Data Farm: Precision Agriculture and the Government of Nature

Abstract

This thesis presents a study of recent socio-technical changes in conventional agriculture that it argues represent the emergence of an informatic ideal in farming. Known as precision agriculture (PA), the integration of digital management, media, and surveillance technologies in farming is popularly presented as a revolutionary transformation. Proponents contend that digital media, biotechnology, computing, Big Data, and automation will help create a more efficient, transparent, productive, and environmentally friendly food system, staving off looming global famine and ecological ruin. This work argues to the contrary that PA represents not a revolution but an evolution, an intensification of the conventional capitalist agri-system responsible for the very social and environmental problems it is presented as solving. While advocates of precision agriculture portray it as a radical, even epistemological break with the past, this dissertation locates contemporary developments in agricultural digitization in a deeper historical context of capitalist rationalization imperatives and the birth of modern governmentality. Drawing on extensive historical and discursive analysis as well as ethnographic research in the United States and Canada with farmers, researchers, government officials, and businesspeople, this work 1) advances an argument and framework for a media studies of agriculture; 2) describes the socio-technical system of PA, identifying it as part of a broader, emergent informatic ontology; 3) historicizes and critiques the ahistorical discourse of PA as “revolution,” arguing PA is better understood as the introduction of an informatic ideal of control to farming, one which represents the intensification of an extant, industrial capitalist form, and 4) highlights the emerging significance of agricultural data in the pursuit of “transparency” and “traceability,” elements of an imaginary in which PA implements a modern, digital “police des grains,” part of broader efforts to govern and control nature in the name of sustaining the extant socio-economic order. Finally, it concludes with a brief outline of an alternative techno-political vision for digital control in agriculture, i.e. as an opportunity to foster new forms of social and ecological democracy and more equitable co-existence between and among human and non-human species alike.