The Precision Farming Revolution

Global Drivers of Local Agricultural Methods

James E. Addicott

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811396854
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811396861
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the precision farming revolution in Somerset, England. It reveals the reasons why local farmers invested in autonomous systems and traces the outcomes of adoption. It describes the local and global drivers of the fourth industrial revolution, from world population growth, climatic and ecological crises, profit driven farming and government agri-tech grants, to the Space Race era. A new cultural method of intelligence, ideas and thinking, new organisational and control powers, was precisely what precision farming offered farmers and off-farm firms, who were able to remotely monitor and control natural environments and aspects of on-farm activities. As a result of local farmers opting into precision farming systems the power dynamics of industrial agriculture were reorganised and this book will offer readers an understanding of how and why.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. E. AddicottThe Precision Farming Revolutionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9686-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Precision Farming Revolution

James E. Addicott¹

(1)

Bath, UK

James E. Addicott

End Abstract

1.1 Old and New Farming

During the Second World War, English farmers were employed in a nationalised, state-imposed war effort to sustain the country’s food supplies and such demands required that farmers work through the night—especially if weather conditions were poor. Night work depended upon the development of entirely unique set of physical skills, intuition and eye work:

Night ploughing, though never a very common practice, developed, when necessary, its own special technique. It had to; for, even in daylight, ploughing is a tricky business; you need a clear and confident eye for it. But to plough at night is like a blind man walking a tightrope; shadows deceive you at every turn, you lose your sense of direction, and to control your machine and keep your furrow straight you need the instinct of both owl and acrobat. But experienced ploughmen developed a sixth sense; they got used to ploughing by moonlight, and when there was no moon they worked to a special system of lights; one fixed low on the front on the tractor and screened to light of the furrow, and another – a lantern – hung in the hedge before them and moved after each cut to give them direction. (Ministry of Information 2001: p. 20)

Human labour power , and labour capacities such as knowledge and skills, gathered from interaction with immediate local environments , is what farming has been traditionally founded upon. Although this form of work was clearly demanding and arduous, there was a supreme sense of embodied skill demonstrated through workmanship, a noble craftsmanship in labour, knowledge gained from physically interacting with nature.

In an article in the farming press entitled ‘The Digital Revolution ’, the authors summarise an Internet video produced by one of the world’s biggest tractor firms entitled ‘Farm Forward’, which presents the company’s vision for the future of farming:

We see an American farmer starting his working day: From his living room, he logs into the operations center of his farm via a touch table and a holographic screen. A digital voice greets him and asks him to prioritise the jobs for the day. An irrigation alert sounds; the farmer activates the pumps from his computer. He gets a video call from his dealer telling him that some maintenance work has been finished, then a message from his agronomic advices about a new prescription map, which the farmer transfers by sliding his finger on a computerised map of his farm, to the relevant field… Then the farmer goes out for a walk in the field using the camera on his smartphone, he analyses a handful of soil and the condition of a maize plant. (Leroy et al. 2016: p. 14)

It was the most peculiar marketing video since there was nothing particularly beautiful or glamorous about the company’s future vision (Fig. 1.1). The farmer owner’s house was dimly lit, sparsely furnished. He was dressed in grey, his persona droll and pensive. The weather outdoors was stormy, and dense grey clouds over the farmland were almost dystopian, if not apocalyptic. It seemed that all life, substance and soul have been sapped from the poor American farmer. He had no face-to-face contact with a wife or family. There seems to be only one farm worker who is autonomously driven around the fields by a tractor in absolute science. Without conversation, he was only engaged with his computer or smartphone. Interaction took place using his eyes, ears and fingertips. Knowledge was streamed through to him in visual forms. From his farm office he has the power to control and radically alter vast agricultural landscapes. He responded robotically. Yet, this was the firm’s pitch for the future of precision farming systems .

