Subhead: "Are the many alliances and acquisitions among platforms really designed to benefit farmers?" ... "While a data-sharing platform may put growers in the driver's seat when it comes to how their information is distributed, ag tech providers have not always done a good job of communicating that message. 'Problems arise when owners of the data feel as though they no longer understand who is accessing their data and why,' Tatge says."
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 153 Document Number: D11607
Notes:
21 pages., Online from Think Shift Communications, San Francisco, California, via AgriMarketing Weekly., "While the industry hs never been a stranger to change, it seems increasingly certain that we are currently in the greatest state of evolution - maybe even revolution - that ag has ever faced."
8pgs, This paper presents a critical examination of smart farming. I follow other critical analyses in recognizing the centrality of innovation processes in generating smart farming products, services, arrangements, and problematic outcomes. I subsequently use insights from critical human geography scholarship on the significance of understanding topological transformations to move beyond interpretations that identify only a narrow range of smart farming problems, such as a lack of coordination or limited uptake by farmers. Instead, I examine a broader set of challenges produced by smart farming developments. The overriding concern, I argue, is that smart farming unfolds via the production of numerous ‘misconfigured innovations.’ Using insights from literature on responsible research and innovation I then probe the stakes of looking beyond the misconfigured innovations of smart farming and discuss how new technologies might come to play a role in producing emancipatory smart farming. I pay attention to research on the ‘internet of people,’ which paints a stark new picture of social life generally, and in particular how rural life might be computed and calculated according to new conceptualizations of sociality and spatiality.
