Digital Technologies for Smallholder Agriculture: Tensions and Speculations

Abstract

Big Tech, Big Agri, and agri-tech start-ups promise us that digital technologies will make agriculture more sustainable, painting high-tech visions of sensors, AI, and autonomous drones and robots running the data-driven farm. However, many such visions just reinforce the existing unsustainable industrial production paradigm. Since smallholder farms continue to produce most of thew world’s food, we ask in this work-in-progress: What can we learn from them about the design of appropriate and responsible digital farming technologies? We report tentative findings from an ongoing engagement with smallholder farmers in Northern England, UK. We present six tensions related to the relationship between technology and farming practices and the nature of technologies themselves. We develop a set of values for design for nature-friendly and community-based smallholder agriculture and propose three unfinished evocative design speculations, which we plan to develop further and use in co-design work with farmers going forward.