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

在过去的二十年里，世界各地的初创公司用数字技术深刻地改变了人们的日常生活。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。此外，这些初创企业与风险资本和私募股权合作，吸引了激进的投资行为。尽管我们通常将这些转变与城市空间联系在一起，但现在初创企业在农村世界变得越来越重要。农业初创企业开发的软件和硬件承诺农民提高生产率，减少环境污染，创造更好的工作条件。这项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。了解当代的农业变革对于制定创造均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方面的培训提供资金外，该项目还将通过向投资于制定农业综合企业领域数字技术使用政策的组织广泛传播其发现来提高科学理解。Ana Flavia Badue将在纽约市立大学研究生中心的Gary Wilder博士的监督下，探索初创企业家和风险资本投资者进行的工业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，在过去两年里，巴西涌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，该国发生的变化对于了解数字技术和新商业模式在全球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农业；(2)采访初创公司创始人、采用数字技术的农民和与农业初创公司合作的金融投资者，以了解自农业初创公司出现以来从事农业转型的不同行为者的动机、兴趣和视角；以及(3)观察事件和农场，以确定技术和投资对工业农业的日常影响。在Loco中收集数据是一个实时观察变化如何发生的机会。这项研究提高了人们对最近工业化农业变化产生的潜在意外结果的认识，如全球和地方不平等、权力关系不平衡和经济依赖。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.