A Better Wilderness? Ethical Questions and Social Ambivalences of Precision Livestock Farming

This paper gives an overview of current developments in the area of digitalization in agriculture, focusing on Precision Livestock Farming (PLF). It discusses the consequences of new technologies for three relevant groups: farmers, society as a whole, and animals. For each of these groups, there are hopes and potentials, but also risks and open questions. After discussing ethical aspects, the paper develops an escalation that could be argued as either utopian or dystopian, by describing a future PLF barn as a kind of “better wilderness”, where the animals are largely left to their own devices and come into little or no contact with humans, but are cared for and fed at the same time. There is an intentional provocation in this description. The text argues that such a thought experiment can make the hitherto still largely abstract topic of PLF more comprehensible to laypeople and be a good starting point for participatory technology development.