by Barbara Van Dyck
This blog asks questions about how agriculture and policy frameworks adapt to the needs and capacities of technologies
The large hall at Domaine de l’Escaille near Namur was packed when the Federation of Young Farmers (FJA) held its annual congress there in March 2024. Many of the farmers present had blocked motorways and other economic hubs in recent weeks to make it clear that things cannot continue as they are. The agricultural union wants to support young people in taking over family farms that are economically, socially, and ecologically viable. Yet between administrative burdens, prices that fail to cover costs, extreme weather, and complex environmental regulations, such viability is often not the case. That is why their members took to the streets. The adrenaline in the room was palpable, and when then-Minister of Agriculture Willy Borsus took the stage, the farmers gave him their backs.
Being in the room I realised that the conference programme must have been finalised before the farmers’ protests erupted. It does not feel in line with the current mood. The official theme of the meeting was “the digital horizon: imagining tomorrow’s agriculture”.
WalDigiFarm and the Walloon Agency for Digitalisation focused on the opportunities and challenges that digital transformation poses for agriculture in Wallonia and how to ensure that more farmers integrate digital technologies into their operations. Both organisations receive support from the Walloon government to accelerate the introduction and application of digital technologies in the agricultural sector. In this way, they hope to ‘improve’ and ‘optimise’ Walloon agriculture.
After presentations by WalDigiFarm, the Agency for Digitalisation and a French farmer who runs a highly digitised farm, the chair of the young farmers’ association were given the floor. The young farmer did not seem overly enthusiastic about the need for the rapid dissemination of digital agricultural technologies and instead talked about what he saw as the real need of farmers : fair prices, access to land, less administrative hassle and no unfair international trade agreements. Specifically on the digitalisation of agriculture, he stated that farmers naturally want ‘technology that works for them’. In the same breath, however, he wondered whether it is not the farmers who are working for the digital technology companies, rather than the new technologies being at the service of agriculture.
The tension between the agricultural crises farmers feel and their entanglement with digitalisation touches on one of the core questions of friction research: who works for whom?
Who works in whose interest ?
As a researcher who spends a lot of time on the computer, I work for Big Tech for free. Every time I enter a search term into a platform such as Google or enter a text into a platform for machine generated translations, I create data. The cloud-based company that collects and processes the data which I enter in their system, gains value from it. When I use their services, I enter their domain and agree to their terms and conditions.
Many parallels can be drawn with what digital transformation is doing to agriculture. After all, modern tractors are computers on thick tyres. And when tractors become computers, they also inherit the problems of computers. Fun-fact, in 2021, John Deere, one of the largest players in the global agricultural machinery market, employed more software engineers than mechanical engineers.
In the United States, a related controversy arose between farmers and John Deere over repair rights. Farmers complained that even for simple repairs to tractors –for which they had paid a lot of money—they were completely dependent on John Deere and their authorised dealers. Because of the software in the tractors, it was practically impossible to physically replace even small parts because it required opening software locks. John Deere argued that farmers did own the tractors, but that they only had user licences for the software in their tractors. Unsurprisingly, farmers therefore started working with hackers to unblock the digital locks.
In addition to the right to repair, the dispute also concerned the ownership of and access to the real-time field data that farmers generate every time they use a John Deere machine. John Deere believed that it, not the farmers, owned this data. And it is precisely the collection of enormous amounts of data, combined with software services offered by cloud-based companies, that forms the foundation of precision farming.
The dispute resulted in dozens of lawsuits and a class action, as farmers were no longer willing to accept that they first had to purchase expensive modern tractors, then do the work that generates data, without having access to it themselves. Meanwhile, users of John Deere machines do have access to their data, but this does little to change the fact that it is John Deere that gains value from the large scale data collection.
Between 2010 and 2025, John Deere doubled its annual revenue and tripled its market capitalisation. In 2021 alone, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the company generated revenue of 7.7 billion dollars. In addition to the sale of machinery, part of that value is generated by offering services. Little transparency exist about what John Deere ultimately does with the all the data. To what extent does it sell aggregated data for example to investment firms ? Or who makes what strategies and decisions based on such aggregated data ?
Behind the question “who works in whose interests” lies thus much more than simply collecting data and regulating access to it.
Reverse adaption : adjusting agriculture to its tools
Technology thinker Langdon Winner provides valuable tools for addressing this question. In his book on technology and autonomy, first published in 1977, he talks about “reverse adaptation”. He exposes the idea that technological systems can become disconnected from their original purposes and that the environment in which technologies are introduced consequently adapts to the needs and possibilities of certain technologies.
If we apply the idea of “reverse adaptation” to agriculture, it is easy to see how much truth there is in the idea that agriculture itself adapts to technologies. This adds to and sometimes even contradicts with the common belief that technologies are developed to address the issues agriculture faces. Think of synthetic fertilisers. While these are technologies that were originally intended to increase yields, they have also caused agriculture to gradually adapt to these products. The type of soil cultivation, the seeds used, plot size and standardisation of products that we know today are partly the result of dependence on these industrial fertilisers. Technology therefore co-determines the nature of agriculture that thrives in a particular moment and place.
Another more recent example is the insertion of digital boluses into the reticulum of cows for monitoring purposes. Dairy farms in Belgium have also recently seen the introduction of smaXtec boluses. SmaXtec is an Austrian company, in which the global investment fund KKR became the majority shareholder in 2025 under the motto “unlocking potential and securing futures”.
The stomach bolus measures the cows’ movements, drinking behaviour, rumination and temperature with an accuracy of 0.3 degrees Celsius, according to the company’s website. Temperature and movement are indicators of udder inflammation, fertility and approaching calving, all of which are important factors in dairy farm management.
SmaXtec users receive a personalised analysis of their herd via the Smart Farm Data app, which can be used for management decisions and potentially for greater automation when linked to where a cow can move at any given time, what feed it receives or when it should be inseminated with which semen. Other farm management software in dairy farming that is used in Belgium are SenseHub or Lely systems.
During farm visits in Belgium, farmers explained us how they organise the farm work, their routines and tasks according to alerts and algorithmic insights from these systems. Especially for larger herds, the monitoring systems’ algorithmic signals rather than the ‘farmer’s gaze’ becomes key in work organisation and decision-making. As such, what counts as a problem and becomes actionable depends on what is measurable by the technology.
Using the reverse adaptation framework, the cow monitoring systems don’t just support dairy farming, they also reconfigure it : the farm work adjusts to the technologies’ rhythms, assumptions, embedded logics and capabilities.
Policy frameworks and incentives to make technologies work
When it comes to an environment that adapts to the needs of technological systems, it is not just a matter of farm management choices, but also of larger political and economic shifts. Jacques Ellul, a technology thinker from the middle of the last century, argued how political and economic systems can become subordinate to technological systems. He speaks of a technological imperative when, even if it is clear that a technological system does not work in the interests of people or ecologies, political decisions are made in order to improve the functioning of the technology.
Questioning the technological imperative is crucial at a time when we see Europe, national and regional governments, such as Wallonia and Flanders, investing heavily in accelerating and scaling up the digitalisation of agriculture. A huge blind spot arises when supporting technological transformation in itself becomes more important than trying to understand its consequences. It is that blind spot that Friction aims to explore.