Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Andrew Donaldson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2021 Elsevier LtdThis paper considers the digitalisation of food infrastructure as a wider context within which smart farming and big data applications in agriculture are being introduced. It examines the use of digital devices aimed providing traceability and transparency across different sites of food supply chains, from farm to fork. The infrastructural perspective problematises ideas of digitalisation as a technological fix to the uncertainness of food supply chains, and highlights the relational nature of food. Digital devices aimed at ensuring food integrity and the control of supply chains are shown to reconstitute infrastructures of qualification by which the qualities of foodstuffs are established as they move through the processes of the supply chain, from production to consumption. The paper identifies question of power around the ongoing process of infrastructuring that generate a requirement for more labour by some actors; the possibility of new politics and relationships built around increased circulation of quality information; and questions of who controls access to information that are obscured by different understandings of transparency.
Author(s): Donaldson A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Rural Studies
Year: 2022
Volume: 91
Pages: 228-235
Print publication date: 01/04/2022
Online publication date: 24/10/2021
Acceptance date: 06/10/2021
Date deposited: 08/12/2023
ISSN (print): 0743-0167
ISSN (electronic): 1873-1392
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.10.004
DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.10.004
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
