Land grab/data grab: precision agriculture and its new horizons

ABSTRACT

Developments in the area of ‘precision agriculture’ are creating new data points (about flows, soils, pests, climate) that agricultural technology providers ‘grab’, aggregate, compute and/or sell. Food producers now churn out food and, increasingly, data. ‘Land grabs’ on the horizon in the global south are bound up with the dynamics of data grabbing, although hitherto researchers have not revealed enough about the people and projects at issue. Against this backdrop, this paper examines some key issues taking shape, while highlighting new frontiers for research and introducing the concept ‘data sovereignty’, which food sovereignty practitioners (and others) need to begin considering.

KEYWORDS:

• Land grab
• precision agriculture
• big data
• food sovereignty
• data sovereignty
• Ireland

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Nancy Ettlinger, Rob Kitchin, and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Any errors and omissions are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Alistair Fraser is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland. He holds a PhD in geography from the Ohio State University, USA. His first book is Global foodscapes: oppression and resistance in the life of food (Routledge, 2017). Other works include articles in the Journal of Rural Studies, Environment & Planning A and Geoforum. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 In the rest of the paper I will continue to use the term ‘precision agriculture’ rather than related terms such as ‘smart agriculture’ or ‘big data in agriculture’. Both of these alternative terms point toward the same practices and developments highlighted in Schrijver’s (2016) definition – data-laden calculations designed to maximise yields – but PA is a more widely used term and captures the essence of the core technological developments at issue in this paper.

2 But only if governments globally continue to reject the possibility of limiting such demand, for example via forms of meat rationing, a dramatic intervention but one that would recognize the planetary limits to this type of dietary change (see Weis 2013).

3 It is unclear whether guidance systems in farm machinery will make a big impact given their expense and focus on large farm sizes, although even here, with falling prices for components and new applications arriving on the market, guidance systems are by no means entirely off limits.

4 Like slow food, ‘slow computing’ has some merit.

5 And requires supporters of food sovereignty to probe the limits of coalitions with the private sector (contractors, consultants, providers of ‘data farms’, etc.).

6 The rise of tech giants might hold out the promise that they will not be evil, as Google once promised, but their track records suggest otherwise. Besides, shareholder value, growth and profit margins are what will always matter, in the final instance.

Additional information

Funding

This paper did not receive any research funding.