Agriculture and Human Values最新文献

{"title":"From farmer-centred design to algorithmic participation: navigating technical demands and normative discourses in digital extension","authors":"Eliot Jones-Garcia,&nbsp;Katharine A. Legun,&nbsp;Laurens Klerkx","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10928-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10928-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Digital extension and farmer-centric design are increasingly presented as complementary strategies for transforming agricultural innovation systems: digital extension promises scale and efficiency, while farmer-centric design is expected to ensure relevance, inclusivity, and legitimacy. This paper challenges the assumption that these approaches are naturally aligned. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, we examine how farmer-centricity is enacted within digital extension initiatives and how its normative commitments are reshaped as digital platforms evolve. Empirically, we analyse two digital extension platforms developed between 2014 and 2024, one in the Global North and one in the Global South. Drawing on public-facing media, organisational records, design documents, and technical walkthroughs of each platform, we trace how normative, technical, and interpretive frames interact across different phases of platform development. Our findings show that, in early phases, digital extension is framed as enabling farmer-centric design, supporting decentralised design practices, epistemic pluralism, and farmer sovereignty. Over time, however, farmer-centricity becomes instrumentalised to support the scaling of digital extension through data generation, peer diffusion, and environmental accountability, placing new forms of labour and responsibility onto farmers without a commensurate redistribution of authority. These tensions are not resolved but reconfigured through design practices, often obscured by the rhetoric of empowerment and responsiveness. We conceptualise this dynamic as <i>algorithmic participation</i>: a form of participation mediated through digital infrastructures that anticipate and steer farmer engagement in ways that stabilise existing innovation logics. The paper contributes to debates on farmer-centric design and digital extension by showing how even well-intentioned practices can reproduce structural inequalities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10928-z.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148628425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Framing the future cow: sustainability, efficiency, and moral imaginaries in dairy tech startup narratives","authors":"Jorge Fernandez-Vidal","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10926-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10926-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Digital technologies are increasingly promoted as essential to the future of dairy farming, yet little is known about the moral, political and strategic assumptions embedded in how these tools are described. This paper examines how dairy tech startups imagine the future of the sector and how these visions shape ideas about good farming, responsible care, and legitimate innovation. Drawing on qualitative analysis of public communications and interviews from more than forty startups across Europe, North America, and Oceania, the study identifies four interconnected imaginaries - Efficiency, Welfare, Naturalness, and Data Optimism - that structure how digital futures are presented. Across these imaginaries, startups frame the dairy sector as being in crisis and depict digitalisation as the necessary response. Sensors, dashboards, and automated systems appear not only as technical aids but as devices through which startups claim strategic relevance, moral legitimacy, and environmental responsibility. At the same time, each imaginary contains contradictions: biological variation persists despite promises of control; sensor-based welfare narrows the meaning of care; engineered environments are framed as “natural”; and data is cast as objective despite opaque algorithms. These tensions reveal how responsibility shifts from structural pressures to individual farmers and how alternative forms of knowledge, labour, and production become less visible. The analysis demonstrates that startup narratives do important governance work by defining which futures appear credible and desirable. The paper concludes that understanding these moral imaginaries is essential for developing more inclusive and transparent approaches to agricultural innovation, and offers specific policy recommendations for welfare metrics, data governance, funding criteria, and labour assessment.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148628426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"More than coping: the multifaceted benefits home and wild food procurement provide to food-insecure practitioners in the Northeastern US","authors":"Janica Anderzén,&nbsp;Sam Bliss,&nbsp;Rachel E. Schattman,&nbsp;Stevens Azima,&nbsp;Rebecca C. Mitchell,&nbsp;Scott C. Merrill,&nbsp;Kathryn Yerxa,&nbsp;Sarah A. Nowak,&nbsp;Jennifer Laurent,&nbsp;Meredith T. Niles","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10949-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10949-8","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many food-insecure households in high-income countries produce some of their own food through gardening, hunting, fishing, foraging, or raising livestock—activities collectively referred to as home and wild food procurement (HWFP). This study