In this blog, author Coline Prévost looks at how at a time of increasing digitalisation of agriculture and food systems, militant peasant organisations are mapping out other paths of innovation, on the fringes of colonial capitalist logics and as close as possible to peasant communities.
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The current wave of innovation in agriculture is ostensibly digital. The so-called fourth revolution of agriculture encompasses various digital technologies, including drones, GPS-powered tractors, farm management software or precision irrigation systems. These technologies are generally embedded within a globalised economic system that integrates diverse actors that are far removed from farming communities.
The digitalisation of agriculture is the logical continuation of the corporatist and interventionist model that has guided technical and economic decisions in agriculture for the past sixty years. It is developed within the same structures (global corporations, start-ups, research centres, governments) and motivated by similar imperatives: prospects for profit, search for productivity, the need to feed a growing population, international competitiveness. In some ways, “nothing new under the sun with digital agriculture” (Martin & Schnebelin, 2023). However, it incorporates some of the historical criticisms of agricultural modernisation through new promises, such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions and use of pesticides, and brings powerful new players to the table: Big Tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Ali Baba and Google have deeply become involved in food systems. There is every reason to fear that Big Tech is reshaping and soon controlling food systems globally.
Technological governance
Many countries are moving towards the promotion of digital technologies as a means of linking environmental concerns and competitiveness and a way to filling the void left by governments, such as fair prices for farmers or better working conditions for immigrant workers. The digitalisation of agriculture promises to answer longstanding and structural problems with ‘ready’ solutions that can be quickly implemented. But at what costs ? (Carolan, 2023).
Digital technologies transform our ways of working and communicating, our territories and our bodies in a lasting way, without changing the biggest logic that the system is built on. Clarote’s maps of internet cartographies, for example, shows how digital technologies’ production and use reproduces a colonial geography. What might look like green technology for European or North American policy makers, is a source of pollution and oppression for others.
Indeed, digitalising agriculture is one way of responding to the actual environmental and social emergencies, but it is embedded in power relations that exclude other ways of addressing it (Arora et al., 2020). Peasant agroecology is one such alternative. It offers valuable guidelines for (re-)thinking innovation in agriculture based on principles of social justice, deconstruction of gender, race and class dominance, grounded and bottom-up approaches, valuing the knowledge and know-how of peasants and farmers.
Grassroots organisations concerned with food sovereignty are reappropriating the issue of technological autonomy as a way to empower farmers while protesting against corporate concentration of power.
Fabriek Paysanne
Fabriek Paysanne (FP), based in Brussels, is one such organisation. FP began with a shared commitment to environmental and social change, seeking meaningful work rooted in autonomous organizing, manual labor, anti-capitalism, and horizontality. Its members are activists in agricultural struggles, and thus view it as the foundation of broader environmental, social, anti-patriarchal, and decolonial movements, leading the collective to focus on peasant struggles in their work..
FP provides metalworking training, as well as on-farm repair and co-designing of on-farm tools in collaboration with farmers. These spaces are intended for collective construction and knowledge sharing. The co-designed farming tools can be repaired on the farm, using very little equipment, and the training enables people to acquire the skills they need to carry out these repairs. The different areas of technical support work together to build so-called technological sovereignty.
Tools for and by peasants
In 2024, I conducted participatory research with FP for my master’s thesis (Prévost, 2024) to explore the co-design process of a tool. This approach offers valuable insights into the particular nature of FP’s innovation process and methodology, built on values such as economic accessibility, repairability and inclusivity.
The Kabalèze is a market-gardening cart developed in co-design with market-gardeners. From the outset, co-design was a way for FP to produce tools based on farmers’ needs and practices. In this case, ideas and needs converged on the idea of a harvesting cart that would be more stable and larger than a wheelbarrow.
The idea may seem simple, but it’s a non-linear journey that involves real collective arbitration and debate, enabling iterative readjustments of the needs to be met by the tool. For example, the first Kabalèze were built from recycled bicycle wheels. Recycling enables market gardeners to easily change a wheel that breaks and is important to make the cart repairable on the farm, but takes time and makes the tool more expensive. This was at odds with FP’s objective to produce economically accessible tools. Indeed, throughout the innovation process, trade-offs are continuously made – in this case accessibility and repairability.
Market gardeners not involved at the outset also contributed to the development of the Kabalèze by testing it in their fields and suggesting modifications based on their practices and the specific characteristics of their land.
The values and priorities underlying this process– accessibility, repairability, inclusivity – denote commitment to a transformative approach, breaking away from capitalist logics of standardized production and large-scale distribution. Co-design is indeed a means of socializing the production of agricultural tools, turning it into a creative activity serving collective interests rather than private ones.
Renewing technical culture… and building collective action
The co-design process of the Kabalèze allowed for the tool to be adapted to peasant needs, working environments and practices, while providing them the autonomy to repair it by themselves. FP, by opening the door to adaptations, demonstrates its ability to integrate diversity rather than exclude specificities. It aims to serve farmers rather than seeking profit and scalability, and allows for setting up collective discussion forums on the needs that technologies aim to meet.
Farmers become active participants in the innovation process and get to define useful and adapted equipment by themselves. This is also referred to as practices of care (Arora et al., 2020), describing an activity that is closely aligned with farmers, supports situated practices and adapts to them, rather than projecting dominant or “top-down” conceptions onto agricultural tools and practices.
The digitalisation of agriculture raises questions in terms of social justice, and environmental relevance, and FP engages in a critical analysis of it. It proposes concrete alternatives built outside the networks of corporate power players , and based on complex, iterative and collective practices together with farming communities. In that respect, the co-design process proposes a counter-methodology to the current development of digital technologies, and provides a strong foundation for technological sovereignty in Belgium. This indeed requires decentralized organizations capable of politically and technically supporting farmers towards greater autonomy from the dominant players in agricultural equipment and their private interests.
The reappropriation of our tools through collective reflection and sharing of field experiences marks the beginning of a broader reflection on the way our societies work, our needs and the appropriate means to address them. Remembering Ivan Illich’s words: « The lack that industrial society carefully maintains does not survive the discovery that individuals and communities can meet their own needs » (1973)
Bibliography
Arora, Saurabh, Van Dyck, Barbara, Sharma, Divya, & Stirling, Andy (2020). Control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 16(1), 247-262. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2020.1816687
Carolan, Michael (2023). Digital agriculture killjoy : Happy objects and cruel quests for the good life. Sociologia Ruralis, 63(S1), 37-56. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12398
Illich, Ivan (1973). Tools for conviviality (Harper & Row).
Martin, Théo, & Schnebelin, Éléonore. (2023). Agriculture numérique : Une promesse au service d’un nouvel esprit du productivisme. Natures Sciences Sociétés, 31(3), 281-298. https://doi.org/10.1051/nss/2023046
Prévost, Coline (2024). Faire paysan autour de la co-conception d’outils agricoles en collectif. Le cas d’une charrette maraîchère. Matheo. Mémoire, ULiège.
Coline Prévost is doctoral researcher at the Agroecology Lab, Université Libre de Bruxelles. The article is based on the findings of her master’s thesis. Contact: coline.prevost@ulb.be