This article is also available in audio as part of the Green Wave podcast.

Written by Francesco Ajena

Increasingly, ‘smart farming’ has been making its way into farms across Europe and onto the political agenda. The European Union appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies and funds which strongly facilitate the development of smart farming and data-driven business models in agriculture. In the recent CAP legislative proposal, precision agriculture and digitalisation are praised by the agricultural Commissioner Phil Hogan as a great opportunity to develop rural communities and to increase the environmental and climate mitigation impact of farmers. A new focus on Farming Advisory Systems — structures providing the training of farmers — is intended to prepare farmers to this technological leap forward.

What is smart farming (or precision agriculture)?

Smart farming, or precision agriculture, is a modern farming management concept using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. For example, rather than applying the same amount of fertilisers over an entire agricultural field or feeding a large animal population with equal amounts of feed, precision agriculture helps measure specific needs and adapt feeding, fertilising, pest control or harvesting strategies accordingly. The means of precision agriculture  consist mainly of a combination of new sensor technologies, satellite navigation, positioning technology and the use of mass amounts of data to influence decision-making on farms. The aim is to save costs, reduce environmental impact and produce more food.

Without a doubt, the promise of more efficient farming, higher yields, and environmental sustainability sounds very attractive. But some might wonder how such market-oriented technologies will impact the agricultural sector. While mega-machinery, chemical input and seed lobbies push to fund these innovations through CAP money, serious questions are raised about who has access to these technologies, who controls the data and what is the environmental performance of these innovations.

Is precision agriculture the way forward to sustainability?

Smart agriculture is described by many EU policy-makers as the answer to make agriculture sustainable. While it leaves no doubt that precision agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture from an environmental point of view, there seems to be confusion about what sustainability truly is. An increasing scientific consensus emerged over the years around the fact that sustainability should encompass ecological, economic, and social aspects. Under these aspects, a brief analysis shows the limits of the impacts precision agriculture shall have on sustainability.

First of all, this new paradigm ignores ecological processes, being simply based on models for optimising conventional production and creating unintended needs. For example, optimising chemical soil fertilisation and targeting the amount of pesticides to apply in a certain area are useful tools in a context of conventional production only. Precision farming may help to reduce fertilisers and pesticide use, but it fundamentally assumes a sterile soil and impoverished biodiversity. In contrast, in a balanced agroecosystem, a living soil works as a buffer for both pest and nutrient management, meaning there is no need to resort to pesticides and fertilisers.

Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit

Secondly, smart agriculture, as currently developed, is not economically sustainable for most of the farmers. For the last 50 years mainstream agricultural development has progressed along the trajectory of ‘more is better’, imposing top-down chemical and bio-technology and energy-intensive machines. The logic of increasing production at all costs has led farms to grow and pushed farmers into debt. European farms are disappearing, being swallowed by few big farms. From 2003 to 2013, more than one in four farms disappeared from the European landscape. Along the same paradigm, digitalisation risks putting farmers in more debt and dependency. Farmers would be led to buy machines and give up their data. The collected data will then be owned and sold on by the machinery companies to farmers. These new market-oriented technologies governed by the trend of pushing to commodify and privatise knowledge would increase dependency on costly tools, mostly unaffordable for smallholder farmers, accelerating their disappearance.

Finally, the precision agriculture approach is not socially sustainable. The knowledge transfer mode of precision agriculture mainly follows a top-down procedure where innovation comes from private companies that develop and provide technological solutions. Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit, fostering a path dependency, and ignoring the potential of practice, knowledge sharing and participatory research. Moreover, the promises of digital technology and the big data agenda are mainly addressed to conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing them alone to thrive at the expense of smaller ones.

A smart and truly sustainable way of doing agriculture is already here

During the last decade, agroecology has known large success, sparking transition across all the EU. Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and transition-oriented research, agroeocology links together science, practice, and movements focusing on social change. While far from being an ‘agriculture of the past’, as some opponents have labelled it, agroecology combines scientific research and community-based experimentation, emphasising technology and innovation that are knowledge-intensive, low cost,and easily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. Agroecology implies methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allows the technologies to respond to real user needs. It develops a systemic paradigm towards a full harmonisation with ecological processes, low external inputs,use of biodiversity, and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The resulting technology is as ‘smart’, ‘precise’ and performing as the one promoted by big data companies. Drip irrigation (a type of micro-irrigation), nitrogen fertilisation using mycorrhizal fungi, adaptive multi-paddock grazing systems (a management system in which livestock are regularly moved from one plot to another to avoid overgrazing), and bokashi composting (fermented organic matter) are just a few examples of advanced agroecologial technologies that correspond to the needs of adaptability, performance, and accessibility. Low-tech methods can be equally or more effective, are more appropriate for smaller or remote upland farms, and engender less debt or input dependency. The major part of equipment most of the farmers need is affordable, adaptable and easy to fix.

