Data is the new soil for global agriculture MNCs. As the use of digital technologies (robots, AI and drones) proliferates among farmers, agri-conglomerates rush to tie multiple nuptial knots with giants in technology, telecom, finance and space. In the process, the providers of farm inputs (seeds, fertilisers, herbicides and tractors) morph into “smart” and “farm services” Goliaths. Deere & Co, the world’s largest farm machinery maker, employs more software engineers than mechanical ones. The aim: use Big Data and “precision farming” practices to target individual and specific plants and farm plots.
Welcome to the new, unexpected world of robotic farms and dream tractors, where farmers don’t think, act minimally, relax, and reap profits. Drones and sensors assess soil quality and fertility to decide the crops to grow and the seeds to use. Data analytics gauge how, when and where to irrigate. Drones sow seeds and spray the required amounts of fertilisers and pesticides. GPS guides farm machinery. Satellite imagery collects information about yields and crop damages, even as sensors figure out the presence of weeds and pests. Cloud stores a massive amount of this data. Internet connects these technologies.
A recent global study, Food Barons 2022, by ETC Group, an international research and action collective, maps out the extent and expanse of corporate power in Big Food. It highlights how the above trends power agri-MNCs such as Bayer, BASF, Syngenta and Corteva to capture fertile corporate lands in non-farm areas. Data firms like Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon are “tightly entangled” with them. China, which has the largest 5G network with 500 million users, hopes to build futuristic “smart farms”. Farm firms partner with telecom players like AT&T and Verizon to expand rural connectivity.
The combined holding of the three largest global asset management firms—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street—is over 20% each in several ‘Big Ag’ food firms. Planet Labs, which dubs itself as “Bloomberg Terminal for Earth Data”, owns 15% of commercial satellites, collects 25 terabytes of data daily, and works closely with agri-MNCs. Big Tech ventures into space and undersea cables to enrich cloud computing. Microsoft has links with Elon Musk, who plans to launch 42,000 satellites in a few decades. Along with Google and Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft own or lease half of the undersea bandwidth. Asian companies from China and India have gatecrashed the digital farmhouse parties. India’s Mahindra & Mahindra, the world’s sixth largest farm equipment maker, has stakes in foreign firms specialising in predictive data analytics, AI and machine learning algorithms. It may use ag-drones in paddy and pepper fields in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Telecom giant Bharti Group, part-owns a satellite internet company. In her 2022 Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that “kisan drones” will be used for crop assessment and spraying of fertilisers and insecticides.
The digital farm footprint expands furiously. Bayer, a renowned Big Ag firm, states the ETC study “extracts 87.5 billion data points from 180 million acres of farmland in 23 countries, and funnels it into the cloud servers of Microsoft and Amazon”. Its ambitious plan, TraceHarvest Network, which uses blockchain technology, follows the motto, “know your farmer” from thousands of miles away. The network traces every deal from seed to stomach. This leads to the future possibility of “smart contracts”, or “self-executing, automated agreements”, which may control the entire gamut of the global food-and-farm chain.
Critics contend that this can take “autonomy away from farmers and consumers”, and hand it over to those “who write and structure the code for these digital agreements”. As the farm-food-tech-telecom-space-finance marriages flourish, the farmers may lose decision-making powers and cede control to Big Ag. So will consumers. This is the main objective of the companies. Farm and food MNCs are under socio-economic threat due to backlash from growers and consumers, thanks to “trust issues”. The croppers feel they will lose their lands if they give up their freedom. Consumers still favour local or known producers. Land grabs in the global South (Asia, Africa and Latin America) may accelerate as firms use Big Data to extricate more value and farm profits. UAE owns 45% of Louis Dreyfus, a huge commodity player. Such investments by cash-rich nations in Big Ag may grow in the future as the former strive to attain “climate-proof food security via offshore food production”. “Mass privatisation and financialisation of land”, states the Food Barons report, is an ongoing trend and can lead to “foreign control of productive farmlands”. Even food-growing nations may be at risk and find it difficult to feed their citizens.
Of course, if Big Ag has to thrive in future, it has to break the stranglehold of agriculturalists. The bitter truth, which the companies cannot gulp down, is that despite their vast overreach, the peasants feed 70% of the global population, using less than 30% of resources. The three billion indigenous producers, i.e., rural and urban farmers, fishers and pastoralists, “create and conserve most of the world’s biodiversity” and are “humanity’s best defence against climate change”. The farmer-controlled networks account for 80–90% of seeds and planting materials used annually.
As companies aim to dominate, farmers resist, and governments are caught in the crossfire, two crucial standoffs stand out—ownership of data and the right to repair. The ETC Group claims, “The legal ownership of (Big) data collected on-farm is murky at best.” Deere & Co argues that selling its tractor implies a “license” to operate the vehicle but stops short of ownership. Hence, the company has complete rights over the tractor, its software, and the data generated on it. Local “right-to-repair” movements against Apple and Tesla wish to stop farmers from fixing the products they have purchased.
Ultimately, the war concerns who will monopolise the gigantic digital agriculture information. Even governments are divided—some bow down to corporate diktats. Others distrust Big Ag.
Alam Srinivas
Independent journalist and author