Fig. 1.1

‘Farm Forward’: set somewhere in the future, an America farmer makes adjustments to his crops from his farm office using computing and remote sensing technologies. Available online at https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​jEh5-zZ9jUg

(Source Image clearance obtained from John Deere & Co.)

Technologies have demonstrated their transformative effects on modern societies, which foster a new spirit of ‘technological optimism’ surrounding new agricultural technologies applied to conventional, industrial farming systems. Technological optimism can be understood as an ontology and corresponding political outlook that with the use of science and technologies, human beings ‘should become increasingly able to protect ourselves from formerly catastrophic threats from nature: storm, floods, doubts, diseases, predators and so on’, and ‘nature should become an indefinitely expanding reservoir for the satisfaction of human desire’ (Benton 1994: p. 32). Some sociologists see that technologies such as satellites have radicalised modern culture, and as a result reflexive knowledge about the harmful effects of industrial processes and growing awareness about environmental risks has driven modernity into a new phase of development (Giddens 1990; Beck 1992; Beck et al. 2003). Some have expanded on this theory, arguing that reflexive knowledge about the harmful environmental effects of industrial systems can be fed back into industrial systems as inputs to regulate system performances, delivering ecological modernisation to industrial sectors of modern societies (Huber 2004; Mol 2003, 2008; Spaargaren 2000; Spaargaren et al. 2006). Given that the modern industries are reorganising in environmentally sustainable ways, then a popular political theory is that governments should financially support this green-tech revolution so that modern industrial societies can strike a harmonious, sustainable balance with the natural ecosystems they are embedded within. Technologies can help humans feed the world and save the planet.

Critics, namely historical materialists and critical realists, have for a long time contended that unless the economic mechanisms that caused unsustainable industrialism, poverty and famine or global warming are somehow brought under control or arrested completely, then green technologies represent another wave of temporary fixes to more fundamental and catastrophic social and economic problems, if not all out apocalypse (Benton 1996; Enzensberger 1996; Dickens 1996, 2004; Foster et al. 2010). Emerging knowledge economies, driven by forces of capital accumulation, are entering into a new era of cognitive capitalism, or cognitive materialism, in which material capital is dematerialised and immaterialised whilst preexisting social relations of class exploitation are not only maintained, but reinforced and amplified (Moulier Boutang 2011; Zukerfeld 2017). The digital revolution in agriculture and emergence of precision farming systems enable transnational firms to substitute, appropriate and displace the local, lay and tacit knowledge possessed by farmers around the world and sell it back to them in a digitalised commodity form, extending control beyond local farm gates to off-farm firms (Wolf and Wood 1997; Wolf and Buttel 1996). Such criticism suggests those not only are ‘eco-modern’ or ‘green-tech’ brands green-wash ideologies, glossing over exploitative relations between ruling classes, working classes and natural environments, but will also help big firms to attract tax-yielded funding that push forward innovation and transition at a greater rate.

Coming from a family farming background, with an interest in the transformative effects of modern technologies, I wanted to know more about this global revolution in agriculture. My research interests were driven by my anxieties that what could come to pass as a result of the revolution is a computerised agricultural industry, run off of inputs of commoditised data captured from remote satellites and fed into farm and field operations, with local farmers playing little more than the role of nodes or conduits. In order to understand the way things were going, it was important to find out how the industry was being driven, and into what direction it was heading. If we accept that farmers play an active role in any revolution, as economic agents in technological change (Kline and Pinch 1996), thereby rejecting the position that farmers are entirely structurally or technologically determined or forced to use precision farming systems , then one would need to explore the dynamics of agency that local farmers were expressing or exercising in structural change or reformation.

Whilst working on my family farm, I told a service engineer that I was going to start studying precision farming for my Ph.D. topic at Cambridge University to which he responded: ‘well that’s the way things are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Precision Farming Revolution
• 2. Global drivers
• 3. Economic drivers
• 4. Cultural methods
• 5. Society and Nature
• 6. Farming futures
• Back Matter