Short abstract:

This paper examines the recent policy turn in digital agriculture in South Korea towards an ‘open-field smart farm.’ By contextualizing the ‘imagined’ paths to achieve this turn, this paper highlights tensions embedded in different imaginaries of agriculture, farmers, and rural areas.

Long abstract:

South Korea’s digital agriculture policy has been centered on building and spreading smart-farm facilities since the early 2010s. Recently, it has been expanding beyond greenhouses to transform open-field farming into a digital one. The number of smart farms and best practices seems like a blessing on the path forward. Still, a recent feasibility study on a large-scale national R&D project aimed at ‘open-field smart farms’ received overwhelming opposition concerning its policy and economic feasibility. The critical point was that its goals and strategies failed to align with the real issues of farmers and rural areas.

To understand this discrepancy and provide a reflexive understanding of digital agriculture policy, this paper aims to contextualize the ‘imagined’ paths to achieve digital transformation in agriculture. Through critically analyzing policy documents, best practices, and interviews, I examine how the current policy issues and strategies have emerged, interpreted, and represented and what alternatives have been excluded. In particular, the government-led ‘Smart Agriculture AI Competition,’ ‘Best Practices,’ and ‘Pilot Projects’ show multiple paths to digital transformation and mobilize different imaginaries of agriculture, farmers, and rural areas. Compared with the lived experience of farmers, farm consultants, and officers at the Data Center for Soy Smart Farm, this paper highlights the untold imaginaries of sustainability, organic, and rural communities.

This paper argues that the digital transformation of agriculture cannot be realized through replicating Best Practices but requires a complex set of additional conditions and the crystallization of contending imaginaries surrounding it.