Digital technologies increasingly figure in the futures that the Australian horticultural industry imagines for itself. These imagined food futures invoke both hopes and anxieties for growers, workers and agri-investors, and portend diverse and uneven terrains of belonging and possession.
Paper long abstract:
Digital technologies—from blockchain to smart farm applications, AI-driven robotics and digitally-mediated compliance and accreditation platforms—increasingly figure in the futures that the Australian horticultural industry imagines for itself. In their engagements with these technologies—both actually-existing and anticipated—growers and agri-investors pursue visions of connectivity, traceability and efficiency. Digital technologies are held out as keys to accessing long-desired, if often elusive, export markets for Australian fruit and vegetables, to attracting skilled workforces, and to shoring up the industry in the face of generational change. At the same time, digital technologies and infrastructures intrude upon and interrupt established forms of production, relationships between people, and relationships between people and environments, in ways that can also be experienced by growers as deeply troubling. In this paper, I identify both the digital hopes and anxieties that circulate within the horticultural sector, and inquire into the terrains of belonging and possession that these imagined food futures portend.