Imprecision farming? Examining the (in)accuracy and risks of digital agriculture

Abstract

The myriad potential benefits of digital farming hinge on the promise of increased accuracy, which allows ‘doing more with less’ through precise, data-driven operations. Yet, precision farming’s foundational claim of increased accuracy has hardly been the subject of comprehensive examination. Drawing on social science studies of big data, this article examines digital agriculture’s (in)accuracies and their repercussions. Based on an examination of the daily functioning of the various components of yield mapping, it finds that digital farming is often ‘precisely inaccurate’, with the high volume and granularity of big data erroneously equated with high accuracy. The prevailing discourse of ‘ultra-precise’ digital technologies ignores farmers’ essential efforts in making these technologies more accurate, via calibration, corroboration and interpretation. We suggest that there is the danger of a ‘precision trap’. Namely, an exaggerated belief in the precision of big data that over time leads to an erosion of checks and balances (analogue data, farmer observation et cetera) on farms. The danger of ‘precision traps’ increases with the opacity of algorithms, with shifts from real-time measurement and advice towards forecasting, and with farmers’ increased remoteness from field operations. Furthermore, we identify an emerging ‘precision divide’: unequally distributed precision benefits resulting from the growing algorithmic divide between farmers focusing on staple crops, catered well by technological innovation on the one hand, and farmers cultivating other crops, who have to make do with much less advanced or applicable algorithms on the other. Consequently, for the latter farms digital farming may feel more like ‘imprecision farming’.

Biographical Note

Sarah Ruth Sippel (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University, Germany)

Sarah Ruth Sippel is a lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and a Principal Investigator at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1199. Her research interests concern the complex nature of the global agri-food system, particularly questions in relation to food security, the financialization of agriculture and food, and the alternatives that are being developed to the current agri-food system. All these issues raise important questions in relation to politics, ethics, and social justice, which motivate her research. As a human geographer with a background in Middle Eastern Studies and Philosophy, Sarah investigates social phenomena from an interdisciplinary and transregional perspective. She intensively worked on the interlinkages between export agriculture, rural livelihood security, and labour migration in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean. Her current research addresses the diverse (re)imaginations of land in Australia.

Oane Visser (International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands)

Oane Visser is associate professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), in The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He has been visiting researcher at University of Oxford, Toronto University, Cornell University and City University New York. Building on his long-term research on agrifood issues, his latest research projects study digitalization in the sphere of agriculture, natural resources and global development more broadly. He is principal investigator of a Toyota Foundation funded international project on digital/smart farming, emerging farm data cooperatives and changing values regarding data in the EU, Russia and Australia. Another (ISS-funded) project examines the labour implications of new digital technologies in EU agriculture. Further, together with data scientists, he investigates the role of big data and AI in preventing or mitigating land grabs. Visser also furthers his longer standing research on (super)large farms, farmland investment and financialisation (investigated amongst others within his European Research Council (ERC) project), increasingly seeking to integrate it with environmental history and the study of the impact of climate change. Another important line of research is around smallholders, alternative food networks and (‘quiet’) food sovereignty, in particular in post-socialist countries.

Louis Thiemann (International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands)

Louis Thiemann is an external PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Among this publication, he published Beyond the ‘Special Period’: Land reform, supermarkets and the prospects for peasant-driven food sovereignty in post-socialist Cuba (2008-2017) Opens external as well as Fast Food Sovereignty: Contradiction in Terms or Logical Next Step? Opens external.