Paradoxes in Producing the Future of Farm Work: Anticipating Social Impact through the Lens of Early Adopters

Agriculture is said to be undergoing a ‘digital revolution’ which proponents believe will improve its productivity and eco-efficiency. To that end, technological visions for digital agriculture center on a radical transformation of the nature of work that farmers do. The eventual impact of current technological changes on farmers’ work will be significantly shaped by the imaginations and actions of researchers and companies currently developing digital agriculture platforms with limited rural input. Here, we explore how the future of agriculture is being anticipated and developed through the lens of early adopters of Microsoft FarmBeats. We identify a tension between the visions of seamless technical progress and the material resistances to those visions developers experience in practice.

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