Automated agrifood futures: robotics, labor and the distributive politics of digital agriculture

ABSTRACT

This paper draws from interviews with (1) US farmers who have adopted automated systems; (2) individuals employed by North American firms that engineer, manufacture, and/or repair these technologies; and (3) US farm laborers (immigrant and domestic) and representatives from farm labor organizations. The argument draws from the literature interrogating the fictional expectations that underlie capitalist reproduction, reading it through a distributed (ontological) lens. The framework questions whether concepts like ‘automation’ and ‘skill’ provide sufficient analytic and conceptual clarity to critically engage these platforms and suggests that we think about what these technologies do rather than fixate on what each is.

KEYWORDS:

• Automation
• smart farming
• imaginary
• sociotechnical
• anticipatory action
• temporality

Michael Carolan is a Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Affairs for the College of Liberal Arts, Colorado State University. He has published over 200 peer review articles and chapters. His recent books include The Real Cost of Cheap Food, The Sociology of Food and Agriculture, No One Eats Alone: Food as Social Enterprise, and The Food Sharing Revolution: How Start-Ups, Pop-Ups, and Co-Ops are Changing the Way We Eat. Additionally, Dr. Carolan regularly writes pieces for public audiences. His pieces regularly appear in such outlets as The Conversation, Bloomberg, Market Watch, Mental Floss, Business Insider, Alternet, World Economic Forum, Houston Chronicle, Bangor Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post, Popular Science, The Smithsonian Magazine, Salon, The Independent, Scroll.in, and New Food Economy. He also routinely makes radio and television appearances around the world, having been featured on the popular CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Cooperation) program Ideas, NPR, Radio New Zealand, and TVNZ-One (TV New Zealand). Dr. Carolan is also Associate Editor for the following journals, Journal of Rural Studies, Society and Natural Resources, and Sustainability.

Notes

1 Digital agriculture: a catchall term that includes ‘milking robots on dairy farms to greenhouses with fully-automated climate control […] [and] smart farm machinery equipped with real-time kinematic global navigation satellite systems and other sensors’ (Cornell Experiment Station 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute of Food and Agriculture: [grant number NIFA-COL00725]; National Research Foundation of Korea: [grant number NRF-2016S1A3A2924243].