aims to deepen understanding of the roles that diverse HWFP activities play within the broader set of strategies food-insecure households use to keep food on the table. We conducted interviews with 25 participants in two rural states in the northeastern United States, Maine and Vermont. On average, study participants reported having engaged in 19 of a list of 41 behaviors that can help one’s household food situation, not including HWFP activities, in the last year. Overall, they described HWFP activities as socially legitimate food sources that provide multifaceted benefits beyond food. For these interviewees, HWFP can be an effective coping strategy for alleviating household food insecurity because it diversifies their food sources and allows for stockpiling non-market abundances. Yet, HWFP should not be mistaken for a coping strategy in the sense of an activity that households undertake <i>only</i> in response to hardship, because participants associated these activities with diverse, positive meanings such as joy, connection, and autonomy. The only negative aspects of HWFP that participants identified were challenges stemming from limited access to key resources needed for successful harvests, such as equipment, skills, and land access. We recommend policies and programs that ensure access to these prerequisites for HWFP success; people experiencing food insecurity should guide these efforts.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148614853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Attentiveness and agroecological transformation: soils as participants in peasant-to-peasant learning","authors":"Leonardo van den Berg,&nbsp;Anna Krzywoszynska,&nbsp;Esther Turnhout","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10935-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10935-0","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>While the role of non-human nature in agroecology has been widely examined at the level of farm practice, its contribution to movement building and broader societal transformation remains underexplored. Drawing on scholarship on attentiveness and more-than-human affect, this article examines how encounters with soils can mobilise agroecological change beyond individual farms. Based on participant observation and interviews with agroecological farmers participating in peasant-to-peasant soil gatherings in the Netherlands, we analyse three interrelated dimensions of attentiveness: noticing, sensing, and nourishing responsibility. Microscope-based encounters with soil organisms fostered shifts in farmers’ perceptions of soils as vibrant and agentic more-than-human participants rather than passive resources, motivating collective learning and experimentation. Embodied sensing practices supported adaptation in everyday farming practices, while collective reflection within peasant-to-peasant gatherings enabled farmers to challenge productivist values, legitimise experiential knowledge, and address structural constraints such as insecure land access. We argue that social movements play a crucial role in amplifying the transformative potential of attentiveness by embedding affective encounters within collective learning networks and political organising. The article contributes to scholarship on agroecological and food systems transformations by showing how non-human lives participate not only in farm ecologies but also in processes of movement building and socio-ecological transformation</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10935-0.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148614730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tracing politicisation in community agriculture: a semiotic analysis of participatory mind maps","authors":"Irina Aguiari","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10942-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10942-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Debates on agriculture and food increasingly highlight the depoliticising effects of neoliberal governance, technocratic regulation, and consumer-oriented solutions. While a growing literature has examined collective action dynamics within grassroots agrifood initiatives, less attention has been focused on the processes through which politicisation may emerge. The article addresses this gap by examining how political meanings are constructed through collective processes of meaning-making in community agriculture. Building on a processual conception of the political as an ontologically present dimension of social relations, the study proposes a semiotic approach to analyse how practices of politicisation and depoliticisation unfold within everyday communication. Methodologically, the article combines political semiotics with participatory mind-mapping workshops co-created with three community agriculture initiatives in Italy. The analysis draws on linguistic functions to trace how different communicative configurations support or constrain the emergence of political meanings. The findings show that politicisation is encouraged by communicative environments where relational interaction, contextual interpretation, symbolic expression, and orientations toward collective action reinforce one another. Depoliticising tendencies, by contrast, tend to emerge when these linguistic functions become disconnected, for instance when discourse remains confined to technical descriptions, individualized narratives, or symbolic imagery without grounding in shared interpretations of socio-economic contexts. By foregrounding the communicative infrastructures through which meanings are negotiated, the article contributes to debates on Community Food Networks and environmental post-politics. More broadly, it advances a methodological framework for observing processes of politicisation empirically through the analysis of collective meaning-making practices.