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2. Acting like an algorithm: digital farming platforms and the trajectories they (need not) lock-in
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Carolan, Michael (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12-01
- Published:
- USA: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12047
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Journal Title Details:
- Vol. 37, issue 4
- Notes:
- 13 pages, via Online Journal, This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved.
3. Agencing an innovative territorial trade scheme between crop and livestock farming: the contributions of the sociology of market agencements to alternative agri-food network analysis
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Velly, Ronan Le (author) and Moraine, Marc (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12-01
- Published:
- USA: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12045
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Journal Title Details:
- Vol. 37, issue 4
- Notes:
- 14 pages, via Online Journal, The aim of this article is to show the relevance of the sociology of market agencements (an offshoot of actor–network theory) for studying the creation of alternative agri-food networks. The authors start with their finding that most research into alternative agri-food networks takes a strictly informative, cursory look at the conditions under which these networks are gradually created. They then explain how the sociology of market agencements analyzes the construction of innovative markets and how it can be used in agri-food studies. The relevance of this theoretical frame is shown based on an experiment aimed at creating a local trade scheme between manure from livestock farms and alfalfa grown by grain farmers. By using the concepts of the sociology of market agencements, the authors reveal the operations that are required to create an alternative agri-food network and underscore the difficulties that attend each one of these operations. This enables them to see the phenomena of lock-ins and sociotechnical transition in a new light.
4. Blunting EU Regulation 1107/2009: following a regulation into a system of agricultural innovation
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Payne-Gifford, Sophie (author), Srinivasan, C.S. (author), and Dorward, Peter (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12-06
- Published:
- USA: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12040
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Notes:
- 21 pages, via Online Journal, This paper explores the role of regulation and legislation on influencing the development and diffusion of technologies and methods of crop production. To do this, the change in pesticide registration under European Regulation 1107/2009 ‘Placing Plant Protection Products on the Market’ was followed through the UK’s agricultural system of innovation. Fieldwork included: a series of interviews conducted with scientists, agronomists and industry organisations; a programme of visiting agricultural events; as well as sending an electronic survey to British potato growers. The innovation system is noted to have made the legislation less restrictive than originally proposed. The most notable system response to the legislation is the adjustment of agrochemical company pesticide discovery strategy and their expansion into biologically derived treatments. There have also been other innovation responses: agricultural seed companies have been breeding in pathogen resistance in their cultivars; agricultural consultancies are prepared to recommend pathogen-resistant seeds; scientists are using the change as justification for adopting their solutions; the agricultural levy boards funded research into off-label pesticide uses; and producers, potato growers in particular, have been seeking advice, but not changing their growing practices.
5. Competing food sovereignties: GMO-free activism, democracy and state preemptive laws in Southern Oregon
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Daye, Rebecka (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12-01
- Published:
- USA: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12046
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Journal Title Details:
- Vol. 37, issue 4
- Notes:
- 13 pages, via Online Journal, Indicators of food sovereignty and food democracy center on people having the right and ability to define their food polices and strategies with respect to food culture, food security, sustainability and use of natural resources. Yet food sovereignty, like democracy, exists on multiple and competing scales, and policymakers and citizens often have different agendas and priorities. In passing a ban on the use of genetically-modified (GMO) seeds in agriculture, Jackson County, Oregon has obtained some measure of food sovereignty. Between 2016 and 2017 ethnographic research was undertaken in rural Southern Oregon where local community and State of Oregon priorities regarding the use of GMO crops are in conflict. This article presents ethnographic research findings about the expression and negotiation of multiple food sovereignties by civil society in rural southern Oregon and the State of Oregon via democratic processes. In particular, these findings illustrate the effects of socio-political power dynamics on local and state acts of food sovereignty, democracy and agrifood policy by analyzing what the different expressions of food sovereignty reveal for its implementation at the local level.
6. Hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency: social media affordances and the governance of farm animal protection
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Rodak, Olga (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-06
- Published:
- Netherlands: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 203 Document Number: D12240
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Journal Title Details:
- Vol. 37 Iss. 2
- Notes:
- 15 pages, The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad (in: Leonard et al. (eds), Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms.
