The distributed farmer: tracing US Midwestern precision agriculture techniques in the Anthropocene

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Agriculture and Food 1

Abstract

This article theorizes changes in the social world of farming and environmental decision making in regions where precision agriculture techniques are increasingly commonplace. In these data-intensive, automated techniques, I posit that farmers do not act as discreet, human actors but as collections of human and material participants which only together enact farming and decisions about farming. Drawing on qualitative data from on-site interviews with agronomists and seed sellers working in the US Midwest alongside a rich body of agri-food scholarship in cognate agriculture regimes, this research theorizes that precision agriculture produces a uniquely distributed farmer. Looking to the US Midwestern farm with the distributed farmer in mind, one sees the mess of relations between machinery, data, technique, corporate organization, and material on-farm corn and soy growing in the US. Tracing these relationships reveals that farming techniques are often stabilized by a variety of relational flows between actors interior to farming. These flows stabilize and control farming assemblages through different methods than those revealed by capitalocentric critiques of top-down corporate actors. Understanding the distributed farmer yields generative results for continued scholarship and for future applied research in transitions to sustainable or equitable agricultural practices in the US Midwest and cognate geographies. Tracing material flows, machinery, agronomists, or seeds themselves all have the capacity to be just as, if not more, generative ways forward for studying the distributed farmer in a more-than-human Anthropocene.

Author

• Matt Comi, University of Kansas