Since agriculture is so important, why are we leaving its future up to a few powerful companies?
Humankind through many generations has explored, learned and thus increased our understanding of the world. We have used observation, ingenuity, creativity, and scientific research to create technologies that have made us safer, healthier, and more comfortable with less toil, improved the collection of information related to basic needs of production and commerce, and increased our abilities to communicate with each other. Yet, as the industrial revolution demonstrated, the power of ownership of new technologies and the decision-making that this power facilitates has not had the common good in mind.
It was the machine-smashing Luddites of the 19th century who recognized this culturally-destructive situation. Today, the term ‘luddite’ is used derogatorily to discredit anyone who questions the use of new technologies. However, historians tell us that these skilled textile workers were not against technology. Their protests were against “the new logic of industrial capitalism, where the productivity gains from new technology enriched only the machines’ owners and weren’t shared with the workers.”
When we look at our food and agriculture system, any farmer will tell you that many technologies have proved beneficial, relieving them of some of the most physically demanding work, improving safety on the farm, and providing new insights for farm management. As agricultural technology is advancing, with sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, genetic sequencing, machine learning, and communications networks to collect, process, aggregate, and analyze data, any new benefits to the farmer – and their ability to make ethical land use decisions – is quickly disappearing. Big Data, the massive accumulation of digital information on land, seeds, plant genetics, livestock, workers, production systems, and consumer behavior is an emerging source of power and profit for both tech companies and agribusiness.
Earlier this year, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced it had formed Mineral, a new ag tech company. In a Des Moines Register guest column published January 15, Mineral’s CEO asks, “if agriculture is so important, why isn’t it getting the best tech?” The question that must be fully addressed is, “since agriculture is so important, why are we leaving its future up to a few powerful companies?”
In fact, Alphabet/Google is positioning itself to join the agricultural data mining industry as the major tech companies jostle to see who will control the most lucrative data – and the related infrastructure - coming from every corner of our food system. Mineral claims it already has data on 10% of the world’s farmland. Seed, chemical, and equipment companies are investing heavily in ag tech as well, a big influence in Bayer’s $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018. As reported last fall, Bayer’s ‘Field View’ digital platform, used by many farmers here in Iowa, “extracts 87.5 billion datapoints from 180 million acres of farmland in 23 countries and funnels it into the cloud and AI servers of Microsoft and Amazon to generate new business strategies.” With little to no oversight to this digitalization of agriculture, government leaders, commodity groups, and agribusiness executives are enabling, and even encouraging, this increase in power and influence of companies whose sole interest is profits.
In 2020, the CEO of an Iowa farmer-member cooperative, whose role is to work for the benefit of farmers, told members that data was likely to be more valuable than the crops they produced in the near future. With the chronically-low price of crops determined through a global market without reflecting the full costs to produce the crops, this may not be a huge leap. Yet, how could this be possible? Who would pay more for data than a crop is worth? And, how long will it be before the tech and agribusiness companies want these payments for themselves and take over our farms, leaving us with no more farmers? What will this mean for rural communities, protections of our precious natural ecosystems, and our food choices?
This commodification of data realizes payments in a number of ways, such as through carbon credits, incentive programs, and precision climate-smart agriculture, all of which are based on narrowly-defined and corporate-friendly practices that have been called out as greenwashing. Farmers are lured into giving up their data – their knowledge – for little real return. These data-collecting schemes are a combination of offerings through the private sector, public-private partnerships, or entirely tax-payer funded and heavily promoted by US Department of Agriculture, especially through the actions of current Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
In turn, the financialization of data-rich farmland attracts investors, often through shares in Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs. With closely-held technology, thousands of acres of farmland can be managed by artificial intelligence. Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft with its Azure Farmbeats service, reportedly owned the most private farmland of anyone in the United States in 2021. It is becoming more and more difficult for today’s family farmer to compete with this appetite for farmland investment.
While agribusiness and tech companies claim benefits to farmers and to the environment, the technology being developed and employed will lock-in the farm practices, land use, crops, and equipment that support the extractive, chemical-intensive corn-soybean-CAFO-ethanol model, further entrenching this system. Additionally, the collection, processing, and storage of data takes huge amounts of energy. Even when this energy comes from what is labeled as renewable energy, all forms of energy have environmental consequences, with mining of Earth’s metals as a major concern.
As many people in Iowa are beginning to understand, this system of agriculture is not sustainable. Evidence shows it causes widespread air and water pollution, harms ecosystem health and human health, moves more and more farmers off the land, and destroys rural communities and small businesses. Any biodiversity that is left is only a novelty, at risk of completely disappearing.
Agribusiness repeats the claim that decisions about agriculture need to be science-based. However, they are really talking about technology that serves their economic interests. Science and technology are not the same. Science, which includes ecology and sociology that we ignore at our own peril, is not an endpoint as new research adds to scientific knowledge. We must guard against the corrupted application of science.
We don’t need to smash machines as the Luddites did, but we do need clearly defined rules and limits. We can assess which technologies are helpful tools to allow farmers to farm in ecologically-sound ways, develop open-access technologies and infrastructures for public use, emphasize the value of human knowledge, and define policies to ensure the digital collection tools and the infrastructure work for the common good. We can create a sustainable agriculture system if we set the rules to benefit all of us equitably and to protect the planet. After all, technology will not change the fact that we are part of nature.