Recent technological and methodological changes in farming have led to an emerging set of claims about the role of digital technology in food production. Known as precision agriculture, the integration of digital management and surveillance technologies in farming is normatively presented as a revolutionary transformation. Proponents contend that machine learning, Big Data, and automation will create more accurate, efficient, transparent, and environmentally friendly food production, staving off both food insecurity and ecological ruin. This article contributes a critique of these rhetorical and discursive claims to a growing body of critical literature on precision agriculture. It argues precision agriculture is less a revolution than an evolution, an effort to shore up and intensify the conventional farming system responsible for generating many of the social and environmental problems precision agriculture is presented as solving. While precision agriculture advocates portray it as a radical, even democratic epistemological break with the past, this paper locates truth claims surrounding datafication and algorithmic control in farming within deeper historical contexts of the capitalist rationalization of production and efforts to quantify and automate physical and mental labor. Abjuring the growing cultural tendency to treat algorithmic systems as revolutionary in favor of social and historical dimensions of precision agriculture, can help re-frame the discussion about its design and use around real, socially and ecologically oriented change in farming, and so ensure that the possibilities and benefits of precision agriculture are as evenly and effectively shared as possible.

Following the advent of precision agriculture in the context of an emerging informatic ideal in farming, digital media technologies of virtually every kind are now increasingly employed in agrarian contexts, making entanglements of media and agriculture explicit and critical scholarship needed. Such developments have significant political, ethical, and ecological consequences media scholars are uniquely positioned to engage across multiple axes. Yet dedicated work in media studies on agriculture is limited. Accordingly, this article advances an argument for a media studies of agriculture that attends to both contemporary and historical insinuations of these two culture industries, employing (1) the agriculturally rooted media concept of cultural techniques and (2) brief histories of the media-agricultural concept of broadcasting and its relation to imperatives for precision “targeting” as a means for framing and exploring such connections toward future work in this area.