Presentation short abstract

We examine how R&D funding architectures shape digital agricultural technologies, comparing agtech ecosystems in the US, Europe and MENA. These funding regimes are not neutral enablers of innovation but should be understood as key sites where the social lives of technologies are pre-configured.

Presentation long abstract

The digitalisation in agriculture is often analysed at the level of farm adoption, data extraction, and labour control. This paper instead moves upstream to examine how research and development (R&D) in agricultural technologies is shaped by funding architectures and financial capital, and how these dynamics prefigure the “future of agriculture” that the panel interrogates. We present preliminary results on how different agtech innovation ecosystems organise and finance R&D, comparing: 1) Silicon Valley–style venture capital models in California, the Netherlands, and the UAE; 2) a Mittelstand-oriented model in Osnabrück; 3) externally funded agtech initiatives in Egypt and Lebanon, where foreign states and donors are central; and 4) AgLaunch in the US as an extreme case where R&D and socio-ecological transformation are promoted. These cases highlight contrasting configurations of public funding, private equity, state investment, and philanthropic capital. Across these sites, we ask: How do funding sources and instruments influence which technologies are developed, for whom, and with what agrarian imaginaries? How do R&D funding structures shape data ownership, control, and risk? Rather than mapping agri-food systems, we focus on the earliest stages of innovation, where financial capital, policy incentives, and investor expectations already shape – and potentially stabilise – particular technical pathways. We argue that R&D funding regimes are not neutral enablers of innovation but need to be understood as key sites where the social lives of technologies are pre-configured. The paper seeks to foreground R&D finance as a crucial terrain of “productive tension” between digital technologies and agricultural knowledge production.