This paper examines the ethics of big data in agriculture, focusing on the power asymmetry between farmers and large agribusinesses like Monsanto. Following the recent purchase of Climate Corp., Monsanto is currently the most prominent biotech agribusiness to buy into big data. With wireless sensors on tractors monitoring or dictating every decision a farmer makes, Monsanto can now aggregate large quantities of previously proprietary farming data, enabling a privileged position with unique insights on a field-by-field basis into a third or more of the US farmland. This power asymmetry may be rebalanced through open-sourced data, and publicly-funded data analytic tools which rival Climate Corp. in complexity and innovation for use in the public domain.

Combining video and performance‐oriented text, this genre‐bending o‐pei‐la is a multispecies enactment of experimental natural history. Our players consider the golden treasure snail (金寶螺; kim‐pó‐lê; Pomacea canaliculata and relatives; golden apple snail), first imported to Taiwan from Argentina in 1979 for an imagined escargot industry, but now a major pest of rice agriculture in Taiwan and across Asia. Whereas farmers in the Green Revolution's legacy use poison to exterminate snails, a new generation of friendly farmers (友善小農; youshan xiaonong) in Taiwan's Yilan County hand‐pick snails and attempt to learn enough about their lives to insert farming as one among many multispecies life ways within the paddy. Drawing on a variety of knowledge sources, including personal experience, international science, social media, traditional calendars, and local understandings of ghosts and deities, these farmers construct an experimental natural history of both new and old paddy‐field denizens. Their experiments self‐consciously intersect with the investigations made by other species of the paddy field. Our article offers an ethnography of both kinds of experiments, human and nonhuman. Video and text together show the performative features of cross‐species acquaintance. In the process, we contribute to debates about radical alterity, showing how anthropologists can do more than sort for difference: we can identify vernacular patches of practice that mix and juxtapose many ontological alternatives.

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Las metodologías empleadas en la entrevista documental a menudo se simplifican demasiado y no se teoriza al respecto, y los talking heads (cabezas parlantes), la técnica de entrevista más empleada dentro del documental, a menudo se percibe como si fuese la única mientras es solo una entre muchas. ¿Qué metodologías alternativas son posibles en un documental que tenga en cuenta el mundo sensorial y que vaya más allá del talking head? Desde un enfoque multisensorial, no solo para las entrevistas sino también para todo mi proceso de realización cinematográfica, he desarrollado un nuevo método de entrevista denominado: método panestésico. Baffle Their Minds with Bullsh*t, Kerry Leigh (2013) presenta al talking head como metodología, mientras que en The Blooming (título provisional) le conecto un micrófono inalámbrico a Wynn, mi entrevistado, durante más de 18 horas en un barco pesquero. