Date/Time
Saturday
26 Apr 2025
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Location
Social Science Matrix
Event Type
Conference
Agriculture 4.0 promises to be the newest “agricultural revolution.” It adapts the technologies of Industry 4.0—AI, advanced robotics, the Internet of Things, and more—to the agri-food system. Proponents of these “disruptive” technologies argue that they will solve many of the problems associated with previous iterations of industrial agriculture (Maffezzoli et al., 2022). Indeed, Agriculture 4.0 is often framed as an important solution to the polycrisis we currently face (Lawrence et al., 2024). Many have argued that Agriculture 4.0 can provide food to an ever-growing population equitably and sustainably while reducing risks due to extreme weather events, which will undoubtedly increase over the next decades. In other words, if we want to avoid catastrophe, implementing Agriculture 4.0 seems inevitable.
In recent years, however, scholars have started questioning the benefits of Agriculture 4.0. Big players in the Global North have used crisis narratives to capture agricultural subsidies and scale up their operations even further, locking us into paths that might not lead to sustainability and justice after all (Guthman & Butler, 2023; Guthman & Fairbairn, 2024; Fairbairn & Reisman, 2024; Hackfort, 2021; Prause et al., 2021). The workshop will explore how the newest agricultural revolution transforms the agri-food landscape in the face of the polycrisis, and how Agriculture 4.0 might reshape and reinforce existing inequalities and power dynamics—along the lines of class, race, gender, disability, and more—of capitalism in the global agri-food system.
This conference is organized by Aaron Zielinski, Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and STS DE graduate student.
Schedule
9.00 – 9.30: Breakfast & Registration
9:30 – 10.45: Panel 1
Sofie Mortensen | UC Berkeley – Thailand 4.0: Understanding the Role of Migrant Exploitation Facilitating Thailand’s High-Tech Seed Value Chain
Ziya Kaya | UT Rio Grande Valley – Everyday Securitization on Farms Through Digital Farming Technologies in Turkey
Ricardo Barbosa, Jr. | Clark University – Digital Cattle: Tracking, Surveillance, and the Political Ecology of Agriculture 4.0 Ranching
10:45 – 11.15: Coffee Break
11:15 – 12.30: Panel 2
Bhavna Joshi | Virginia Tech – The Future of Farming in Agriculture 4.0: Technological Adoption and Workforce Reconfiguration (co-authored with Maaz Gardezi)
Cynthia Garios | Universität Münster – Reimagining AgTech: Evaluating AgLaunch’s Potential to Transform Agriculture (co-authored with Sarah Sippel and Steven Wolf)
Carrie Alexander | UC Davis – The Flaws in the Vision of AI-Based Precision Ag in California (A Dispatch From the Fields)
12.30 – 1.30: Lunch
1:30 – 3.00: Panel 3
Steven Wolf & Christopher Miles | Cornell University – “Capital Is Not Coded For Impact:” A Critical Analysis of AgTech Innovation Systems and Socioecological Problems
Natasha Shannon | UC Berkeley – AgTech in Appalachia: Labor Discourses, Landscapes of Development, and the Rise and Fall of AppHarvest
Monja Sauvegerd | UC Davis – Unlocking Agricultural Data: The Tragedy of the Anticommons in Digital Agriculture
Madeleine Fairbairn | UC Santa Cruz – The Incumbent Advantage
3:00 – 3.30: Coffee Break
3:30 – 5.00: Panel 4 & Closing Remarks
Gabriella Subia Smith | UC Berkeley – Who Has Power in Gene-Edited Sorghum? Farmer Engagement With the Innovative Genomics Institute
Jimmy Robinson | University of Kentucky – In the Greenhouse: A Multispecies Analysis of Scale, Technology, and Rationality in Agriculture
Rebeca Ibáñez Martín | University of Amsterdam – TBD
To attend this event, please RSVP. If you have any questions, please contact Aaron Zielinski, at aaron.zielinski@berkeley.edu.
Additional sponsorship comes from: Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) • CSTMS • Social Science Matrix • The Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science