In the past two decades, startup companies all around the world have deeply transformed everyday lives with digital technologies. Recent research has raised awareness to the multiple effects of these new businesses and the technologies they develop. They have impacted multiple sectors, such as the hospitality industry, transportation, logistics, and retail. Moreover, these startups work with venture capital and private equity, attracting aggressive investing behaviors. Although we typically associate these transformations in urban spaces, startups are now becoming important in the rural world. Agricultural startups develop software and hardware that promise farmers to increase their productivity, reduce environmental pollution, and create better working conditions. This research aims to investigate the impacts of startups and digital technologies on agricultural production, on economic transactions and on the everyday life of rural actors. Understanding contemporary agrarian transformations is critical for developing programs and policies that create balanced economic conditions. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in scientific methods of rigorous data collection and analysis, the project would improve scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in formulating policies around the use of digital technologies in the agribusiness sector.
Ana Flavia Badue, under the supervision of Dr. Gary Wilder of the City University of New York Graduate Center, will explore the socioeconomic and political impacts of industrial farming digitization by startup entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. This research will be undertaken in Brazil, where hundreds of agricultural startups have emerged in the past two years. As Brazil is among the largest producers of agricultural commodities in the world, the transformations that occur in the country are relevant to understand the impact of digital technologies and of new business models in the rural sectors across the globe. This research will be composed of (1) archival research to map how technologies in the past shaped industrial agriculture; of (2) interviews with startup founders, farmers who adopt digital technologies and financial investors who work with agricultural startups in order to understand the motivations, interests and perspectives of different actors engaged with agrarian transformations since the emergence of agricultural startups; and of (3) observation of events and farms to identify the everyday impacts of the technologies and investments on industrial agriculture. Gathering data in loco is an opportunity to observe how changes take place in real time. This research raises awareness to potential unexpected outcomes generated by the recent changes in industrial agriculture, such as global and local inequalities, uneven power relations and economic dependency.
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.
