Autonomous Agriculture?
BY DARIN BARNEY
Contrary to persistent stereotypes of wilderness and countryside, rural locations are media-intensive. What forms of mediation emerge when we foreground the “rural” in the function of media systems and technologies? How do these forms of mediation affect how we think about, inhabit, and relate to rurality?
In June 2022, the Grierson Research Group convened a group of international scholars to discuss these questions, and more, at the intersection of media and emerging forms and practices of rurality. Drawing from a range of humanities and social sciences fields and discourses that foreground rural media technologies and experiences, the Media Rurality project investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike, in diverse global locations. We are grateful to Heliotrope for the opportunity to share these essays, the first to arise from this exciting collaboration.
Patrick Brodie, University College Dublin
Darin Barney, McGill University
Media Rurality is supported by an SSHRC Connections Grant
In 2019, Canadian-based global financial firm RBC published a report introducing “Farmer 4.0,” an imagined farmer adapted to a “fourth revolution in agricultural technology” that is “all about data.” According to the report, “Farmer 4.0 will need to focus on strategy and systems, leaving past tasks to a new generation of smart machines.” Farmer 4.0 is closely aligned with the emerging paradigm of “autonomous agriculture,” a phrase that refers to increased use of automated sensing and data technologies in farm operations, in order to reduce dependency on the human work and judgment traditionally associated with agricultural production.
Autonomous agriculture depends on highly integrated systems of mechanical and digital technologies designed to automate, optimize, execute and coordinate operations, including field mapping and crop planning, seed genetics, soil diagnosis, variable rate fertilizing, seeding, irrigation, pesticide and herbicide application, crop care and harvesting, crop storage, transportation and marketing, and the accounting and logistics involved in each of these processes. It includes machines traditionally associated with industrial-scale grain farming – tractors, ploughs, seed drills, sprayers, harvesters, combines, irrigation systems, grain carts, fences and silos – and a suite of data-intensive devices and systems. These systems rely on networked, digital information and communication technologies, including sensor and monitoring arrays, drones, satellites, wireless internet and cellular networks, a diverse range of microchip enabled devices and mechanisms, laptops and tablets, cell phones and servers. They require specialized software, dedicated digital platforms, graphic interfaces, custom algorithms, artificial intelligences and massive digital computing power and storage capacity, knitted together by protocols and standards that ensure interoperability and, importantly, seamless integration of endless upgrades. Together, these technologies comprise what companies such as Raven Autonomy describe, without irony, as the “autonomous ecosystem.”
Autonomy also relies on reconceiving agriculture as the logistical management of flows (see Bernes 2018, 348). In a promotional video about the “Raven Path to Autonomy,” the company’s Senior Director of Global Sales describes “connected workflow” as crucial to achieving “full autonomy.” Connected workflow is the cybernetic dream of a seamless loop of environmental data, materials, inputs, operations, adjustment, extraction and money – what Matteo Pasquinelli (2017) has described as the “the automaton of the Anthropocene,” the “carbosilicon machine” by which the real subsumption of ecosystems by capital is materialized via digital mediation. In the case of agriculture, the only remaining source of friction in connected workflow is the farmer, whose judgment and practice have not yet been absorbed by automated systems that operate autonomously from her, and upon whose providers she is increasingly dependent (see Stone 2022).
In his excellent genealogy of the concept of “flow” in contemporary approaches to defining the economy, Augustine Sedgewick (2014) observes: “[t]he flows metaphor has become a way of thinking about both economic processes and persons. It has become what its partisans always hoped it would be: an instrument for reducing the latter to the former” (153). In this account, while neo-classical economics sought to portray flows as a natural property of economies, the truth is that flows were (and are) made, not discovered. Their conceptualization and measurement performatively construct the economic relations they purport to represent, at the expense of other ways of conceiving those relations. This makes “flow” as much a political category as it is an empirical one.
For Sedgewick, “[f]low is not only a descriptively, analytically, and politically impoverished way of representing motion and change. It is also an instrumentality, developed and deployed by vested interests to smooth out, and in so doing legitimate and win increased power over, the processes by which people and things move through space and time” (2014, 143). In particular, to conceive of economies in terms of flow – flows of energy, flows of goods, flows of grain, flows of data, flows of money – is to avoid, obscure or erase work as the material basis of those economies.
This entails converting the persons, places and practices of work to processes that can be optimized, or eliminated, when work generates friction in relation to flow. The language and apparatuses of flow serve to:
“smooth the ragged edges of complex social and historical processes and make them available for ready comprehension and consumption. In this way, the flows metaphor discredits work, which is a more burdensome way of describing the motion of people and things, and which moreover threatens to destabilize reigning regimes of valuation and models of value creation.” (Sedgewick 2014, 153)
Flow models and technologies accomplish this by “abstracting given intersections of time, space, resources, and embodied action in a way that blurs rather than clarifies the dynamic interplay of those variables,” (ibid) in other words, by abstracting emplaced, embodied, grounded knowledge and judgment into data.