7. How farmers “repair” the industrial agricultural system
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Houser, Matthew (author), Gunderson, Ryan (author), Stuart, Diana (author), and Denny, Riva C.H. (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-03-31
- Published:
- USA: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12059
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Notes:
- 15 pages, via Online journal, Scholars are increasingly calling for the environmental issues of the industrial agricultural system to be addressed via eventual agroecological system-level transformation. It is critical to identify the barriers to this transition. Drawing from Henke’s (Cultivating science, harvesting power: science and industrial agriculture in California, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008) theory of “repair,” we explore how farmers participate in the reproduction of the industrial system through “discursive repair,” or arguing for the continuation of the industrial agriculture system. Our empirical case relates to water pollution from nitrogen fertilizer and draws data from a sample of over 150 interviews with row-crop farmers in the midwestern United States. We find that farmers defend this system by denying agriculture’s causal role and proposing the potential for within-system solutions. They perform these defenses by drawing on ideological positions (agrarianism, market-fundamentalism and techno-optimism) and may be ultimately led to seek system maintenance because they are unable to envision an alternative to the industrial agriculture system.
8. Impacts on food policy from traditional and social media framing of moral outrage and cultural stereotypes
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Small, Virginia (author) and Warn, James (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-06
- Published:
- United States: Springer Nature B.V. 2019
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 203 Document Number: D12228
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Journal Title Details:
- v. 37, iss. 2
- Notes:
- 16 pages, Food policy increasingly attempts to accommodate a wider and more diverse range of stakeholder interests. However, the emerging influence of different communities and networks of actors with localized concerns and interests around how food should be produced and traded, can challenge attempts to achieving more open, sustainable and globally-integrated food chains. This article analyses how cultural factors internal to a developed country can disrupt the export of food to a developing country. A framing analysis is applied to examine how activists using social media to interact with the traditional news media in Australia were able to inflame public opinion and provoke outrage to disrupt the policy agenda. The paper contains a case study analysis of the media controversy in 2011 around the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesian abattoirs and the subsequent banning of live cattle exports to Indonesia by Australia. The analysis draws on the theory of binary cultural oppositions to examine how practices in relation to the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesia were reframed, through extensive media coverage of moral outrage into a critique of the values and cultural practices of Indonesian society.
9. Is there a convincing case for climate veganism?
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Kortetmäki, Teea (author) and Oksanen, Markku (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12-06
- Published:
- USA: Springer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12041
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Notes:
- 12 pages, via Online Journal, Climate change compels us to rethink the ethics of our dietary choices and has become an interesting issue for ethicists concerned about diets, including animal ethicists. The defenders of veganism have found that climate change provides a new reason to support their cause because many animal-based foods have high greenhouse gas emissions. The new style of argumentation, the ‘climatic argument(s) for veganism’, may benefit animals by persuading even those who are not concerned about animals themselves but worry about climate change. The arguments about the high emissions of animal-based food, and a resulting moral obligation to abstain from eating such products, are an addition to the prior forms of argument for principled veganism grounded on the moral standing of, and concern for, nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine whether the climatic argument for veganism is convincing. We propose a formulation for the amended version of the argument and discuss its implications and differences compared to the moral obligations of principled veganism. We also reflect upon the implications of our findings on agricultural and food ethics more generally.
10. Palatable disruption: the politics of plant milk
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Clay, Nathan (author), Sexton, Alexandra E. (author), Garnett, Tara (author), and Lorimer, Jamie (author)
- Format:
- Journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12-01
- Published:
- USA: Sringer
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12043
- Journal Title:
- Agriculture and Human Values
- Journal Title Details:
- Vol. 37, issue 4
- Notes:
- 18 pages, via Online Journal, Plant-based milk alternatives–or mylks–have surged in popularity over the past ten years. We consider the politics and consumer subjectivities fostered by mylks as part of the broader trend towards ‘plant-based’ food. We demonstrate how mylk companies inherit and strategically deploy positive framings of milk as wholesome and convenient, as well as negative framings of dairy as environmentally damaging and cruel, to position plant-based as the ‘better’ alternative. By navigating this affective landscape, brands attempt to (re)make mylk as simultaneously palatable and disruptive to the status quo. We examine the politics of mylks through the concept of palatable disruption, where people are encouraged to care about the environment, health, and animal welfare enough to adopt mylks but to ultimately remain consumers of a commodity food. By encouraging consumers to reach for “plant-based” as a way to cope with environmental catastrophe and a life out of balance, mylks promote a neoliberal ethic: they individualize systemic problems and further entrench market mechanisms as solutions, thereby reinforcing the political economy of industrial agriculture. In conclusion, we reflect on the limits of the current plant-based trend for transitioning to more just and sustainable food production and consumption.