The combine will tell the truth

On precision agriculture and algorithmic rationality

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5260852
AutoresCarrie Miles (0000-0002-6654-2430, Indiana University Bloomington, autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume6
Fascículo1
Páginas205395171984944
Data de publicação2019-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoBig Data & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/2053951719849444
OpenAlexW2945831990
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas82
Referências citadas39

Recent technological and methodological changes in farming have led to an emerging set of claims about the role of digital technology in food production. Known as precision agriculture, the integration of digital management and surveillance technologies in farming is normatively presented as a revolutionary transformation. Proponents contend that machine learning, Big Data, and automation will create more accurate, efficient, transparent, and environmentally friendly food production, staving off both food insecurity and ecological ruin. This article contributes a critique of these rhetorical and discursive claims to a growing body of critical literature on precision agriculture. It argues precision agriculture is less a revolution than an evolution, an effort to shore up and intensify the conventional farming system responsible for generating many of the social and environmental problems precision agriculture is presented as solving. While precision agriculture advocates portray it as a radical, even democratic epistemological break with the past, this paper locates truth claims surrounding datafication and algorithmic control in farming within deeper historical contexts of the capitalist rationalization of production and efforts to quantify and automate physical and mental labor. Abjuring the growing cultural tendency to treat algorithmic systems as revolutionary in favor of social and historical dimensions of precision agriculture, can help re-frame the discussion about its design and use around real, socially and ecologically oriented change in farming, and so ensure that the possibilities and benefits of precision agriculture are as evenly and effectively shared as possible

Agriculture · Economics · Environmental ethics · Management · Political science · Precision agriculture · Rationality · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Computer Science · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Law · Ecology