{"id":3613,"date":"2023-11-05T14:45:15","date_gmt":"2023-11-05T14:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biomaterialities.de\/de\/project\/?p=3613"},"modified":"2023-11-23T11:01:34","modified_gmt":"2023-11-23T11:01:34","slug":"louisa-prause-et-al-digitalisation-for-a-socio-ecological-transformation-in-agriculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biomaterialities.de\/de\/project\/louisa-prause-et-al-digitalisation-for-a-socio-ecological-transformation-in-agriculture\/","title":{"rendered":"Louisa Prause et al.: “Digitalisation for a Socio-Ecological Transformation in Agriculture”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Abstract<\/h1>\n

The future vision of food production is often portrayed as a tech utopia. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), for example, published a future image of food production that includes self-driving tractors, drones, sensor equipped cows, and field robots alongside high-tech aquaponic urban agriculture (BMBF, 2023). There is still quite a way to go until these technologies become all-encompassing or even widespread, but they have made huge headway in the agricultural sector in the Global North in the past five years.
\nNew digital technologies are often presented by politicians and large agro-food companies as the silver bullet to solve all of agriculture\u2019s problems:The food system contributes between 20% and 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Mbow et al., 2019). Most of these emissions are generated by agricultural production, particularly crop and livestock activities within the farm gate as well as land-use change and deforestation for agriculture. Large-scale industrialised agriculture is also a key driver of the global biodiversity crisis. At the same time, many, especially small-scale, farmers as well as farm workers around the world struggle to make ends meet as they are often the first to suffer from the negative impacts of a changing climate. Digital technologies, so a widespread promise, provide the solution to making agriculture more profitable, more productive, more independent of a seasonal workforce, and of course more environmentally sustainable. As such, the promise continues, they will provide a veritable fourth revolution in agriculture.Yet, many of the digital technological innovations currently being rolled out by large agro-food companies such as Bayer, John Deere, or Syngenta are far from revolutionising the dominant agro-industrial model of food production. More to the point, they minimally optimise the current production model through precision agriculture that can slightly reduce the use of fertilisers and water or through robots that reduce the need for seasonal labour (Prause et al., 2021). They do not, however, offer a radically different way of doing agriculture, one that might, indeed, offer ways forward for a pesticide free, more climate-resilient and socio- and ecologically sustainable way of producing food. Instead, data-based decision support tools such as farm management platforms increase the risk of locking farmers into the current system of using large-scale machinery, chemical inputs, and standardised seeds (Bronson, 2022).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/i>Read article<\/a><\/p>\n