“If they don’t tell us what they do with it, why would we trust them?” Trust, transparency and benefit-sharing in Smart Farming

TLDR

Smart Farming and Big Data promise productivity and sustainability gains, but realizing these benefits requires addressing their socio‑technical nature and the social implications that influence adoption. The study investigates socio‑technical factors shaping Smart Farming and Big Data development through a multi‑level perspective and social practice theory. The authors conducted semi‑structured interviews with 26 Australian grain farmers and industry stakeholders to elicit perspectives on benefits and risks. Participants identified trust, transparency, and equitable benefit distribution as key concerns, leading to skepticism and a mismatch of expectations, and the study suggests that enhancing farmer agency and designing cooperative institutions are needed to bridge this divide.

Abstract

Advances in Smart Farming and Big Data applications have the potential to help agricultural industries meet productivity and sustainability challenges. However, these benefits are unlikely to be realised if the social implications of these technological innovations are not adequately considered by those who promote them. Big Data applications are intrinsically socio-technical; their development and deployment are a product of social interactions between people, institutional and regulatory settings, as well as the technology itself. This paper explores the socio-technical factors and conditions that influence the development of Smart Farming and Big Data applications, using a multi-level perspective on transitions combined with social practice theory. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 Australian grain farmers and industry stakeholders to elicit their perspectives on benefits and risks of these changes. The analysis shows that issues related to trust are central concerns for many participants. These include procedural concerns about transparency and distributional concerns about who will benefit from access to and use of "farmers' data". These concerns create scepticism about the value of 'smart' technologies amongst some industry stakeholders, especially farmers. It also points to a divergence of expectations and norms between actors and institutions at the regime and niche levels in the emerging transition towards Smart Farming. Bridging this divide will require niche level interventions to enhance the agency of farmers and their local networks in these transactions, and, the cooperative design of new institutions at regime level to facilitate the fair and transparent allocation of risk and benefit in farming data information chains.