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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.