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- Convenor:
-
Mascha Gugganig
(Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
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Saul Halfon
(Virginia Tech)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel presents recent work of members of the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN) that was born at the 2019 4s conference in New Orleans. We are at the intersection of STS and critical agri-food studies, and welcome you as listener, co-thinker, or future member.
Long Abstract:
Food and agriculture have historically served as key sites for theorizing prominent STS concerns and concepts, such as the deficit model and the politics of technologies. In more recent years, high-tech actors’ and venture capitalists’ ‘discovery’ of food and agriculture as a ‘last frontier’ for technological transformation has led to an unprecedented degree of digitization, in the form of increased monetization through big data systems, automated and AI-assisted food production systems, and an explosion of novel food products. STS and critical agri-food studies, or what has emerged as agri-food technoscience scholarship, have tended to old and new power dynamics between influential agri-food tech actors, transnational and local institutions, policymakers and farmers when it comes to novel (digital) technologies and the scientization of the food sector. Studying related sociotechnical imaginaries of food and agriculture, techno-optimistic or techno-sceptical future visions and their profound material impacts have likewise become important analytical inroads. Concurrently, the question arises how agroecology, organic and/or regenerative farming initiatives have adopted (and resisted) novel technologies, or the scientization of their work in order to become legible to elite actors in policy, transnational institutions or funding bodies. This scholarship has also raised crucial questions about the role of (STS) scholars as both critical commentators and engaged collaborators, be it within agri-tech or food-tech consortia or other (s)lower-tech initiatives. This panel is the result of the open STSFAN—the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network--that started to connect researchers around these topics five years ago in 2019 at the 4s conference in New Orleans. The panel continues these conversations through a variety of contributions on AI in the Spanish agri-food sector, satellite data in French nitrate regulation, sociotechnical fantasies of precision agriculture in India, digitization and biodiverse farming in Germany, and “precision regulation” in meat safety in the United States.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Lucía Arguelles (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) Paloma Yáñez Serrano (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Long abstract:
In this paper we review how AI – a popular and ambiguous term that encompasses different technologies - is being applied to the agri-food sector, why, and by whom. This study is the result of a qualitative analysis of the digitalization of the Spanish food sector as part of the project DEMO (The Digital Turn of Environmental Governance). We first mapped the technologies that start-ups, small-medium enterprises, and big companies are developing, as well functions and applications of these technologies. On a second phase, we traced the use and application of AI, a technology that is being particularly propelled by the Spanish government. Then we applied a case study approach to two AI-related initiatives.
The first case study is a public-funded project that aims at advancing the applications of AI in agri-food “to make AI the governing system for the agricultural value chain”. The partners are from farming companies to big tech developers to research institutes. The second case is the regulation over the mandatory use of a digital field notebook to report farming practices. The first project uses data and the other is aimed at producing it, yet both share a common rationality around the use of data to provide “solutions” for the agri-food sector.
We untangle the rationales and dynamics embedded in the landing of AI in the agri-food sector. Results show that the promises of AI for prediction and controlling are challenged by the various difficulties to gather accurate and reliable data on the ground.
Saul Halfon (Virginia Tech)
Long abstract:
For some decades there has been a gap in the US meat safety regime between an ideal of molecular risk management and a practice of hazard reduction through process control. The gap has been one of technique and precision. That is, in the absence of real-time monitoring of molecular and biological contaminants, and a nuanced understanding the precise organisms that lead to food poisoning, meat safety regulations have relied on indicator contaminants to track the efficacy of sanitary practices. But, recent advances such as whole genome sequencing and rapid molecular assays are increasingly making possible what we might call “precision regulation” in food safety.
On the one hand, this development holds promise for enacting a risk-based food safety regime in which a wider range of organisms are deemed to be adulterants and banned from the food supply. On the other hand, a reliance on molecular and biological precision brings with it a range of socio-technical, political, and ecological implications that escape regulatory control.
