Over the past decade, major multinational agribusiness firms including Bayer/Monsanto and Syngenta, along with dozens of tech startups, have dramatically increased investments in digital farming technologies. Building on GPS satellite data, climate modeling, and mobile data harvesting, the new suite of digital farming technologies is routinely marketed to farmers as a form of ‘risk management.’ Big-data algorithms enable private micro-insurance policies, farm implement sensors promise to reduce reliance on agrochemicals, and in-tractor mobile computers use real-time commodity pricing data to advise farmers on the most profitable micro-timing of harvests.
Commercial agriculture, by its nature, is an enterprise fraught with profound uncertainty and risk. Yet technology, policy choices, and business practices have fundamentally transformed the ways in which farmers have confronted risk and uncertainty since the mid-twentieth century. From the early twentieth century to the 1990s, large-scale institutions were the essential mode for confronting risk and uncertainty. Vertically integrated agribusinesses used their oligopoly and oligopsony power to internalize many of the costs of unpredictable agriculture, while national governments spent controversially large sums to subsidize commercial farmers. Yet by the end of the century, the development of new technologies and discourses of financialization enabled both government policymakers and agribusinesses to pursue strategies that have increasingly individualized risk as something to be “managed” by farmers. This short presentation will explore the broader social and environmental consequences of this shift.