Recent headlines like those in The Guardian announce a particular direction for automation: “The rise of the robot farmer: We'll have space bots with lasers, killing plants” (Harris, 2018) or the latest, “Killer farm robot dispatches weeds with electric bolts” (Carrington, 2021). Reading popular media coverage of advances in open-field agricultural automation gives a particular view of the way crop husbandry is being conceived, revealing the dominant monocultural approach-cultivating a sole crop in a given area-underpinning these developments. Nonetheless, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic it has been projected that investments into automated open-field farming technology will only accelerate (van der Boon, 2020). Commercial entities and research institutions are funneling tremendous resources into the development, testing, and production of robotic equipment for open-field settings, although these tools remain largely in research and development environments and have yet to gain traction among farmers the way applications in other agricultural realms have, such as automated milking systems (Bechar & Vigneault, 2016 Duckett et al., 2018). In open-field farming Footnote 2 too, robotization is being presented as inevitable (Blackmore et al., 2005 Harris, 2018). These findings highlight a need for design processes which include a diversity of actors, involve iterative design cycles, and incorporate feedback between designers, practitioners, tools, and cropping systems.Ī drive towards automation of both physical and cognitive work processes fuels increasingly ubiquitous applications of robots, Footnote 1 for example in manufacturing, mobility, entertainment, health care, security, and food processing. We conclude that a rethinking of automation is necessary for agroecological contexts: not as a blueprint for replacing humans, but making room for analogue and hybrid forms of agricultural work. We found that automating agroecological cropping systems requires finding ways to imbue the ethos of agroecology into designed tools, thereby seeking to overcome tensions between production aims and other forms of social and ecological care. This generated a spectrum of imaginations for how automated tools might-or might not-be appropriately used, ranging from fully automated visions, to collaborative scenarios, to fully analogue prototypes. Around this case we engaged with a variety of specialists in discussion groups, workshops, and design challenges to explore the potential of field robots to meet the multifaceted demands of highly diverse agroecological cropping systems. The research was situated in The Netherlands within the case of pixel cropping, a nascent farming method in which multiple food and service crops are planted together in diverse assemblages employing agroecological practices such as intercropping and biological pest control. Noting this gap, we here explore the potential for robots to foster an agroecological approach to crop production. Meanwhile there is little pull for automation from ecology-based, diversified farming realms. Robots are widely expected-and pushed-to transform open-field agriculture, but these visions remain wedded to optimizing monocultural farming systems.
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