“Farm forward”: Data imaginaries in productivist food discourses

Description

Big Data – like anything in the world – do not have meaning in themselves, they become meaningful in social practices and their corresponding narratives. In the realm of Big Data, these narratives are produced by the data analytics industry, that, as David Beer (2018) has described it felicitously, creates a “data imaginary” – a presentation of “a series of problems and inadequacies to which data analytics are offered as the solution.” However, the more Big Data and data technologies proliferate society and everyday life, the more other industries and institutions create their data imaginaries to legitimize emerging data practices in the respective societal sectors. One of these sectors, huge in terms of economic turnover, is the agro-industry where data are gathered on large scale to optimise processes in farming and retail. In their instructive comment on “Big data in food and agriculture”, Kelly Bronson and Irena Knezevic (2016) discuss the digital revolution in farming and advocate for a “critical data scholarship in food and agriculture”. This critical scholarship includes research into how “the images circulating in the promotion of Big Data tools normalize hegemonic farming systems”, as they argue with respect to John Deere’s Farm Forward marketing campaign.
This paper takes this campaign as a starting point to analyse data imaginaries as produced by diverse agricultural Big Data technologies and their discourses in PR-material, experts’ statements and academic journals. Examples are, among others, John Deere’s Farm Forward campaign, articles in the lobbyist journal Future Farming and academic review articles on research into precision farming. The paper asks how these data imaginaries are linked to power structures of existing food systems, whether they just legitimize established productivist agricultural concepts or whether they also might foster an inclusive transition to sustainable and healthy food systems.

Period	17 Sept 2021
Event title	2nd Biennial Conference on Food & Communication: Discoures on the future of food
Event type	Conference
Location	Ljubiljana, SloveniaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International