11:20am - 11:40am THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM AND CULTURED PROTEIN DEVELOPMENTS Rob Burton
Researchers using the multi-level perspective (MLP) of socio-technological transition have suggested that the cultured animal proteins (e.g. lab meat) are a niche product within the agro-food system that could rise to challenge the existing food regime. The image presented by the MLP is very much one of plucky little innovative niche actors banding together to overthrow a decadent and bloated regime. This paper investigates whether this is actually the case. Using YouTube videos and media interviews with CEOs and CSOs of the cultured protein start-up companies, the paper explores the developing cultured protein sector and its relationship with the agro-food system. The analysis suggests that rather than challenging the regime, the development of the industry is increasingly occurring in partnership with key (but not all) regime actors. Further, it is not landscape level pressures that appear to be creating gaps in the regime, but internal tensions within industrial agriculture at the regime level. The niche for the new product (cultured animal protein) is being created largely by the size and complexity of the locked-in agro-food system. Current regime actors stand waiting to gain from any transition.
11:40am - 12:00pm UNDERSTANDING HISTORICAL DISRUPTIONS TO AGRIFOOD SYSTEMS: THE CASE OF ARTIFICIAL FIBRES AND THE NEW ZEALAND WOOL INDUSTRY Niall Kemnitz Campbell, Hugh Campbell and Rob Burton
The emergence of potentially large-scale industrial production of synthetic proteins is just the latest in a long history of new technologies which have created massive disruption to estabished agrifood sectors. In order to understand the potential impact of synthetic proteins to global agrifood systems, several case studies of prior historical disruptions have been undertaken (as part of the Norway-based Protein 2.0 research programme). This paper presents the results of one of those historical cases: the impact on the New Zealand wool industry of the arrival of artificial fibres. The paper will briefly review the longer history of the development of artificial fibres, and then describe the way in which the New Zealand wool industry did and didn’t respond to this external threat. Three main industry discourses are identified as being prevalent in wool industry discussions in the mid-20th century New Zealand. None were sufficient to prevent a major crisis and diminution of the industry’s status and markets.
12:00pm - 12:20pm HOW WILL NEW AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES AFFECT EVERYDAY AGRICULTURAL WORK? THE CASE OF A VR-TRAINING TOOL FOR USE IN VINEYARDS IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND Mira O’Connor and Karly Burch
This research will explore the possible effects of new agricultural technologies (agritech) on the future of agricultural work in Aotearoa New Zealand’s viticulture industry, with a particular focus on the work of pruning winegrape vines. Agritech vary in shape and capability, and different technologies might affect agricultural work in different ways. This makes technology-specific studies of great importance when trying to understand how everyday work might be transformed by the introduction of a particular new agritech. The technology of interest in this study is a virtual reality (VR) training tool being designed by the MaaraTech Project—a multi-university, New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE)-funded trans-disciplinary project collaboratively designing (co-designing) robotic and human assist technologies with artificially intelligent (AI) capabilities for use in high-value fruit industries in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through bringing the VR training tool to interviews with vineyard trainers and pruners, the research will provide an opportunity for the people who might be using the tool in their everyday work to engage with the particular technology, and to discuss the various ways it might shape or support their everyday work. These interviews will support the project’s technology developers in becoming more responsive to the experiences and needs of these possible end users. While understanding changing work patterns in response to a single technology cannot provide insights into the future of agricultural work in general, such an inquiry can provide invaluable empirical insights and opportunities for possible end-users to become directly involved in discussions on technology design and how they imagine themselves within a more automated future. Such an inquiry distinguishes this research from a usability study, which tends to confine discussions to pre-determined technical metrics. As the experiences of agricultural trainers and workers are often not included in the design of new agritech, this research will contribute important empirical findings to discussions of the future of agricultural work and the inclusion of agricultural trainers and workers in the co-design of new technologies that will shape their lives and livelihoods.
12:20pm - 12:40pm FOLDED & UNFINISHED: DATA, TEMPORALITY AND EVERYDAY AGRO-ENVIRONMENTAL TOPOLOGIES Matthew Henry, Chris Rosin and Sarah Edwards
Data is essential to governing those emerging matters of concern that confront the agro-environmental everyday. But data is no neutral intermediary. It disrupts, exposes and creates new social, economic, political and environmental possibilities, whilst simultaneously hiding, excluding and foreclosing others. Critical data scholars have become attuned to the role of data in creating everyday worlds, and the need to develop critical accounts of the materialities, spatialities and multiplicities of data relationships. A key feature of this emerging work has been a developing understanding of the intricate topologies of data relationships and how these topologies reconfigure the spatial performances of everyday life. However, gaps exist within the ambit of critical data studies. In particular, a concern with spatial topologies has largely taken the temporal dimensions of data relations to be matters of fact. This paper explores temporality and data as a matter of concern through three lenses: infrastructuring, performativity and ferality. These three lenses speak to the entanglement of temporal relations in data infrastructures; the performance of time made possible through those infrastructures; and the ferality of data as it escapes the bounds of the temporal worlds it helps fashion.