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10942-1.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148614773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Soil influencers in alternative knowledge networks: farmers’ soil health learning beyond traditional advisory systems","authors":"Kasper Krabbe,&nbsp;Kim L. Niewolny,&nbsp;Lia Kelinsky-Jones,&nbsp;Eric S. Bendfeldt,&nbsp;Tiffanie F. Stone,&nbsp;Martin Hvarregaard Thorsøe","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10936-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10936-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Agricultural change depends not only on technologies and policies but also on the knowledge infrastructures through which farmers learn to interpret ecological processes and evaluate expertise. In recent years, many soil-health-oriented farmers have begun assembling learning networks that extend beyond conventional advisory systems. This article examines how such networks are formed and what role digitally mediated educators, here termed soil influencers, play within them. The study draws on qualitative interviews and drawing-based elicitation with ten soil-health-oriented farmers in Virginia, USA. The analysis explores how farmers conceptualise soil, how these understandings are shaped through learning pathways, and how they are enacted in everyday soil-care practices. The findings show that farmers often approach soil as a living and evolving system and assemble plural knowledge ecologies that combine peer networks, regional organisations, selective engagement with extension services, and practice-based educators encountered through books, podcasts, courses, and social media. The article argues that soil influencers function as emerging agricultural intermediaries whose authority rests on experiential credibility, demonstrable practice, and interpretive narratives that resonate with farmers’ situated ways of knowing. These dynamics point to shifting politics of agricultural expertise and raise questions about how public advisory systems might engage with emerging soil-health knowledge cultures.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10936-z.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148614813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mapping dots, tracing lines of becoming: the socio-technical meshwork of sustainability transitions among crop and dairy farmers in Uruguay","authors":"Santiago Alzugaray,&nbsp;Victoria Evia,&nbsp;Florencia Sosa,&nbsp;Javier Taks","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10931-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10931-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>How do sustainability transitions unfold in Uruguay’s extensive dairy and crop farming systems, and what do the metaphors of dots, lines of becoming, and meshworks reveal about their relational and open-ended character? Drawing on five years of collective ethnographic fieldwork, a national mapping of 86 transitional units and a GIS-linked database of 39 production units, we mobilise Ingold’s meshwork concept to trace how transition trajectories are woven from the continuous interweaving of moral concerns, territorial attachments, intergenerational dynamics, collective experimentation and affective investments, a generative mechanism that shapes individual pathways and gives form to the broader field of change. Results show heterogeneous pathways rather than a single model: most units are family-managed farms with stable land tenure and long territorial roots. Nearly all (97%) implement at least one sustainable practice; 41% rely exclusively on bio-inputs, 38% combine bio and synthetic inputs, and technological hybridisation is common. Participation in producer groups (95%) and on-farm trials (58%) are central to knowledge circulation and support. Transitions are shaped by moral concerns about health and environmental care, intergenerational dynamics, and reputational pressures from neighbouring communities. We argue that sustainability change in extensive agriculture is better understood as an emergent meshwork of practice and meaning -contingent, negotiated and affectively charged- than as a single-path technical fix. We identify relational interweaving as the generative mechanism of change, contribute to sustainability transitions theory, and we advance debate on alternatives to hegemonic agriculture in the Southern Cone of South America.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148613767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religion, spirituality and faith of Swiss farmers in relation to biodiversity-linked farming behaviour","authors":"Ghezal Sabir,&nbsp;Robert Home,&nbsp;Thomas Breu","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10923-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10923-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Biodiversity promotion schemes often have limited impact because they fail to connect with farmers’ personal values and beliefs. The effectiveness of such schemes could be enhanced by understanding how farmers’ value systems, including religio-spiritual beliefs, influence their biodiversity-promoting decisions. The aim of this contribution is to explore relationships between farmers’ religio-spirituality and faith and biodiversity-supporting farming decisions, which