Anubha Singh (University of Michigan)
Long abstract:
The push towards digitization of agriculture in India is fueled by the sociotechnical fantasies and techno-optimistic belief that information transparency will eventually and inevitably result in making food supply chains efficient, trustworthy, and productive. The notion of Agritech’s speculative benefits relies on the objectivity and control afforded by data based precision and accuracy– characteristics that are [supposedly] transportable across cultural differences. In my work, I question these sociotechnical fantasies of control perpetuated by Agritech's precision technologies. By centering a multispecies sensibility of relationality through my 16 month ethnographic research of the onion supply chain in India, I demonstrate the social nature of precision. The lens of relationality allows me to narrate the story from the vantage point of onions and in doing so, highlight the limits of the information ideals of precision technologies. I follow two precision technology interventions: an IoT based sensing device to identify early wastage in onion storage structures and; an AI based smart grading, sorting, and packing solution for onions. I show how the discursive and material practices of precision technologies downplay the varied socio-natural characteristics of onions, and Indian small farmers’ embodied, experiential knowledge by calling it “subjective.” However, there exists a wide gap between the promise of these technologies and their low rate of adoption by the farmers in India. I theorise this gap by investigating the friction, and its consequences, that precision technologies encounter when they move out of developers’ spaces and into the social life of agriculture.
Alina Gombert (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Long abstract:
Glitches herald the breakdown of digital infrastructures. Glitch refers to routine moments of malfunction and irregularity in digital technologies. On one hand, glitches grant us a behind-the-scenes perspective on digital technologies and give us a sense of their materiality and fragility. On the other hand, glitches appear as generative fissures, pushing us to reflect on a technologies logic and pointing at the contingency and potentiality of other digital infrastructures. Glitches constitute the starting point for this project, which looks at digital agriculture in Germany. The research will explore how glitches are both experienced and evoked by those who farm with digital tools. With this, previously underexposed aspects of digital farming come into focus: the quotidian irregularity, tinkering, circumventing, and dealing with errors. In the fine arts, glitches have emerged both as a subgenre and a subject of theory-building: The curator and writer Legacy Russel coined the term glitch feminism, calling for new worlds and the refusal of gender binaries. In human geography, glitch epistemologies were used as a vehicle to understand digital urbanity. Building on glitch scholarship, this project shifts the focus from urban to rural contexts and builds a bridge to STS literature on breakdown and repair. This project asks how digital farming can get known through the glitches. Looking at these digital failures can lead to a more nuanced engagement with digital technologies, attending both to their tendencies to enforce certain logics and as well to their potentials to challenge the status quo, opening landscapes of possibility.
Sarah Hackfort (Humboldt University Berlin) Mascha Gugganig (Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich)
Short abstract:
“Digitization… what?” This talk poses the rather provocative question whether digital technologies with its premise of standardization and automation are fundamentally opposed to biodiverse farming approaches.
Long abstract:
“Digitization… what?” Often this is the first reaction of farmers who practice regenerative or biodiverse farming when asked whether they use digital technologies on their farm. GPS-controlled tractors, drones, or the Internet of Things are rarely a lived reality, while for others the question may arise in daily work how certain tasks could be simplified through certain technical means. This talk is part of a research project that explores the possibilities and limits of digitization in small and medium-sized regenerative / biodiverse farming. It poses the rather provocative question whether digital technologies with its premise of standardization and automation are fundamentally opposed to biodiverse farming approaches. Based on a speculative design workshop with German small-/medium-scale and regenerative farmers in Munich in October 2023, we present results of their future visions of farming, their co-designed speculations, and what role digital technologies could or should not play therein. This exercise showed that the binary framing of digitization and biodiverse farming was not prevalent among the farmers. Rather, they would generally integrate digital technologies in their speculative designs as one-of-many components that needed to serve those very farming practices. We will juxtapose these findings with results from a Germany-wide survey that we conducted from June to August 2023 and that likewise explored what role digital technologies should play in their farming. We connect these findings to the growing trend of grass-roots organizations and farm hackers doing DIY (digital) farm-tool development.