Being Granular, Becoming Sustainable:

A Preliminary Inquiry into the Wor(l)ds of Smart Farming Developers

Abstract

This article examines the integration of digitization and environmental concerns in digital agriculture from the perspective of actors in smart farming in Switzerland. Those actors, previously unconnected to farming, promote the use of granular data to achieve more sustainable practices. Considering granularity as a practitioner-made achievement rather than a technical property alone, I draw on interviews and ethnographic observations, and rely on material-semiotic insights from STS (Law, 2008; Mol, 1999; Lien & Law, 2011) to examine how granularity data is brought into existence through heterogeneous practices. I first analyze how the connection between digital agriculture and more sustainable practices is operated as a motto, an aspirational principle that draws from different sources and comparisons. I then show how the production and interpretation of granular data depend on experimental infrastructures, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ongoing human interpretation, all of which contribute to the existence of granularity while enacting specific definitions of sustainability.