Agribusiness claims that digital agriculture can transform industrial agriculture into a climate solution. Supposedly, digital ag platforms will encourage farmers to use sustainable practices, and automated farm tools will help farmers carry out these practices. However these arguments hide that the supply chains fueling digital ag entail massive water use, energy use, land use, and pollution in order to manufacture hardware and use data. Data storage and transmission currently takes up 2-2.7% of all global GHG emissions and is expected to take up 14% by 2040.
The companies designing digital ag technologies are the same companies that created the industrial agriculture system which is a major source of environmental destruction and emissions. That means they encourage the same practices which have been used to greenwash industrial agriculture for decades, like reduced tillage which generally relies on increased pesticide use to kill weeds. As digital agriculture locks in the power of ag-tech companies over farming practices, transitioning land into agroecological, chemical-free, just food production becomes even more difficult.
The most recent Agrifunder report found that, while global investment in AgTech declined last year, investment in digital agriculture continued to skyrocket by 35% relative to 2021, for a total of $1.7B. Although this investment is funding a wave of AgTech startups, within the context of extreme consolidation in agribusiness the most successful startups are accquired by large agrochemicals and tech companies. For investors looking to fund socially repsonsible climate solutions, corporate-led digital ag is not the answer. Claims that digitalization will increase sustainability ignore the massive resource consumption necessary to produce, maintain and discard data-based digital technologies, and sideline agroecological alternatives that already feed communities with minimal resource use.
Although corporate-led digital ag is unlikley to deliver on its promises of increased farm profitability and smaller environmental footprints, it is likely to make a return for investors. Similar to many big tech companies, the profitability in digital ag lies in the extraction of massive amounts of farm data through sensors and automated machinery. However, we have to question what rights farmers and workers will have over their data, and how the data will be used. There are no legal restrictions on farm data use, leading to risks of insurance discrimination, price discrimination, lock-in, and coercing farmers into using specific affiliated products and practices.