Technology Treadmill Research Articles

Contradictions between commercializing seeds, empowering smallholders farmers, and promoting biodiversity in Ghana: Seed policy within a historical framework

This article critically examines the agricultural development agenda of promoting commercialization and sustainable intensification and contrasts this with farmers’ own priorities, with case studies drawn from the maize and cocoa sectors in Ghana. The study investigates the relationship between agricultural development paradigms, seed breeding strategies, and the commercialization of agriculture from the 1950s to present. It returns to the debates of farming systems research, the appropriation of the agricultural varieties of farmers within the South by Northern agribusiness, and Paul Richards’ framework of an Indigenous African agricultural revolution rooted in the experimental traditions of farmers to establish a critical framework for examining the commodification of seeds. It focuses on the contradictions between maintaining biodiversity, fashioning high-yielding proprietary seeds, and promoting farmer participation that became manifest in the framework of farming systems research. It argues that commercial pressures have prioritized yields and the protection of proprietary varieties over biodiversity in policy frameworks. This contrast with farmers’ own concerns with adapting varieties to the conditions on their farms through their own experimentation, and maintaining a diversity of changing genetic materials including those drawn from certified varieties. This enables farmers to hedge against risk, disease, and pest attacks, while selecting varietal materials that optimize yields in the particular agroecological conditions of their farms. Although social participation is still upheld as an important value in liberal market agrarian policies, there has been a significant transformation in its usage. It no longer denotes farmer participation in the design of and experimentation with technology, but participation in the consumption of the agricultural products of agribusiness or in the agricultural technology treadmill. This contribution examines the implication of smallholder agricultural commercialization for biodiversity and for the dynamism and vitality of local farming systems.

“If I need to put more armor on, I can’t carry more guns”:: the collective action problem of breeding for productivity in the California strawberry industry

Facing the appearance of novel soil-borne plant diseases as well as increasing restrictions of the chemical fumigants that have long been used to treat them, developing disease resistant cultivars is one strategy among several that the California strawberry industry is supporting. Yet, under the assumption that growers most desire high yielding varieties, university strawberry breeders continue to emphasize productivity, despite knowing the difficulty of breeding for many different qualities. They make this assumption even as the industry’s per acre productivity reached an all-time high in 2018 while prices continued to slip, a dynamic predicted by Willard Cochrane’s famous technology treadmill. This paper explores if and why growers want yield over disease resistant varieties to assess if there are ways to slow or stop the treadmill. Based on twenty in-depth interviews with strawberry growers, we found that growers want yield to remain individually competitive even as they largely recognize that prioritizing yield over other qualities can be self-defeating for the industry. We additionally found that this desire is being augmented by buyer-grower contractual relationships, conditions of land access and rising land values, and practices of labor remuneration not heretofore theorized as playing into the treadmill. Given that those structural forces are not easily addressed, we also consider the role that university scientists play in constructing this desire for yield. On this question we draw on work in science and technology studies as it relates to university agricultural science to suggest that farmers’ needs and desires are a reflection of what university research and extension can offer and conclude that university breeders are best positioned to level the playing field by ceasing to breed for productivity.

Alternative economic strategies and the technology treadmill: Beginning vegetable farmers in Iowa

AbstractThis article describes the specialized technologies and nonmonetary economic strategies used by beginning vegetable farmers in Iowa alternative agriculture. Cochrane's model of the technology treadmill suggests that the newest wave of precision agriculture technology will soon become compulsory on large‐scale grain farms in Iowa, but these are not the only technologies driving Midwestern agriculture forward. Beginning farmers in Iowa alternative agriculture seek to establish profitable, small‐scale, direct‐market farms. In pursuit of these goals, many look to technological solutions, such as specialized cold‐storage systems, harvesters, and root washers. However, these technologies are often unaffordable for debt‐averse new farmers. To access these solutions, beginning farmers integrate their use of agricultural technologies into a range of alternative economic strategies, including bartering, equipment sharing, and reciprocal labor exchange. This article argues that these nonmonetary strategies effectively allow beginning farmers access to the efficiency benefits of technology while simultaneously providing a buffer to the classic treadmill effect of “get big or get out.”

