Smart Farming: Including Rights Holders for Responsible Agricultural Innovation

This article begins from the foundational premise that values are endemic to innovation. This premise goes against the dominant view in which innovation design (and to a certain extent governance) is seen as highly technical and objective work that addresses a narrow set of practical problems. Innovations not only solve design problems but they also reorder society, fostering particular distributions of power and authority and giving rise to some social realities, necessarily at the expense of others (Winner, 1986). Therefore, innovating with foresight requires having broad conversations early on in the innovation process about the kinds of societies we want to enable (or disable) (Stilgoe et al., 2013). What kind of society do we want and what innovation features will get us there? Such a question cannot be answered technocratically; instead, answering values-based questions requires the wide involvement of rights holders, not least because engineers and technical policy actors are highly specialized experts whose life experiences and training do not equip them to anticipate the broad ethical and political implications of innovations (Ottinger & Cohen, 2011; Sarewitz, 2004; Yearly, 2004). Unlike “stakeholders”, or anyone with a stake in the innovation process, rights holders might be thought of as those for whom the realization of their livelihood is inextricably linked to governance decisions. This article details emergent “smart” agricultural innovations in their wider historical context – framed in continuity with longstanding values and goals, which have driven agricultural innovations that have both delivered a productive but also an inequitable global food system (Lang & Heasman, 2004; Patel, 2008). The socalled “smart farming” approach is one where farm decisions are informed by big data collected and made sense of by intelligent machines (Wolfert et al., 2017). It is also referred to as digital agriculture, precision agriculture or big data in agriculture (Bronson & Knezevic, 2016a, 2016b). Ultimately, this article uses research in the burgeoning area of scholarship and practice called “responsible innovation” to lay out potential inclusive decision processes that could help engender justice and equity through current innovation-led agricultural transformations.