Abstract
This paper examines the ethics of big data in agriculture, focusing on the power asymmetry between farmers and large agribusinesses like Monsanto. Following the recent purchase of Climate Corp., Monsanto is currently the most prominent biotech agribusiness to buy into big data. With wireless sensors on tractors monitoring or dictating every decision a farmer makes, Monsanto can now aggregate large quantities of previously proprietary farming data, enabling a privileged position with unique insights on a field-by-field basis into a third or more of the US farmland. This power asymmetry may be rebalanced through open-sourced data, and publicly-funded data analytic tools which rival Climate Corp. in complexity and innovation for use in the public domain.
Highlights
This paper examines the ethics of big data in agriculture, focusing on the power asymmetry between farmers and large agribusinesses like Monsanto
Though big data has been commercialised elsewhere, little scholarly attention has been given to the ways in which large data resources have come to bear upon industrial agriculture, often called “data-driven farming” or “smart farming”
Though big data analytics can be a powerful tool for farming, can it be used equitably? What are the ethics, power dynamics, and possible consequences surrounding the use of big data in agriculture and food production?
Summary
As a tool for revealing hidden patterns, requires large mobilisations of technologies, infrastructure, and expertise, which are much too elaborate for an individual farmer. Lev Manovich writes of three classes of people in the realm of big data: those who create data, those who have the means to collect it, and those who have amassed the expertise to analyse it 1673) between people and their data: they are rarely granted access to their own data, and they lack the tools or the context to analyse it – it is corporations, not individuals, that benefit from big data collection. Following a survey conducted by the American Farm Bureau in October 2014, “Fully 77.5 per cent of farmers surveyed said they feared regulators and other government officials might gain access to their private information without their knowledge or permission. What do we know about who has access to this data?
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