A recent report highlights how Big Technology leaves small farmers behind

Goldbach’s version of a plowing, hauling, crop-spraying contraption might seem to have little to do with the realities of contemporary American commodity crop production, which relies ever more on “higher tech and higher intelligence and AI-enabled” gizmos, he says, that are both costly to own and require expensive service contracts for repairs. But it speaks to a growing rift between the kinds of machines designed for very large-scale corn and soy farmers, for example, and the needs of “anybody who’s got less than 1,000 acres” — despite so much agricultural consolidation, the vast majority of U.S. farmers worked between 1 and 999 acres in 2022. When it comes to equipment that could serve them, “That’s a niche that is unfilled because all of these companies are driving so hard towards the massive scale,” Goldbach says. It’s even inspired the creation of an annual competition to which makers submit designs for mini-scale electric tractors and mulch blowers and ATV-like vehicles they can’t otherwise find in the marketplace.

The dangers of such focus on the large is the theme of a report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). It raises the alarm about various technologies snowballing throughout agriculture: $1 million “precision” tractors that digitally collect and analyze data; AI-enabled drought-, pest- and disease-sensing tools linked up to satellites; and the facilities where data collected by various machines are stored. Together, write the report’s authors, these represent an alliance between Big Technology and Big Agriculture firms that’s “rapidly gaining control of farming under the guise of innovation,” by “providing cloud platforms and AI-driven decision tools [that are] being integrated into all parts of industrial agriculture, from seeds to chemical inputs to machinery.” And, the report cautions, “Continuing along this pathway risks leaving us with declining ecological resilience, rising farmer debt and bankruptcies, loss of rural jobs [and] erosion of farmer knowledge and autonomy.”

Who controls the data

Pat Mooney is an agricultural development expert and a member of the working group that informed the report. As he explains it, “The major problem with the technology is not that it exists. It is who owns and who controls it.” More and more, that is massive global corporations like Bayer, which own the intellectual property rights to seeds, including those gene-edited with CRISPR. And Elon Musk’s Starlink, whose satellites collect information from tractors and other precision-agriculture machines made by companies like John Deere every time a farmer plows a field. And Google — whose parent company, Alphabet, is currently worth over $3 trillion — which stores that information in water- and energy- guzzling data centers it is building across the country. This creates a whole tentacle of interconnected problems.

One of the big ones for Patti Naylor is the potential loss of farmer expertise, precipitated by a reliance on AI-driven tech. Naylor is a farmer and the president of Family Farm Defenders, a group that supports agroecology (an approach to farming that centers ecological practices). She says AI-driven technology tends to recommend chemical solutions as a default. Additionally, “Sometimes AI is wrong, and you have to be able to check that,” Naylor says. She cites as an example an app that misidentified a prairie plant as invasive and toxic, which a local expert later classified as an important native. But also, when new technologies supplant “the skills that people have, they become just machine operators. And when these kinds of skills that we should have disappear, it’s very hard to get that back.” This is especially troubling in a world rapidly morphing due to climate change, where long-held knowledge of soil health, say — and a farmer’s intuition about when to water or apply nutrients — is more valuable than ever.