by Barbara Van Dyck
This blog asks questions whether new technology works for, and adapts to farmers’ need or if farmers work for new technology corporations and adapt their farms to the needs of technologies.
The large hall at Domaine de l’Escaille near Namur is packed when the Federation of Young Farmers (FJA) holds 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 attainable. That is why their members took to the streets. The adrenaline in the room is palpable, and when the then-Minister of Agriculture Willy Borsus takes the stage, the farmers give him their backs.
Once in the room, I start to guess that the congres programme must have been finalised before the farmers’ protests erupted. The theme of the meeting, “the digital horizon: imagining tomorrow’s agriculture”, feels far off from the farmers preoccupations and the mood of the day. WalDigiFarm and the Walloon Agency for Digitalisation highlighted the opportunities and challenges that digital transformation brings for agriculture in Wallonia, with a focus on encouraging more farmers to integrate digital technologies into their operations. While farmers are concerned with heavy administrative burdens, insufficient incomes, looming free trade agreements and a widespread sense of not being valued by society, the congress programme displayed boosting productivity through the adoption of new technologies—changes that could further complicate their practice and impose additional financial strain.
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When the chair of the young farmers’ association takes the floor, he shows little enthusiasm for accelerating the uptake of digital tools across the union’s membership. Stressing that farmers naturally want technology that works for them, he raises a pointed question : are these technologies working in service of agriculture or are farmers working for digital technology companies?
His remarks underscore a broader concern about powerful industrial players that drive the modernization of agriculture and touch on one of the core questions of the research that we are doing at friction research: who benefits from the digital transformation of agriculture, and in what ways?
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 generate data. The digital platform that collects and processes that data will then monetise it. While I am not paid for performing my search – it is a service that Google or Deepl offers me for free – I contribute to the companies’ value creation. 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 such as the constant need for software updates, strict use licences and software – hardware incompatibilities. Fun fact, John Deere, one of the largest players in the global agricultural machinery market, ACCORDING TO now employs 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 and therefore could not repair them themselves. Unsurprisingly, farmers 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. Farmers, however, were not willing to accept that they first had to purchase expensive modern tractors, then do the work that generates data, without having access to that data themselves. After dozens of lawsuits and a class action, farmers and John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding, that included some provisions on the right to repair as well as farmers’ access to their data. The underlying question of who benefits, is not addressed when regulating data access.
The settlement of the dispute indeed does little to change the fact that it is John Deere that gains value from the massive data collection. And it is precisely the collection of enormous amounts of data in combination with digital platforms, that form the foundations of precision farming. Data is therefore also referred to as the new gold or oil of the platform economy.
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 financial services and by selling aggregated data from farmers to private equity firms, which can then use it to make decisions. Decisions that may be contrary to the interests of farmers.
Let’s return to question the young farmer asked:« are these technologies working in service of agriculture or are farmers working for digital technology companies? ». In posing that question he also points to another major concern that we seek to address in our research. More precisely, we seek to understand how farming practice is changing when entangled with digital logics ?
Technology thinker Langdon Winner provides a helpful term 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 people and up reorganising their lives around the needs and possibilities of certain technologies, rather than these technologies being adapted to peoples needs.
If we apply the idea of “reverse adaptation” to agriculture, it is easy to see how much truth there is in it. Think of synthetic fertilisers. While these are technologies that were originally intended to increase yields by replenishing soil nutrients, over time they have also caused agriculture to gradually restructure around them. Crop rotations, fallowing, manure spreading or intercropping became less central. Eventually seeds, soils and entire farm management became dependent on these inputs, making it difficult to farm with chemical fertilisers. As such reinforcing farmers’ reliance on industrial supply chains, credit systems to acquire these inputs and eroding their knowledge and skills on other forms of soil care. In Winner’s terms farm practices are reshaped around a technology—synthetic fertilisers—that in the long run, contributes to soil degradation.
Picture : cow – robot interaction in a fully automated milking system (photo credits : Louis Hautier)
Another, more recent, example of an agricultural technology that illustrates how farms potentially adapt more to the potential and needs of a technological system, than the technologies to farmers’ needs is the introduction of milking robots. As I detailed elsewhere [LINK FIAN], the replacement of milking parlours with fully automated milking systems is a determining factor in the physical layout of the farm, the practicing of grazing or herd size. To acquire a level of productivity that allows a return on the financial investment of the robot, requires the optimal functioning of the robot. Permanent access for the cows to the robot is needed, which is often hard to combine with grazing. The Lely astronauts or other typical milking robots on dairy farms in Belgium, handle about 60 to 70 cows and require a substantial financial investment for the machine itselfs, farm layout and infrastructural changes. To allow for return-on-investment, size herds may therefore be adapted to the optimal functioning of the robot, rather than other farm characteristics such as, for example, access to land. To feed its cows, farmers may opt to buy extra food rather than to decrease the size herd according to the fodder it is able to provide in a set context. Another example is the robot’s quick cooling of the milk which is hardly compatible with on-farm cheese making. The use of milking robots therefore is likely to discourage on-farm milk transformation and reinforces dependency on milk cooperatives, in a sector that is known for its power concentration. The introduction of fully automated milking systems is thus in tension with the possibility of gaining autonomy from industrial globalised fodder value-chains and milking cooperatives.
When it comes to agriculture adapting to the needs of technological systems, it is not just a matter of individual farm management choices, but also of larger political and economic shifts. Jacques Ellul, a French technology thinker from the middle of the last century, argued how entire political and economic systems can become subordinate to technological systems. He speaks of a technological imperative referring to normalisation and presentation of technological systems as unavoidable and necessary, to the point that, even if it is clear that technological systems do not work in the interests of people or ecologies, political decisions are made in order to improve the functioning of technology. An example in point is the race to arms as means to provide security. Although history of the mid 20th century has shown that the race to more and more powerful arms predominantly led to greater insecurity, States continue to invest in the development of ever more powerful weapons.
With everything that is known today about the materiality of digital infrastructures, their entanglement with shrinking democracy and the ways in which they enable massive wealth appropriation, it is concerning that speeding up the rolling out of digital infrastructures in agriculture is automatically presumed to be forward looking. 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, it may be helpful to think with the technological imperative. It requires us to focus on the roots, visions and interests that enabled the emergence of wide spread belief of computer-powered agriculture as the best, or only possible way forward. After all, a huge blind spot arises when supporting technological transformation in itself becomes more important than trying to understand its drivers and consequences.