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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. Ag commodity marketing helping hand
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Brock, Richard (author / Brock Associates)
- Format:
- Commentary
- Publication Date:
- 2020-12
- Published:
- USA: Henderson Communications L.L.C., Adel, Iowa.
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12085
- Journal Title:
- Agri Marketing
- Journal Title Details:
- 58 : 34
- Notes:
- Via UI Library subscription., Owner-president of Brock Associates, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, describes his career, the services his firm provides, outlook for agricultural commodities, and farm policy changes anticipated with the new federal administration.
4. Five strategies for building a profitable agritourism venture
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Format:
- Report
- Publication Date:
- 2020
- Published:
- USA: Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 148 Document Number: D11586
- Notes:
- 3 pages., Online via Agcareers.com.
5. 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.