[Post-doc] Romain Blancaneaux : Scaling-up agroecological market gardening through digital technologies

Scaling-up agroecological market gardening through digital technologies

Abstract: While considerable expectations are placed on the greening and digitalization of agriculture, my research questions the current promise according to which agroecological practices and digital technologies can effectively be coupled. The deployment of robots, sensors, decision-support tools (DSTs), or precision technologies is indeed expected, among other things, to reconcile environmental sustainability, economic viability, and improved working conditions, as well as to foster a scaling-up of agroecology. Today, various actors (economic, scientific, institutional) invest in this promise of interdependence, which in turn fuels the development of markets, research agendas, and public action.

Rather than engaging with the recently opened debate on the (in)compatibility between digital technologies and agroecology, I focus on what the promise of complementarity between the two entails and implies: On which actors and logics does it rest? Which agroecological practices and digital technologies are most (usefully) associated and promoted? How do these assemblages between agroecology and digital technologies circulate? Under which social, economic, and political conditions do they correspond—or fail to correspond—to farmers’ situations?

To address these questions, I investigate three complementary fields or spheres of activity (scientific, media, and agricultural). Market gardening constitutes a particularly relevant agricultural sub-sector: it remains understudied, despite its importance for agroecology, and is weakly digitalized compared to the rest of agriculture. On the one hand, the scientific literature actively participates in defining agricultural problems and the solutions considered legitimate—including the coupling between agroecology and digital technologies—thereby orienting research, public policies, and innovations. On the other hand, the national professional agricultural press circulates the promise of interdependence between agroecology and digital technologies by making certain ways of associating them visible or invisible, by narrating the costs and benefits to be expected, and by conveying dominant representations of agricultural transformations. At the local level, conducting fieldwork with market gardeners for whom digital technologies are (in)dispensable—or even contested—in the implementation of agroecological practices is necessary in order to confront the produced and circulated promise with situated realities.

Like previous technologies, digital technologies do not accompany agroecological practices in a neutral manner. The interdependence created by the promise of a digital–agroecological convergence is already accompanied by a process of adjustment, which simultaneously redefines what counts as “relevant” technologies and what agroecology comes to mean. Consequently, if the “scaling-up” of agroecology occurs through digitalization, it will appear less as a simple quantitative diffusion than as a political process that selects and privileges specific practices.