Are agroecology and digitalisation poles apart?

Considering the current agenda of big data and big machineries companies, yes, they are.But this does not mean digital innovations are unfit for agroecology. The main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to their accessibility and the lack of autonomy of farmers. Agroecology is based on inclusiveness, it emphasises the importance of the dialogue between producers, researchers, and communities through participatory learning processes. A bottom-up approach, a horizontal integration, and a complete freedom of information are needed to support agroecological innovations.

Thus, opposing agroecology and digital technology would be critically wrong. Serious potential can be unlocked by combining digital tools to achieve the objectives of sustainable agricultural production. Farmer-to-farmer methods based on open-source information ruled by a horizontal exchange can be used to democratise the use of data. Crowd-sourced soil data can help farmers to share information and benefiting from it. An example of this is the app mySoil, which seeks to promote the distribution of freely available data through digital technologies. This project has developed a citizen science role for data collection, enabling users to upload their own observations about soils in their area. Sensors can help measure plant or animal needs, information can be transferred and shared among a farming community quickly, and new apps can help farmers selling their products directly and developing a more efficient community-based agriculture. The cost of specialised machines that manage sustainable soil cover and weeds, or composting, can be made affordable by promoting cooperative models and community connections among bioregions.

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Examples of collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, such as l’Atelier Paysan in France, can be found allover Europe. These local innovations require an enabling environment that Governments are failing to provide. Atelier Paysan is a network of farmers, scientists, and researchers that have developed a bottom-up approach to innovation in order to integrate farmers’ knowledge and the development of new technologies adapted to agroecological farming. The aim is to empower farmers to take back control on technical choices. The starting point is that farmers are in the best position to respond appropriately to the challenges of agricultural development. With the support of technical facilitators and building on transdisciplinary and collective intelligence, farmers develop appropriate and adapted innovations. The technology is developed and owned by farmers, and the investment and the benefits are collective. Adapting digital technology to similar processes can spark transition in a much more effective way than obsolete top-down and technocratic approaches. If we want real innovation, we need to start daring to innovate the innovation process itself.

Involving users in the design of agro-equipments, creating financial incentives for innovative equipment purchase, sharing costs among cooperatives and farming communities, and training end-users on the high potential of these new technologies are pivotal aspects of adapting digital tools to agroecological innovation. These processes need the support of public investment to scale up. This shall be the role of the new CAP, in order to make its huge money flow legitimate. CAP money should serve inclusive innovation, in order to develop accessible and adapted knowledge. During the upcoming CAP negotiations, the future of 38 per cent of the European budget will be decided. Public money must be spent for public goods. It is not a matter of what kind of technology we want to support for our agriculture; it is a matter of who will benefit from his technology, farmers or private companies.

This article has been reprinted from the Greeneuropeanjournal you can find the original post here!

The original post included an embedded podcast that was not reposted here.

Featured image: “Rt. 539 Hay Field” by James Loesch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Can FOSS stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge?

Gabriel Ash: Acting against the grain of current economic and political structures and offering both valuable access and inspiring ideas about collaboration, the sharing of ‘the commons,’ and the future of work, these FOSS-modelled schemes are unlikely to be the last of their kind. But if they are to realize their full potential, it is essential that both the lessons of the history of FOSS, and differences in context between IT and agriculture, as well as the impact of the quarter century that separates the two moments in time, become subjects of reflection.

The reality of FOSS is significantly more complicated that the simple distinction between open and proprietary. In many products—the Android phone, for example—‘open’ and ‘closed’ elements co-exist, and tiered commercial projects with an Open Source base and proprietary additions are common. Furthermore, ‘open’ itself is a continuum, with various licensing schemes offering a range of different degrees of control. If FOSS models become widespread, forms of accommodation between open and proprietary technologies are likely to emerge in agriculture as well, which could further advance the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers. It matters therefore how and to what ends FOSS schemes engage and mobilize users and producers.

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

The history of the evolution of agricultural knowledge is also more complicated than a simple binary between proprietary and public. The Green Revolution replaced the informal, tacit knowledge of farmers with formal, scientific knowledge that was nevertheless organized as public knowledge, primary through institutions of research and higher learning. This phase of development elicited resistance and criticism for both the damage to farmers and ecosystems, primarily in the Third World, and for the denigration of centuries of accumulated local knowledge. This conflict was instrumental in the emergence of agroecology as a discipline[1] as well as in a range of efforts to foster better interactions between scientists and farmers.[2]

A second process that began shifting funding, control, and eventually the ownership of knowledge from the public to the private sector occurred later. In contrast to agriculture, software development never had the equivalent of farmers, and FOSS emerged purely out of resistance to the second process. This difference implies that FOSS-inspired schemes in agriculture could be more complex and resilient, and potentially more effective alternatives. But it also opens more room for misaligned interests and internal conflicts.

