EAGER: Pilot Comparative Research on Adoption of Digital Agricultural Technologies

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

This award is made under NSF's EAGER funding mechanism, which supports Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research. Some data-intensive digital agriculture technologies have been in use in farms and other food production operations since the 1990s. The range of digital agricultural technologies is now expanding rapidly and some of these technologies are being introduced more widely. Historically most agricultural technologies have brought impacts beyond the obvious realms of yield and farmer profits, including impacts on technical knowledge, on dependencies, and relations among farmers. Given the diversity in emerging digital technologies and in the settings into which they are being introduced, such indirect impacts will be highly diverse and difficult to predict. To date, most research on digital agriculture has focused on a narrow set of issues, with scant attention to indirect impacts and little analysis from a comparative perspective. This EAGER project will conduct exploratory pilot research in diverse settings to collect data to allow investigators to develop a comparative, multi-sited study of this range of impacts. The project is appropriate for EAGER funding because it aims to collect data to test and evaluate questions as a step towards developing a proposal for the larger comparative project. Interviews will be conducted by a team of researchers with local knowledge of agriculture across multiple sites and scales. While the specific digital technologies and farmer characteristics will, by design, vary greatly across sites, researchers will investigate four sets of related questions in each setting. The first concerns identifying the recipients of information about farm operations and farmer behavior. Potential recipients include private companies, government offices, extension agents, CGIAR researchers, and academic analysts. Each of these has distinct expertise and sets of interests. The second concerns the social dynamics of adoption and non-adoption. Farmer decisions on adoption may be driven by various factors other than simple bottom-line profit expectations. The third concerns effects on farmer behavior. The last concerns effects on social relations among farmers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.