Against ‘technology adoption’: troubling a dominant concept through biodiverse farmers’ in-difference to digital agriculture

Abstract

How do small-scale farmers ‘adopt’ digital agriculture technologies, what is their use for diversified farming, and how do they position themselves vis-à-vis the seemingly inevitable era of ‘Agriculture 4.0’? This paper discusses results from the research project Diversity by Design to ponder how small-scale, biodiverse farmers in Ontario and Quebec, Canada, relate to digital agriculture and farming tools even though and exactly because these technologies are rarely part of their farming routines. These farmers’ perspectives did not reveal indifference to digital agriculture but a range of attitudes – from curiosity to a dismissal of digital tools – which also broadened the definition of what counts as ‘digital agriculture.’ We argue these perspectives stem from farmers’ positions ‘in difference’ to the dominant farming regime for which digital agriculture technologies are developed, and theorize this stance as farmers’ in-difference: a notional interest in and lack of concern for digital farming tools that reveals both their impracticality and potential for biodiverse farming. We propose farmers’ in-difference as a positional critique of a political economy that privileges tech-savvy, industrial agriculture and sustains asymmetrical power relations while obscuring the realities of small-scale, biodiverse farming. As such, farmers’ in-difference also troubles a more fundamental paradigm of ‘technology adoption,’ which inevitably assumes technologies to be at the center of analysis, rather than the farm, good working conditions, and the idea that digital tools may be more peripheral to small-scale farmers’ decision-making processes.