches (e.g. foresight methods applied to envision desirable futures of agricultural work) and complex system tools (e.g. network analysis and topic modelling). The project will convene focus group discussions to interrogate numerous future implications of PA on the agricultural workforce and explore risks and benefits from several lenses, including technological, social, ethical, and governance. Focus group data will be analyzed through topic modeling and network analysis to identify new and existing multi-sectoral network connections based on actors and organizations' common interests, concerns, and visions of agricultural workforce requirements. This project and the subsequent NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier research grant will build on the successful precision agriculture research initiatives at South Dakota State University and transdisciplinary research in Complex Systems at the University of Vermont to advance new workforce development approaches and precision agriculture technologies for the purpose of preparing future workforce under precision agriculture. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop the necessary research personnel, research infrastructure, and foundational work to expand the opportunities for studying future technology, future workers, and future work at the level of a FW-HTF full research proposal.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.