Agriculture, Climate Change,
and Posthuman Design
Alternatives to Agrilogistics
In this project, I tease apart the complex entanglements between agricultural practices, agricultural technologies, and climate change through ethnographic fieldwork and expert interviews with small farmers and conservationists in Indianapolis Indiana. Drawing from the framework of agirlogistics, developed by ecological philosopher Timothy Morton, which argues agriculture is based on a logic/logistics that separates humans from nature, I show how small farmers actually refute this style of agriculture and are working toward more sustainable agricultural futures.
This image shows a small farmer talking about and demonstrating the use of tools which help them till and develop garden beds with minimal disturbance to the soil underneath.
Publications
Alternatives to Agrilogistics: Designing for Ecological Thinking
Biggs, H., Joshi, T., Murphy, R., Bardzell, J., & Bardzell, S. (2021). Alternatives to Agrilogistics: Designing for Ecological Thinking. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1-31. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3479557
Project Description
In this research I tease apart the complex entanglements between agricultural practices, agricultural technologies, and climate change through ethnographic field work and expert interviews with small farmers and conservationists in Indianapolis Indiana. I find that while ideas of agricultural technology often fall along idealisms that surround automation: efficiency, homogenization, and consolidation. However, these moves, while perhaps desirable in other industrial applications, make agriculture less resilient to the complex and emerging weather extremes of climate change, while also increasing the impacts agriculture has on climate change (agriculture is a major contributor to green house gas emissions). However, through imagining agricultural technology through the lens and practices of small farmers, one could re-imaging agricultural technology that supports longer-term timelines of soil health, multi-species storytelling of seed saving, and community resiliency via farming practices.
To develop these findings, I analyzed the work on small farmers in contrast to the framework of Agrilogistics, developed by ecological philosopher Timothy Morton, where he traces the origins and logic of agriculture to argue that it is a major contributor to a human/nature binary divide. He argues that it consists of three main tenets: 1) the assertion of boundaries between the human and non-human 2) it sees soil and other non-human actors as unchanging and ever-present and 3) agrilogistics values quantity of quality. These attitudes, he claims are part of larger trends that led to climate change and the anthropocene era. I compare my findings from ethnography and interviews with small farmers to these tenets to create alternative ways that agricultural technologies might be designed. I see this as reimagining data and automation toward posthuman possibilities.