Since 2024, friction studies how agriculture is deeply affected by the integration of digital technology in the sector.

We are a team of four core researchers with complementary expertise in political economy, human geography, feminist science and technology studies, and agroecology research in Belgium, Europe, Palestine, Brazil and beyond (see Meet the Team). Friction is hosted at the Agroecology Lab in the Ecole interfacultaire de Bioingénieur at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Our research aims to support agricultural communities in Belgium and Europe to continue to produce healthy food through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. We want to contribute to agriculture, food systems and policies that focus on the people who produce, process and consume our food, rather than having to respond to the demands of markets and companies. We also strive to go further and provide insight into the broader impact of digitalisation on agriculture and its connection to issues of migration, security and more.

How do we work?

We speak to farmers that have embraced digital technology in different ways, including those that choose to incorporate these technologies as little as possible.

We study policy documents, we read annual reports from companies, we follow professional agricultural press in Belgium and meet with technicians, researchers, company and finance representatives, bureaucrats passing legislation and others in the sector to learn about the changes happening in the Belgian landscape.

We also work on the creation of local and international networks in the field of critical research on digital agriculture by building solid partnerships with civil society partners locally and regionally.

The context?

Digital infrastructures are rapidly transforming industrialized societies, economies, and people’s daily lives. Transaction platforms like Uber, Amazon and Airbnb have changed how people move, shop and travel. Microsoft, Google and Meta shape how workers interact with their employers and colleagues; how family, friends and loved ones communicate and how the government interacts with its constituency. The companies that own and produce these new tools are deeply entangled in many spheres of our lives.

We are aware how technology has historically been relevant in shaping the different forms of agriculture we have today. We look at the arrival of digital technologies and their infrastructures as a continuation of a long, often controversial, process of agricultural modernisation. For example, we start from peasant lands’ enclosures in European Middle Ages to understand current privatization of lands and how it restructured women’s labor  on the lands and family. Or we look at the logic colonial sugar plantations prosperous on the backs of enslaved Africans that have shaped our accounting systems in capitalist-driven agriculture today. Or looking at the history of the 20^th century, we see how the introduction of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers is closely linked not only features of industrial farming today but also to corporate power and the military.

Companies like Bayer/Monsanto, BASF, Corteva or Syngenta/Sinochem are common brand names of the seeds and pesticides found on Belgian farms. Carrefour, Delhaize and other supermarket chains play a big role in the type of foods we produce and how they are distributed. Yara and Cargill are big players in shaping global value chains by building just-in-time infrastructures. It also isn’t hard to understand what tractor brands Fendt, New Holland and John Deere have to do with agriculture, while DeLaval, Lely and GEA are the handful of players managing the dairy sector.

But what’s with the new kids on the block? Why are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Blackrock moving into agriculture? How does their involvement transform agriculture?

The promises of the digital transformation

We start from the observation that corporations, governments and research institutes are investing whopping amounts of resources into the digitalisation of agriculture. There are promises made on the future-proofing and revolutionary powers of digitalization in Europe, lobbying efforts to push through legislation through the EU parliament, and financing mechanisms that enable this process. In short, the idea of the digital imperative is clearly there, but there is very little knowledge of why that is the case, or of what these technologies actually do nor how to regulate them.

By starting research in Belgium, friction is interested in understanding, what are the consequences of digitalisation on farms, its people, the animals and lands. Meaning that we ask questions such as:

How does digitalisation change on-farm work in the ways cows are raised? Or why are more cows wearing electronic collars? And what does it do to further indebt farmers ?

How do big data analytics change the variety of potatoes cultivated or who owns the land? Why do farmers need to use apps to manage their herds and lands? And what does it do to further entrench farmers into a globalized economy ?

How do digital technologies transform farmers’ skills and knowledge? Is it slowly replacing the need for on-farm technical knowledge? Or how does the introduction of these technologies rework gender relations on the farm? Or what with relations between farmers and other farmworkers?