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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how large-scale white farmers in post-apartheid South Africa envision the future of farm work through digital technologies. Based on fieldwork in the Western Cape's fruit sector, it challenges universalizing assumptions about agricultural digitalization and labor imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

Industrial agriculture is undergoing rapid digital transformation as precision technologies, data platforms, and automated systems reshape production across global value chains. Yet the labor implications of agricultural digitalization remain undertheorized, particularly from perspectives that foreground the co-production of technology and labor in postcolonial settings.

Socio-technical imaginaries of agricultural futures vary significantly across global contexts. While farmers in the global North increasingly frame their visions around productivity optimization and environmental sustainability, South African farmers articulate distinct imaginaries shaped by their specific socio-political landscape, in which labor is a central concern. This paper examines how large-scale white farmers in post-apartheid South Africa envision the future of farm work amid racial and class tensions.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 and 2023 in the Western Cape's fresh fruit farming and packing sector, including more than 50 semi-structured interviews with farm managers, packhouse operators, workers, and labor representatives, alongside participant observation in production facilities, the analysis demonstrates how race, land politics, and economic precarity shape technological imaginaries and future-making practices in ways that diverge significantly from dominant narratives emerging from the global North. By examining these situated imaginaries, the paper challenges universalizing assumptions about agricultural digitalization and highlights how historical legacies and contemporary political tensions mediate farmers' engagements with and imaginaries of digital technologies and labor.