Jakku, Emma (author), Taylor, Bruce (author), Fleming, Aysha (author), Mason, Claire (author), Fielke, Simon (author), Sounness, Chris (author), and Thorburn, Peter (author)
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2019-12
Published:
Netherlands: Elsevier
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 203 Document Number: D12272
13 pages, Advances in Smart Farming and Big Data applications have the potential to help agricultural industries meet productivity and sustainability challenges. However, these benefits are unlikely to be realised if the social implications of these technological innovations are not adequately considered by those who promote them. Big Data applications are intrinsically socio-technical; their development and deployment are a product of social interactions between people, institutional and regulatory settings, as well as the technology itself. This paper explores the socio-technical factors and conditions that influence the development of Smart Farming and Big Data applications, using a multi-level perspective on transitions combined with social practice theory. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 Australian grain farmers and industry stakeholders to elicit their perspectives on benefits and risks of these changes. The analysis shows that issues related to trust are central concerns for many participants. These include procedural concerns about transparency and distributional concerns about who will benefit from access to and use of "farmers' data". These concerns create scepticism about the value of `smart' technologies amongst some industry stakeholders, especially farmers. It also points to a divergence of expectations and norms between actors and institutions at the regime and niche levels in the emerging transition towards Smart Farming. Bridging this divide will require niche level interventions to enhance the agency of farmers and their local networks in these transactions, and, the cooperative design of new institutions at regime level to facilitate the fair and transparent allocation of risk and benefit in farming data information chains.
10 pages, Enormous quantities of data are generated through social and online media in the era of Web 2.0. Understanding consumer perceptions or demand efficiently and cost effectively remains a focus for economists, retailer/consumer sciences, and production industries. Most of the efforts to understand demand for food products rely on reports of past market performance along with survey data. Given the movement of content-generation online to lay users via social media, the potential to capture market-influencing shifts in sentiment exists in online data. This analysis presents a novel approach to studying consumer perceptions of production system attributes using eggs and laying hen housing, which have received significant attention in recent years. The housing systems cage-free and free-range had the greatest number of online hits in the searches conducted, compared with the other laying hen housing types. Less online discussion surrounded enriched cages, which were found by other methods/researchers to meet many key consumer preferences. These results, in conjunction with insights into net sentiment and words associated with different laying hen housing in online and social media, exemplify how social media listening may complement traditional methods to inform decision-makers regarding agribusiness marketing, food systems, management, and regulation. Employing web-derived data for decision-making within agrifood firms offers the opportunity for actionable insights tailored to individual businesses or products.
Online from publisher website. 5 pages., Describes a new Food Trust Consortium , run by IBM, using blockchain technologies to improve food traceability.
35 pages, Despite the significance and growth of wind energy as a major source of renewable energy, research on the risks of wind turbines in the form of accidents and failures has attracted limited attention. Research that applies data analytics methodologically in this context is scarce. The research presented here, upon construction of a text corpus of 721 selected wind turbine accident and failure news reports, develops and applies a custom-developed data analytics framework that integrates tabular analysis, visualization, text mining, and machine learning. Topic modeling was applied for the first time to identify and classify recurring themes in wind turbine accident news, and association mining was applied to identify contextual terms associated with death and injury. The tabular and visual analyses relate accidents to location (offshore vs. onshore), wind turbine life cycle phases (transportation, construction, operation, and maintenance), and the incidence of death and injury. As one of the insights, more incidents were found to occur during operation and transportation. Through topic modeling, topics associated most with deaths and injuries were revealed. The results could benefit wind turbine manufacturers, service providers, energy companies, insurance companies, government bodies, non-profit organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders in the wind energy sector.
3 pages, Big data represent a new productive factor (the "new oil" for advocates) that generates new realities in agriculture. By adding an extra "cyber" dimension to current farming systems, big data lead to the emergence of new, complex cyber-physical-social systems. However, our understanding of the sustainability of such systems is still at a rudimental stage. In this critical review we attempt to shed some light on this topic, by identifying and presenting some issues that put in doubt the sustainability of big data agriculture. By using a punctuated equilibria lens, we argue that despite their contribution to the economic and environmental performance of farming, big data act as a speciation mechanism. Hence, they lead to new forms of intraspecific, interspecific and intergeneric competition, thus putting at risk the most vulnerable players of the game. We conclude by pointing out that to holistically address the interrelation between big data and agricultural sustainability we need a hybrid research line, which will combine the qualities of both technology-oriented research and critical social science.
