Presentation short abstract

A dissertation chapter on how AgTech automation and racialized labor substitution shape the future of greenhouse agriculture in East Austria under conditions of climate intensification.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, I present a chapter from my dissertation, which investigates how climate change, digital technologies, and migrant labor regimes converge to produce new forms of vulnerability and value in East Austria’s greenhouse belt. Drawing on multi-year immersive ethnography with migrant farmworkers, growers, and AgTech consultants, the chapter traces how digital technologies not only coexist with but critically intersect with racialized labor dynamics in a climate-intensifying agricultural landscape.

The analysis centers on the post-2024 rise of Nepali workers in Austrian agriculture. Agricultural actors increasingly describe Nepali workers through narratives of “heat resistance” and heightened endurance. This racialized reconfiguration has unfolded alongside growing investments in climate computers, digital monitoring systems, and emerging robotic harvesting technologies. This concurrence captures the current state of Austrian techno-industrial food production: a race to the top in automation, framed as the long-term solution to labor shortages, coupled with a race to the bottom in labor valuation, where racialized workers are positioned as the necessary solution to the present.

I conceptualize this convergence as the coupling of a techno-fix—automation as an imagined horizon of optimized, data-driven agriculture—and a racial fix—the recruitment of new migrant groups cast as more manageable or biologically suited to harsh microclimates. Together, these fixes reveal how automation and labor substitution unfold in tandem, producing new hierarchies of disposability and value in AgTech cultivation.

By situating these dynamics within broader debates on digitalization and climate adaptation, the chapter shows how agricultural futures are being lived through uneven relations between technologies, bodies, and climates.