The Promise and Peril of Digital Agriculture: ‘Unleashing’ the Value of Natural Capital?

This chapter analyses policy discourses produced by government departments and authorities, corporations and lobby groups, to show how digital agriculture is constructed as an unavoidable, essential development to support global food security and improve Australia’s agricultural competitiveness. These discourses construct farm land as natural capital. Digital agriculture is claimed to ‘unlock’ and ‘unleash’ the economic value that this capital holds, by enhancing its productive use through decisions informed by data. Through this discourse, technological knowledge and data usurps farmers’ knowledge of their land and practice. In doing so, this shifts decision making responsibility towards owners of the technology. The land is re-inscribed as something that can be known and acted on through technology and the data it creates. However, farmers’ uptake of technology is framed as a key policy problem. As a result, governments have implemented policy measures to facilitate technology use, while political and corporate discourses draw on previous constructs of the ‘good farmer’ as one who uses technology, to infer that smart, modern approaches to farming are driven by technology.