This resonates strongly with an observation made by the moderator of a recent webinar on Future Farming: “[n]owadays, farmers have a wealth of data and monitoring equipment at their disposal to optimize operations – sensors in the field providing insightful cloud data to the farmer that he can use to make the best decisions to grow his crop, decisions based on solid knowledge not just gut feeling.” It is not that “solid knowledge” necessarily leads to different decisions than “gut feeling” would. It is that one depends upon the presence of workers bearing embodied, emplaced and practiced knowledges – or what was once called skill – while the other circumvents dependency on those workers. Autonomy in this context means relieving capital accumulation of its dependency on farmers who know the land because they work it, by remediating their work as “connected workflow.”
Sedgewick’s account of the displacement of work by flow in the globalization of Latin American coffee-growing is instructive:
“to describe the movement of coffee as a flow…is to dismiss the very questions that people who knew what it meant to work coffee judged to be questions of life and death, namely the questions of who would work coffee and how. Should these questions lose their status as questions, the real problems that have defined what it means to work coffee become simply problems of income. If work is a foregone conclusion, working people are merely their wages. Writing history in terms of flows reproduces the neoclassical diminution of the human being to a mechanism…” (Sedgewick 2014, 163)
In the turn from work to flow, industrial agriculture and the rural locations in which it occurs, especially those with colonial histories, are paradigmatic, not outlying – leading, not lagging, central, not peripheral. In these locations, questions about what it means to work in relation to land and its many inhabitants are questions of life and death. The biopolitics of the coffee economy described by Sedgewick resonate strongly with accounts of the period of primitive accumulation in Canada. Indigenous inhabitants were violently dispossessed of their lands, relations and modes of work in order to clear a path for colonial settlement and extractive agriculture, a process materialized by a particular configuration of science, technology, media and infrastructure (see Strand 2021). In that context, the worth of Indigenous life and work were incalculable, counted only as an eliminable source of friction which slowed the flows of value that could be extracted from the prairie and unleashed into the circuits of the colonial economy. As Glen Coulthard (2014) has shown, because the economy envisioned for the western territories of Canada was primarily extractive, primitive accumulation was driven by confiscation of Indigenous lands, and had little need to transform Indigenous people into wage labourers. This made them expendable under the racist calculus of settler colonial biocapitalism. Instead, the work of making the Prairies an industrial zone of extractive agriculture during the period of secondary accumulation would be done by settlers adapted to this purpose.
These settlers’ descendants’ modes of living and working the land are now being reconfigured as flows as the tertiary period of accumulation by automation unfolds, driven by major players in the global agribusiness, AI and telecommunications sectors. This process is supported by governments touting the food-security and emissions-reducing benefits of advanced agricultural technologies. In the contemporary period of capitalist accumulation, modes of life and work characteristic of the analog phase of industrial agriculture have been cast as an eliminable friction. Here, again, a complex set of integrated media, technologies and infrastructures are being developed to smooth the residue that might otherwise impede the flow of value. The agricultural dispossession these technologies mediate will not be nearly as violent or unjust as the ongoing Indigenous dispossession that established and maintains the conditions for settler-colonial agriculture in the Prairies. We might, instead, describe autonomous agriculture as a kind of dialectical movement. The dispossessive logic of extractive, settler-colonial agriculture drives towards completion by eliminating its last remaining antagonist: the farmers it once called into being to work the land it had stolen, whose work it no longer requires.
Works Cited
Bernes, Jasper. (2018). The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism. In Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, eds. Materialism and the Critique of Energy. (Chicago: MCM Publishing) 331-375. http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy
Coulthard, Glen Sean. (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/red-skin-white-masks
Pasquinelli, Matteo. (2017). The Automaton of the Anthropocene: On Carbosilicon Machines and Cyberfossil Capital. South Atlantic Quarterly 116 (2) April, 311-326. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3829423
Sedgewick, Augustine (2014). Against Flows. History of the Present. Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall) 143-170. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0143
Stone, Glen D. (2022). Surveillance agriculture and peasant autonomy. Journal of Agrarian Change, 22 ( 3), 608– 631. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12470
Strand, Katherine. (2021). How to Make the Desert Bloom: An Ethnographic and Historical Account of Dryland Agriculture within Palliser’s Triangle. PhD dissertation, Dept. of Anthropology, McGill University. ProQuest document ID 2700375427.
Darin Barney is the Grierson Chair in Communication Studies at McGill University. He studies the politics of materials, infrastructures, media and environments, and convenes the Grierson Research Group (www.griersonresearchgroup.ca/).
