by Larissa Mies Bombardi and Coline Prévost
This post reflects on a visit to Agribex, one of Belgium’s main agricultural fairs, and how agri-digital technologies are being normalised by showcasing a polished image of a field reality that is much more messy.
Among the different solutions proposed to respond to a looming climate emergency, excess ammonia emissions and concerns about animal welfare and disease outbreaks, agri-digital tools and AI are introduced as novel ‘solutions’ to the problems attributed to livestock farming across Europe. The main objective of these technologies is to ‘better’ control over farming operations to dilute the environmental impacts of livestock farming by increased production per cow. As we will show, the agri-digital technologies showcased to cattle farmers at Agribex—one of the largest agricultural fairs in Belgium—are tailored to keep increasingly large herds indoors, while abstracting from the underlying causes of the sector’s ongoing environmental problems.
Following on Donna Haraway’s thinking, we prefer to stay with the trouble1. We have doubts both concerning the promises accompanying these technologies, as well as the relevance these solutions propose to the problems they purport to address. What is increasingly presented as technological solutions to environmental and labour problems may in fact be part of the very dynamics that perpetuate and exacerbate the issues they claim to solve. As Ellul warned in 1964, we wonder whether these technologies aren’t just plugging old holes by digging new ones ?
Techno-optimism at the farm fair
To look for answers to current problems with technological solutions is called techno-optimism, meaning the belief “that technology plays a key role in ensuring that the good prevails over the bad” and will provide adequate answers to the many crises we are experiencing.
Agriculture is not immune to this belief as policy frameworks and company strategies are increasingly geared towards technological development. Agricultural fairs have become one of the forefronts of materialising this techno-optimism and provide a snapshot of current technological developments and political orientations shaping the agricultural sector.
In December 2025, the Belgian capital welcomed the Brussels Agriculture Exhibition, also known as Agribex. The fair is organised by Fedagrim, a professional interests’ association for the agricultural machinery, equipment and infrastructures sector. Since 1958, this association lobby’s EU authorities for its members (including Cofabel, Joskin, Bioelectric). Agribex becomes a stage for this association and other large agritech companies to promote the latest trinkets in the market, featuring machinery giants like John Deere or Deutz-Fahr, alongside pesticide and fertiliser dealers like Syngenta or Yara.
The literature we have come across documents the role agricultural fairs have long played in driving modernization into farm fields by echoing broader societal directions and playing a major role in shaping the sector’s orientation. This is reflected on Agribex’s website, where highlights of the 2025 edition were dedicated to new energies like biogas, as well as emission-reducing technologies and data transmission. These highlights provide a mirror to the EU’s agricultural “areas of action” identified in its ‘Vision for Agriculture and Food’. These entanglements aren’t surprising, as the fair regularly welcomes representatives from the European Commission and the European Parliament to show them the latest technologies.
We paid a visit to the fair this year. As one of friction’s line of research addresses dairy farming in Belgium, we made a stop at the livestock section.
Agri-digital gadgets for the livestock sector
We were caught by a big screen showcasing live the activity of 2000 cows on a German farm. Cow Manager was on display, a Dutch company that sells ear sensors to measure cow body temperatures, the time they spend ruminating, their movements, and also their location in the stable, all at once.
To make the system work, farmers needed to install routers in different places throughout the farm. One of the routers centralises all the information and transfers it to a computer. Farmers then have access via their computers or phone to individualised information about their herd, displayed through numbers, graphs and reports about various parameters. Farmers pay a subscription fee to use the system, the price of which depends on the chosen options (between €1.2 – €1.8 cow/month). After installation, the system requires a few days for calibration according to the herd’s specific characteristics. Algorithms establish a baseline to decipher the ‘normality’ of the herd using collected data.
