Sustainability Claims in Digital Agriculture: A Qualitative Framework to Understand Sustainability Claims in Developing and Using Digital Tools to foster Sustainable Practices in Agriculture

Digital Agriculture aims to transform how we grow food. By collecting and analyzing real-time data on plant life, these innovations promise to help farmers make more informed decisions about water usage, fertilizers, and pesticides, ultimately leading to more sustainable farming practices. But how are these promises translating into reality? Usually answered quantitatively, DIGIPHYT takes a different approach to this question. The project develops an in-depth qualitative research that explores the relationship between sustainability claims and sustainable practices in technology-assisted plant cultivation. Using ethnographic and video-based methods, I observe specific digital agriculture innovations in action by documenting the daily activities of both developers and users, aiming to understand how humans, plants, and digital devices interact to create sustainable agricultural practices. To that effect, I aim to move from claims to practices - I take sustainability promises seriously and examine how participants define sustainability, as well as their efforts to develop sustainable practices in real-world settings. In studying those practices, I also aim to pay attention to all contributors , by documenting the active roles of often-overlooked non-human participants—plants and devices—in efforts to create sustainable outcomes. More info at [email protected].