Seminar (TURBA Lab): The digital factory farm as the future of food production?

Program

Abstract

Agriculture and food production have become central to political debates about socio-ecological transformations. The food system is responsible for roughly a third of CO2 emissions, and industrial agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Last year's farmers' protests across Europe highlighted a significant social and economic crisis in agriculture, with many family and small-scale farmers struggling to make ends meet. This issue is echoed by small-scale farmers globally.

The “digital revolution” in agriculture is often seen as a silver bullet to these problems, promising to make agriculture more productive, profitable, and sustainable. However, instead of a revolution, I read digital technologies as a continuation and deepening of existing capital relations in agriculture.

Much of the food in European supermarkets is produced by large agro-industrial companies, not family farmers. These companies operate factory farms and rely on a large number of farmworkers. Digital technologies have become integral to factory farming. My fieldwork in South Africa's fruit farming industry shows how digital technologies are designed and used to reinforce longstanding attempts by agrarian capital to reshape labor and nature, rather than offering a path toward more sustainable agriculture.

Louisa Prause

Senior researcher at the Environmental Politics Department at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research Centre in Leipzig. She is a political ecologist and currently works on digital technologies, labor and socio-ecological transformations in land use, food and (e-)mobility systems.