When the algorithms detect any deviation from what the program has learned is the herd’s ‘norm’, farmers are quickly notified. They or their workers check on the cows to provide the necessary care to the cow showing ‘abnormal’ behaviour beyond the algorithm’s learned baseline. Continuous monitoring of the cows is promoted by these companies as a tool for detecting diseases before they occur, allowing for potential yield losses to be anticipated and therefore further maximising performance per cow.
In Cow Manager systems, individual and herd-level monitoring of cows is made through ear tags. A company employee, who introduced himself as coming from a farmer family, told us the Cow Manager ear sensors were inspired by traditional observations made by peasants who used to touch a cow’s ear to feel her temperature and assess her condition. But it is with the growing size of cow farms furthering farmers from intimately knowing each individual cow that makes programs like Cow Manager a necessity to be used on large-scale industrial farms. We can thus wonder whether this so-called ‘farmer knowledge-based solution’ is not also leading to the erosion of these same knowledges, and primarily a tool of its appropriation to support the upscaling of herd sizes.
In the long run we may forget practices gained through embodied, intergenerational and inter-species experiences. The further next farmers generations are from the field and cows, the less of a chance they have of practicing methods that are in relation to the land, climate, and ecosystems.
Whether this encounter between different forms of knowledge will lead to their hybridisation or to the replacing of farmers’ experiential knowledge by a data-driven one is a controversy that we are still exploring. But what is for sure is that these data-driven technologies fine-tuned for large-scale dairy farms do not question the broader economic context they are part of, and the intensification cycle they feed.
In the article “Surveillance agriculture and peasant autonomy” (2022), anthropologist Glenn David Stone shows how “the advent of new agricultural technologies often sets off international competition”, thereby further entrenching farmers into a global market, known as being particularly volatile in the dairy sector, thus leading to insecurity in farmers’ revenues as well as bankruptcies.
To respond to issues generated by farm expansion and related technological developments, companies like Cow Manager also provide add-ons to locate cows on the barn – thus creating the conditions for further farm and cattle expansion. Farmers can read where a cow was last identified by the system, or they can make the cow’s ear tag emit a flashing light – just like car keys allow you to press a button to make the headlights flash to locate your car through a new feature called “Find my Cow Flash”.
During our farm visits, we met a farmer who loved this kind of technology to ‘save time’ – “up to 20 minutes per day he said – at the cost of substantial investments. But we also found a young farmer who expressed she would never buy this kind of device as observing her cows to detect heat, sickness, or for pure joy, was one of her favourite activities. It is her way of still being a farmer. Though the agri-digital technologies promoted in Agribex are showing and normalizing another way of being a farmer.
Betting on the barn
Like many companies exhibiting at the fair, Cow Manager’s technologies only go so far to monitor cows’ health and to maximise production per cow. This comes at the cost of improving grazing conditions outside the barn by working with soil quality or creating better climate conditions with hedge rows and trees on pastureland. With each technological introduction, we see that cattle-herding is further pushed into more controlled indoor farms rather than their outdoor habitats2.
In fact, an entire economy has been created to keep cows indoors: manufacturing of doors and ventilation systems for barns and large buildings where curtains and screens open and close automatically according to weather conditions such as wind direction, rain, air humidity, light level, to control the indoor climate. As the Flemish company Vervaeke displayed at Agribex, the curtains can also be automated with cow feeding technologies. A salesman of climate-controlling technologies inside the barn told us cows needed ‘fresh air’ to live and to improve their milk production. This strikingly demonstrates the way farms are increasingly dependent on tech-intensive systems to make the indoor comfortable, perhaps even habitable as solutions to keeping cows from their outdoor habitats to ensure maximal production.
We have visited many organic farms where grass feeding of cows is the status-quo. Farmers have told to us that cows actually needed to learn how to graze. Yet when cows get used to controlled indoor systems and mixed rations delivered to them at the trough, they lose the habit of going out and grazing. Grazing is not merely an activity of these animals; it defines them. It is therefore no coincidence that in different Latin languages a specific verb describes the being of cows as well as other herbivores as grazing animals.
