Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the relationship between discourses of smartness and broader conceptualizations of sustainability in the context of precision spraying, situating imaginaries of the ‘future of farming’ within the political economy and ecology of industrial agriculture.

Presentation long abstract

How do discourses of 'precision' and 'smartness' in the development, marketing, and uptake of new spraying technologies relate to shifting conceptualizations of health and sustainability across human and more-than-human communities in contemporary industrial agriculture? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with farmers and precision agriculture researchers in Mississippi (USA) and Limburg (Netherlands/Belgium), this paper situates recent developments in precision spraying - i.e., spraying technologies that use advanced sensors and data analytics to more precisely target weeds, pests, and diseases – in broader discussions about the relationship between industrial agriculture and planetary health in the context of “the future of farming.” I show that the development of precision spraying technologies mobilizes the promise of enhanced efficiency in a way that reinforces the intensification of agriculture, in part by undermining alternative approaches to sustainability that reject economic efficiency as a virtue. I identify several reasons for this, focusing on the political economic situation of small- and medium-sized farmers and their contested role within the dominant techno-solutionalist (Morozov) ‘socioecological imaginary’ (Milkoreit) of precision agriculture. In doing so, this paper highlights the important role of emergent modes of technological mediation and chemosociality in the political ecology of pesticides, and of agriculture more generally.