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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research among farmers and agtech developers working in the rural US South, this presentation examines some of the affordances of smart farming technologies, focusing on the modes of identification and socialization that such technologies both enable and constrain.

Paper long abstract

Digital technologies are rapidly changing the work of farming and what it means to be a farmer. The integration of sensors that track changes in variables like temperature, humidity, and soil health with algorithmic data processing technologies has shifted much of the day-to-day work of farm management from the field to the office. Farmers can check an app on their phone to make sure their warehouses are properly cooled and ventilated to mitigate rot and control pests. At the same time, differential access to these expensive sociotechnical systems is contributing to new cleavages in rural communities, where large industrial farms are able to afford expensive automation technologies and smaller family farms are at risk of being left (even further) behind. On one hand, these technologies and their rapid adoption have both emerged from within and contributed a context in which the unequal power relationships between farm owners and farmworkers is becoming even more unequal and in which industrial agriculture is becoming even more extractivist. On the other hand, these technologies encourage the cultivation of new relationships (between farm managers and researchers, for instance) and new ways of sensing and engaging with plants, animals, and the environment, opening a political space in which new multi-species worlds (and worldings) might emerge. Drawing on ethnographic research among farmers and agtech developers working in the rural US South, this presentation examines some of the affordances of smart farming technologies, focusing on the modes of identification and socialization that such technologies both enable and constrain.