Searching for sustainability in the digital agriculture debate: an alternative approach for a systemic transition

Roy William Cobby

doi:10.5209/tekn.69475

Abstract

One of the key challenges for agriculture today is feeding an increasing population without contributing to climate change. Increasingly, digital agriculture is discussed as a new sociotechnical regime that could help limit emissions for farmers worldwide. While sustainability is an important issue, recent papers in the field of digital agriculture do not address the problem directly. After a literature review, this paper will focus on the importance of shared perspectives as enablers in socio-technical transitions. This paper argues that the myth of the digital sublime could act in favour of the existing and unsustainable model of agriculture. This is partly a result of hardware production and connectivity already being resource-intensive. Precisely because of this high environmental impact, the following discussion will employ the legacy of the Green Revolution to highlight the importance of precaution in deploying digital agriculture. In theory, in order to address the shortcomings of the current system, private sector companies are developing proprietary software solutions that could in practice entrench unsustainable business models. As an alternative, this paper suggests, existing open-source platforms that encourage not-for-profit collaborations between farmers should be scaled up. Through bottom-up processes, future researchers and developers should seek ways to place sustainability at the centre of their analyses, and encourage the adoption of practices that can be tailored to the diverse needs of farmers. Ultimately, stakeholders in digital agriculture should understand that sustainability principles must be encoded at all stages in the deployment of digital agriculture technologies.

Highlights

As described by Godfray et al (2010), research conducted in first decade of the century concluded that there is a yield gap that needs to be met in order feed 9 billion people by 2050
On the summary for policymakers, the IPCC (2019) team connects the issue of climate change with actions to increase food security worldwide, and reduce food waste across the agricultural chain
This is because climate change is set to diminish yields as land quality decreases due to changing weather patterns (IPCC, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

As described by Godfray et al (2010), research conducted in first decade of the century concluded that there is a yield gap that needs to be met in order feed 9 billion people by 2050. They quote criticisms from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) which have noticed the lacklustre implementation of sustainability goals in agriculture despite the generalised adoption of global agendas (UNCTAD, 2013) Their conclusion is that agriculture research must start looking beyond productivity and broaden its view on the environmental impacts of the whole agricultural system Trendov’s (2019) World Bank study and the World Economic Forum and McKinsey’s report (2018) show great potential for digital tools to address environmental issues identified by recent research: limiting the consumption of resources like water, maintaining soil quality, reducing food waste across chains and helping farmers adopt sustainable practices. A systemic approach is fundamental to address the incompatibility between our current agrarian socio-technical regime, and the Earth’s environmental limits After explaining why this approach is necessary, the paper will advance some alternative solutions for future researchers to consider

Findings

Review methodology and key research questions