Improving New-Product Forecasting at Intel Corporation

Forecasting demand for new products is becoming increasingly difficult as the technology treadmill continually drives product life cycles shorter. The task is even more challenging for electronic goods; these products have life cycles measured in quarters, manufacturing processes measured in months, and market volatility that takes place on a day-to-day basis. We present a model that perpetually reduces forecast variance as new market information is acquired over time. Our model extends Bass' original idea of product diffusion [Bass, F. M. 1969. A new product growth for model consumer durables. Management Sci. 15(5) 215–227] to a more comprehensive theoretical setting. We first describe how forecast variances can be reduced when combining predictive information from multiple diffusion models. We then introduce the notion of demand-leading indicators in a Bayesian framework that reduces forecast variance by incorporating a wide variety of information emerging during the product life cycle. We describe a successful implementation of this model at Intel, where we tested one-third of the microprocessor products. When compared with the current forecasting method, our model reduced forecasting time from three days to two hours and decreased forecasting errors by 33 percent, leading to $11.8 million in cost savings over four months of demand realization.

IS AFRICAN AGRICULTURE CONVERGING? EVIDENCE FROM A PANEL OF CROP YIELDS

It is forty years since Willard Cochrane (1958) introduced the “technology treadmill”, which suggested that farmers have to adopt new technologies to maintain profitability. Cochrane’s concern was the agricultural sector of the United States, but the treadmill argument has global applicability, and has arguably influenced the international agricultural research effort. For world agriculture, the CGIAR system has the task of promoting technical change and, if it is succeeding in diffusing better technologies to the poorest countries, there should be some evidence of convergence. Thus, the less agriculturally successful countries within Africa should be closing the gap between them and the leaders, and the gaps between Africa and Asia, and the developed and developing countries should be decreasing.

Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Guide

A definition of sustainability as maintaining ‘utility’ (average human wellbeing) over the very long term future is used to build ideas from physics, ecology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, history, philosophy, economics and psychology, into a coherent, interdisciplinary analysis of the potential for sustaining industrial civilisation. This potential is highly uncertain, because it is hard to know how long the ‘technology treadmill’, of substituting accumulated tools and knowledge for declining natural resource inputs to production, can continue. Policies to make the treadmill work more efficiently, by controlling its pervasive environmental, social and psychological external costs, and policies to control population, will help to realise this potential. Unprecedented levels of global co-operation, among very unequal nations, will be essential for many of these policies to work effectively. Even then, tougher action may be required, motivated by an explicit moral concern for sustainability. An evolutionary analysis of history suggests that technology and morality can and will respond to a clearly perceived future threat to civilisation; but we cannot easily predict the threat, or whether our response will be fast enough.

Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Guide

A definition of sustainability as maintaining ‘utility’ (average human wellbeing) over the very long term future is used to build ideas from physics, ecology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, history, philosophy, economics and psychology, into a coherent, interdisciplinary analysis of the potential for sustaining industrial civilisation. This potential is highly uncertain, because it is hard to know how long the ‘technology treadmill’, of substituting accumulated tools and knowledge for declining natural resource inputs to production, can continue. Policies to make the treadmill work more efficiently, by controlling its pervasive environmental, social and psychological external costs, and policies to control population, will help to realise this potential. Unprecedented levels of global co-operation, among very unequal nations, will be essential for many of these policies to work effectively. Even then, tougher action may be required, motivated by an explicit moral concern for sustainability. An evolutionary analysis of history suggests that technology and morality can and will respond to a clearly perceived future threat to civilisation; but we cannot easily predict the threat, or whether our response will be fast enough.