Optimizing Stewardship of the Land? Exploring the Environmental Sustainability Dimensions of Digital Agriculture in Canada

Abstract

Digital agriculture (DA) is understood as an approach to agriculture that is high-tech and data intensive; it includes technologies such as robotic machinery, big data applications, drones and remote sensing. Proponents of these technologies claim that they are integral to environmental sustainability, as they are considered to be a solution to a plethora of environmental problems in agriculture. This thesis interrogates those claims through three different studies that contribute to the disciplines of Science and Technology Studies, Critical Data Studies, and Critical Food Studies. The first study considers how DA technologies fit into discourses of sustainable agriculture in the Canadian policy and media landscape. After conducting a discourse analysis, an ideology of optimization became evident. This ideology works to communicate that environmental sustainability needs to and will be optimized using DA technologies. In many ways, this ideology solidifies already dominant paradigms of industrial and productivist agriculture. The second study interrogates the claim that private investment funding in ag-tech will strengthen Canada’s capacity to combat climate change. Through interviews with ag-tech actors in Canada who identify as technology designers, entrepreneurs, and, importantly, funders, such as venture capitalists, I found that ag-tech actors’ capacity to imagine sustainable food systems is heavily shaped by their social contexts and cognitive processes, and that they tend to equate the adoption of digital technologies with the practice of sustainability. The third article focuses on the ways in which the most powerful agri-businesses create value, both economic and otherwise, from agricultural big data. Using the lens of assetization, we examined key corporate documents. Our results identify three main strategies of assetization: securing relationships and dependence, price-setting and data sharing, and product development and targeted marketing. The strategies have socio-ecological implications, as they indicate that asymmetrical power relations in the agri-food system that favour corporations are being reproduced.