Neutralizing nature: Automation, agricultural technologies, and the morality of improvement

Abstract

Agricultural technologies (AgTech) associated with new developments in vertical farming, cellular agriculture, and precision agriculture, attract substantial venture capital investment. They rely heavily on automation and the promise of total control over nature, including the seasons, microbial activity, and the vicissitudes of plant and animal growth cycles. The benefits of these technologies are often expressed in both humanitarian and ecological terms, using the seemingly neutral language of sustainability, productivity, and efficiency. In this paper, we will draw evidence from the longer history of representations of agricultural modernization to argue that the desire to ‘automate nature’ and neutralize its unruly qualities is undergirded by a particular conception of value that has its basis in the morality of improvement. This morality has held specific religious, economic, and labor associations historically, as much as it has been taken to render particular social structures natural and inevitable. Our paper will map the contemporary social and ethical implications of this finding through a series of recent cases—such as The Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg), a failed “open resource to enable a global community to accelerate digital agricultural innovation”; and Just Eat, a chameleon cellular agriculture start-up—to seek to undercover the link between rhetorical and technological modes of neutralization.