The ideas of unfettered collaboration and democratic creativity that FOSS schemes invoke are not external to the development of the privatized knowledge economy and its attendant intensification of intellectual property rights. Workforce creativity, technological innovation, intellectual property rights, and economic growth are widely perceived today by policy makers as linked.[3] By advancing ideas of knowledge as common and knowledge production as free, FOSS-inspired schemes expose some of the internal contradictions of a model of economic growth premised on profiting from immaterial labour and the control and selling of knowledge. But they will not buck the trend towards privatized hi-tech agriculture alone.

Agriculture, however, may offer unique opportunities for linking FOSS-inspired schemes with other forms of engagement and mobilization on issues such as environmentalism and farmers’ and peasants’ rights, and the different ways each of the latter raises the question of the commons. Let these projects be the early shoots of a wide wave of reflection, experimentation, and mobilization around these questions.

Read part 1 of this series here.

[1] Gliessman S.R. (2015) Agroecology: the ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd Ed., CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, New York, USA, p. 28.

[2] World Bank (2006) Global – International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Project. Washington, DC: World Bank http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/753791468314375364/Global-International-Assessment-of-Agricultural-Science-and-Technology-for-Development-IAASTD-Project , pp. 65-68.

[3] See Barry (2008), pp. 42-43.

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Gabriel Ash: Recently, a number of initiatives defending free access to agricultural knowledge have emerged. FarmHack, Atelier Paysan, The Open Seeds Initiative, and Open Source Seeds advance alternatives to the proprietary knowledge model of industrial farming based on ideas drawn from Free/Open Source Software. These initiatives respond to current trends in agricultural development and raise questions about its direction; they express an emergent concern for the commons against the drive to privatize knowledge. But why now? What is Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)? How is the FOSS model applied to agriculture? Finally, what are the opportunities and pitfalls such schemes present?[1]

Why now?

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, blockchain, cryptocurrencies—these are today’s ‘hot’ investment trends. The hi-tech ventures that seek to deploy these technologies receive the bulk of new investment in start-ups as well as media attention. The dominance of Information Technologies affects agriculture in two ways: First, an investment gold rush is building up in ‘Agritech,’ around buzzwords such as ‘smart farming’ or ‘precision agriculture,’ and a crop of companies that seek to make agriculture more efficient and profitable with information technologies such as drone and satellite imagery analysis, cloud based data collection, digital exchanges, etc. One gets a sense of the magnitude of the forces unleashed from browsing the offerings of start-up accelerators such as EIT.  Second, businesses, regulators, politicians, NGOs, and the media adopt vocabulary, goals, expectations, and ‘common sense’ derived from Information Technology, which are then applied to agriculture.[2]

The dominance of Information Technology and its tendency to shape other industries as well as law and regulation is not simply the outcome of “market forces.” Both the US and the EU have long promoted the dissemination of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the adoption of new intellectual property rights to support it. Thus, “the 2005 Spring European Council called knowledge and innovation the engines of sustainable growth…it is essential to build a fully inclusive information society, based on the widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in public services, SMEs and households.” According to António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, “we want to ensure that big data will bring the big impact that so many people need.” It is taken for granted by policy makers that innovation and growth depend on commodified, proprietary knowledge, which in turn require reforming and unifying intellectual property rights.[3]

With the growing visibility of ICT, the policy drive for hi-tech innovation, and the push to commodify and privatise knowledge, alternative practices that first emerged within ICT—notably Free/Open Source Software—have also migrated into the mainstream, inspiring projects such the Creative Commons and Free Culture. They are also gaining a presence in agriculture.

What is Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)?

FOSS emerged in the 1980s among computer scientists and engineers who resented the way commercial constraints interfered with the norms of unfettered collaboration and exchange of information that prevail in science. In 1985, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which launched the GNU project of free software tools. Breaking with the habits of commercial development, the software was written by volunteers in open collaboration over the internet and gave users full access to the source code as well as the right to freely share, tinker with and modify the program.

The FSF introduced a new relation between software producers and users, the General Public License (GPL), which effectively “hacks” copyright law to create the very opposite of a property right, a resource that obliges its users to place the fruits of their own labour in a shared common domain. By mandating that all derivative works must be distributed with the same license, this property of the GPL, called ‘copyleft’, prevents the appropriation and integration of free software in a proprietary product and guarantees that the code will remain free and open to users.

