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22 - Future and Food: New Technologies, Old Political Debates

from Part VI - Food and Agriculture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

By
Michael Carolan
Edited by
Katharine Legun ,
Julie C. Keller ,
Michael Carolan  and
Michael M. Bell
Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

This chapter looks at two case studies: two groups that are part of “smart” farming assemblages in quite divergent ways. These data are derived from interviews with (1) twenty employees (technicians, sale reps, and engineers) from various big data companies located from around North America and the U.K., and (2) eighteen farmers from around the USA engaged to various degrees with the loosely organized group called Farm Hack. The chapter beings by briefly introducing each empirical case. Next, findings from an instrument used to generate word clouds are explored. The word clouds are used to interrogate how the two populations thought about the concept of good citizen. The chapter concludes by discussing what it means for data and code in an agricultural context to have politics and how we might think about prioritizing some techniques, in particular, those supporting collaborative ontologies, over others.

Keywords

digital agricultureprecision agriculturesmart farminggovernancecollaboration
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology , pp. 377 - 389
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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