Sustainability Claims in Digital Agriculture: Relational Agency and Responsibility in Developing and Using Plant Sensors to Take Care of Plants' Needs

Areas of research: Digitization as a process; agency and sociality; bodily, sensory, and material dimensions of interaction between humans and
other-than-humans; practical ethics; multispecies studies. Research question: The fieldwork is designed to follow the development of phytosensors by a Swiss startup. According to the startup, which is testing its solutions in several farms in Switzerland, these sensors can sense the needs of plants before humans
can. Partly inspired by plant behavior sciences, the device is based on algorithms capable of matching plants' phyto-electric signals with a vast array of phenomena, amongst which problems of irrigation or
attacks of insects. These predictive results are marketed as a way to optimize water use, intrants additions, and pesticide applications in a « classic » precision agriculture way of framing agriculture’s
ecological issues. In a preliminary round of
information gathering, by following the
communicative outlets used by the startup and through an interview with the startup owner (where I discussed the possibility of doing fieldwork around their solution) I could start understanding how sustainability arguments were progressively developed to accompany the phytosensors - arguments that have probably led to massive investments of agribusiness funds into the startup.
The project is planned to map out and describe the daily practices of tech developers and users, at the startup and in the farms using the device - to follow
how sustainability issues are thought about and framed, and how the specific outcomes of the IT solution towards sustainability are actually performed
(for example by asking if these are measured or not, or if farmers observe changes in their practices). I will
follow these activities to understand their potential links with ecological concerns, to understand if and how these concerns are deployed in the daily practices of engineers, data scientists, and farmers, rather than at the level of speeches and promises - using practices as a place that STS AgTech critiques, often coming from political economy, have not particularly observed.