Although inspired initially by ideals of openness and freedom, FOSS did not evolve as a radical challenge to proprietary software. Companies large and small soon began investing important sums in open source development, creating new business models around it. In 1998, the shift toward as a more business-friendly model was formalized with the establishment of Open Source Initiative. Today the trend for new projects is towards licenses that eschew copyleft.

There is a perception that FOSS is US-centric. This is true insofar as the powerful US tech industry has shaped its major trends, but with important qualifications. Not only are there numerous European organizations promoting FOSS, but European countries, especially France and Germany, provide a surprisingly large number of participants. Furthermore, a number of Third World countries and public institutions have embraced it for political reasons.

FOSS is undoubtedly a success story. Its products, including heavyweights such as the operating system Linux and the ubiquitous PHP, MySQL, and Apache, power much of the web, and major ITC companies rely on it. It is also a realm of empowerment and meaning for the skilled programmers who contribute to it, one that implicitly invokes new forms of collective creativity, unfettered by the structures of intellectual property that support the expansion of the ‘information society’ and its attendant commodification of knowledge. Yet FOSS has not delivered on the utopian aspirations that are often invested in it. It has not subverted the dominant proprietary industrial structures, nor has it ushered a society of empowered technology users/creators. In David Barry’s words, FOSS remains “precariously balanced between the need for a common public form in which innovation and creativity can blossom and the reliance, to a large extent, on private corporations…” that push forward the commodification and enclosure of knowledge.[4]

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

FOSS-inspired initiatives in Agriculture

Mechanized farm equipment manufacturers such as John Deer progressively moved toward digitized, software-controlled components that require authorized software access to repair, as well as restrictive contracts that forbid repairs and modifications. This inspired hackers, first in Eastern Europe, then in the US, to develop and share hacked versions of the control software, circumventing the manufacturers’ protections. In the US, farmers who used those hacked versions joined a larger movement demanding legislation to protect ‘the right to repair.’[5]

Addressing similar concerns from a different direction, FarmHack, established in 2010 and describing itself as “a worldwide community of farmers that build and modify our own tools,” draws inspiration from the hacking culture of FOSS to promote low-cost, open farm technology. Participants share designs for farm tools and license them under ‘copyleft’ licenses. FarmHack seeks to “light the spark for a collaborative, self-governing community that builds its own capacity and content, rather than following a traditional cycle of raising money to fund top-down knowledge generation.”

In France, Atelier Paysan was set up in 2011 with a similar basic concept, offering “an on-line platform for collaboratively developing methods and practices to reclaim farming skills and achieve self-sufficiency in relation to the tools and machinery used in organic farming.” Unlike FarmHack, whose off-line presence is limited to meetups, Atelier Paysan is organized as a cooperative that owns a certain amount of equipment and provides workshops to farmers. Atelier Paysan publishes its collaborators’ design under the same creative commons ‘copyleft’ license.

The enclosure and commodification of plant genome through patenting, licensing, and hybridization have spurred similar efforts. The Open Source Seed Initiative, a US organization created in 2012, describes itself as “inspired by the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software,” with the goal “to free the seed – to make sure that the genes in at least some seed can never be locked away from use by intellectual property rights.” After initially trying and failing to devise a legally enforceable license, OSSI opted for a short pledge that is printed on all seed packages: “…you have the freedom to use these OSSI- Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this Pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.” As of today, OSSI’s list of pledged seeds numbers over 400 varieties.

Last year, a second open seeds initiative was unveiled in Germany, Open Source Seeds, which has its institutional roots in ecological agricultural development in the Third World. Unlike FOSS copyright-based licenses, OSS license was devised under German civil contract law. The license, which is copyleft and includes derivatives, aims at combating market concentration. As one can expect for an organization that operates for less than a year, only five open source varieties are listed so far, all tomatoes.

Part 2 will question whether FOSS can stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge. 

Gabriel Ash is a translator, software developer, writer, activist, and filmmaker. He lives now in Geneva, Switzerland

[1] The account of FOSS below is highly indebted to David Berry’s excellent analysis in Berry, D. (2008) Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, Pluto Press, London.

[2] See the European Conference on Precision Agriculture Sponsors, the European Parliament report on Precision Agriculture and the Future of Farming in Europe, the European Commission’s Communication on Future of Food and Farming .

[3] See European Commission (2005), p.4.

[4] Berry (2008), p. 144;

[5] See The Repair Association  and Nebraska’s Fair Repair Bill

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