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Accepted Paper:
Paper Short Abstract:
Based on fieldwork research of techno-politics and agri-cultures in several industrial farming companies and cooperatives in the Central Bohemian Region, I seek to demonstrate multiple "fields of tension” between progressive technologies and local agricultural reason.
Paper Abstract:
Over the centuries, human activity has been oriented toward improving farming tools, cultivation techniques, and proto-agronomical schemes (e.g., Scott 2017). Technological progress brought by 20th Century High Modernism then enabled the rapid industrialization of farming. Recent decades have seen another unprecedented acceleration that went far beyond the invention of combine harvesters and tractors: industrial, conventional, or even ecological farming underwent changes initiated by so-called Precision Agriculture (henceforth PA, e.g., GPS, GIS, measuring local soil condition, fertilization, erosion risk, etc.).
The digital legibility of land, landscape, soil, forage, and harvest entails new impulses into the farmer's lives. Contemporary agro-technical research has shown that this "digital turn" has an ambiguous impact on farming. On the one hand, PA technologies have endowed the emerging "cyborg farmer" - a more-than-human assemblage of humans, crops, and complex technological vehicles - with advanced IT technologies devoted to adding new scales of digital care into an agricultural environment. On the other hand, such advanced cyborgization reveals extensive niches of technological exclusion and resistance of non-PA (or less cyborgized) farmers.
My research paper will examine these "growing" fields of tension. Based on participant observation in several industrial farming companies and cooperatives located at the edge of three Czech Republic regions I seek to demonstrate the multiplicities, disruptions, and continuities in technological practice and agricultural reason (Appadurai 2024). More precisely, I will explore the agri-ontologies with which farmers and corresponding agri-cultural entities are enacted and entangled through more-than-human techno-processes of cultivation, growth & decay (Hage 2021).
Innovation, experience and tradition: writing and unwriting agricultural knowledge
Session 2