was addressed with 22 semi-structured interviews with Swiss farmers. Through thematic analysis, values were identified across two main categories: values expressively linked to religio-spirituality and those not expressively linked to religio-spirituality related to biodiversity. This was done to demonstrate the visibility of the religio-spiritually connected values to the values operated in the context of farming behaviour. The findings revealed that religio-spiritual values operated within the context of biodiversity-linked farming behaviour were remaining truthful to design, mercy towards and the rights of creatures, and responsibility and care. These values were operational not only in the personal dimension of the farmers, regardless of their degree of religiosity, but also in the social and business dimensions of the farm enterprise in the context of biodiversity. Thus, religion and spirituality shape farmers’ worldviews, influencing agricultural practices through both internalized non-instrumental values and deliberate instrumental logic.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10923-4.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148614010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A lot to chew on: expanding the frame of nordic nutrition recommendations 2023 to embrace health, transparency and environmental sustainability","authors":"Mikael Klintman","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10950-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10950-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>How do expert committees sustain credibility while radically expanding their institutional scope? This question animates contemporary food governance, as dietary guidelines, historically focused on nutritional adequacy, increasingly incorporate environmental sustainability and demands for democratic participation. Yet scholarship has largely neglected the ongoing legitimacy work, the strategic framing, methodological commitments, and communication practices through which expert bodies navigate such frame expansion. This study takes the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023 (NNR2023) as a critical case, analysing how experts reconciled scientific authority with environmental values and public participation. Drawing on in-depth expert interviews and an extensive documentary corpus, and bringing framing theory into conversation with a further developed, three-dimensional account of legitimacy, we distinguish epistemic, procedural, and cultural registers, the last of which we elaborate beyond its conventional treatment to foreground civic epistemologies and Nordic food cultures. Our findings show that these dimensions constantly pull against one another: methodological hardening strengthened epistemic authority yet narrowed participation; radical transparency enhanced fairness yet exposed disagreements; cultural accommodation honoured national foodways yet strained universalist claims. Rather than resolving these tensions, experts managed them through what we term “performed legitimacy,” an ongoing, audience-relational accomplishment that may suggest the contours of a more reflexive expert governance for an era of integrative food policy.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10950-1.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148614009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From scale-neutral to scale-specific: rethinking agrivoltaics through small farmers’ rationalities","authors":"Carrie Seay-Fleming,&nbsp;Tyler Swanson,&nbsp;Andrea K. Gerlak","doi":"10.1007/s10460-026-10925-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10460-026-10925-2","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Small-scale farmers in middle and high-income countries face considerable challenges in sustaining their operations. This has led some researchers to question how new agricultural technologies, such as digital technologies, which have rapidly scaled up in large-scale agriculture, may benefit or burden small farms. To date, however, scholarship on agrivoltaics has largely been scale-neutral and techno-optimistic. In this study, we investigate the potential of agrivoltaics, the co-location of solar panels and agricultural production, to specifically benefit small-scale producers in arid, semi-arid, and water-stressed contexts. Drawing on interviews with small-scale farmers in Tucson, Arizona, we demonstrate how they are adapting solar and other renewable energy technologies to fit their needs and goals but are largely not considering agrivoltaics for their farms often due to political-economic considerations including tenure, ownership, and control. We show that small-scale, diversified farmers in Arizona draw on diverse rationalities to evaluate agrivoltaics, some of which challenge the primacy given to profit motives in existing agrivoltaics literature. Through this research, we help to expand the critical social science study of agricultural technologies by adding a case study of a novel technology (agrivoltaics) being proposed to support farm livelihoods. We also build on the budding social science study of agrivoltaics, contributing a more critical view that questions the distribution of benefits from this technology, centering the voices of small-scale farmers.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":7683,"journal":{"name":"Agriculture and Human Values","volume":"43 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-026-10925-2.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148466185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}