A farmer told us that when grazing, cows salivate which helps them regulate their body temperature. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all breeds of cows but it shows a wide range of ways of addressing heat stress: from working with cows and pastureland to developing highly controlled indoor spaces.
A salesman at the fair described his appreciation for these novel cow technologies, summarizing, “what is automated is smarter” and the farmer “is always too late”. He suggests that technology is more precise, faster… in short better than generations of experiential knowledge. However, when speaking about his own family experience of farming, things didn’t go as smoothly. While his uncle was implementing digital monitoring technologies in the farm, his grandfather, who used to “scan” his cows with his eyes, did not agree with all of his son’s solutions. According to the farmer grandson, and now technology salesmen, he still reverts to sensory experience, “so far, there is nothing better than human sight to check-on cows’ well-being”. The reality on the ground is far more nuanced and different than what agri-digital technologies offer as ‘solutions’.
Digging new holes to fill old ones
It is precisely in this hesitation that friction sits. While agricultural fairs showcase corporate agri-digital technologies as the way forward for the future of farming and the best way to answer the crises we are now facing, these tools make abstraction of the root causes of the social, economic and ecological problems that are part and parcel of industrialised farming. The need for cooling systems and automated curtains emerges precisely because of political and economic pressures that pushed farmers into intensive – thus indoor – livestock farming systems. The need for light-flashing ear tags is the consequence of pushing farmers into a grow or die logic with ever expanding herd sizes. These technologies in turn further enable confinement with its environmental and sanitary problems3. The many crises agriculture is facing today, such as high ammonia emissions, emerge precisely from the conditions created by intensive agriculture and livestock production itself. Cows are confined indoors and made to live on concrete floors which generate health issues that would not arise under grazing conditions.
The solutions proposed, however, do not question these conditions, but rather introduce new technologies and products to mitigate their effects. Intensification produces problems that are then addressed through further technological interventions, leading to the continuous incorporation of new devices, infrastructures, and forms of dependency. The ‘solutions’ proposed by tech companies repeat the same script as the one farmers have been experiencing for the last sixty years: scaling up in size, buying new, expensive equipment and riding into an export-oriented agriculture that doesn’t favor their interests.
In the technological society (1964), Jacques Ellul described how the logic of “offering a partial solution to old problems, itself based on the very methods that created the problems in the first place” was at very centre of our society. This is what he saw as “the age-old procedure of digging a new hole to fill up an old one.”
During our visit to Agribex, we sought to understand how technology is shaping agriculture in practice. What we observed is that for each challenge encountered in agricultural production—particularly in dairy farming—new technologies are offered as ‘solutions’. This leads to a looping, expanding spiral, in which intensification leads to more technologies, which in turn lead to further intensification, generating new problems and challenges of different kinds (ecological, workload, and animal condition), for which new technological ‘solutions’ are then presented.
By showcasing the latest agritech developments, Agribex participates in their normalisation, shifting the focus from the question of “whether agridigital technologies should be used toward how to make them as effective as possible”4, thereby reinforcing dominant narratives of technological development as a fixture for the problems industry has itself created.
1 « ‘Staying with the Trouble’ – means not giving up when the subject matter or object (a scorpion, sewers, ‘bad’ behaviour) makes you squeamish or angry. It means trying to stay in a place of ambiguity when cherished notions and beliefs are being attacked or undermined. »
2 Farmers into soya-maize systems often express concerns about grazing systems, which they believe would bring greater variability – a variability that would compound that of already highly volatile market prices. They prefer to ensure stability and feed their cows with standardised and quantified mixed rations.
3 Intensified large-scale indoor cattle farming is linked for example to development of new pathogens, such as Rob Wallace shows in Big Farms make Big Flu. In dairy farming, cow lameness is also connected to indoor farming
4 Sandvik et al, Kristin Bergtora, et Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, éd. The Good Drone. First issued in paperback. Emerging Technologies, Ethics and International Affairs. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2018