The introduction of digital technologies into agriculture: Space, materiality and the public–private interacting forms of authority and expertise

This article examines critically how digital technologies are being introduced into agriculture. The authors argue that this introduction takes place through the interacting forms of expertise and coalitions of authority in relation to both private and public players in smart farming initiatives. The piece adds to current debates about the origins of and driving forces behind emerging technologies for agriculture through the investigation of two case studies, relating to a Swiss drone startup that obtained the first authorisation for crop spraying with their home-made drone, and to a private–public smart farming test compound. It is argued that a way of understanding how digital technologies find their way into the farming sector is to consider not only the complex set of relationships between public and private actors but also the influence of space and materiality on the socio-technical composition of the technologies. The empirical data of the article sheds light upon how in an unprecedented collaboration between private and public actors a new regulatory procedure for digital technologies was established. The article adopts a politico-geographical angle of analysis by grounding its theoretical posture in Foucauldian understandings of power, relational conceptions of space and the agency of materiality, which is anchored in actor-network theory. Within this theoretical stream, the authors introduce the concepts of ‘interacting expertise’ and ‘coalitions of authority’ as a conceptual toolkit for comprehending how an interplay between private companies, public institutions and a range of spatial–material arrangements contribute to what is widely understood in Switzerland as smart farming.