The development of digital technologies is often presented as a response to the current challenges facing agriculture, promising both a better future for farmers and benefits for society as a whole. Digital agriculture would finally solve the equation of feeding the population and respecting the environment. As such, it mobilizes significant public and private resources. However, its effects are the subject of heated controversy.

Ecologization and Digitalization of Agriculture analyzes how digital technology fits into and influences the various ecological trajectories of agriculture. It explores the representations, uses and transformations of practices that its deployment engenders. The book shows that current digitalization often conflicts with the strong ecologization of agriculture, in terms of techniques, objectives, reasoning, time frames, or political and social issues. However, forms of hybridization appear possible, as models of industrial ecologization or as part of a more global transformation of digitalization, rethinking its technical, economic and political models.

Eléonore Schnebelin is an agricultural engineer and a researcher at the UMR AGIR – INRAE, Toulouse, France. She studies the joint transformations of technologies, practices, organizations, knowledge and institutions in the agricultural sector and its related industries.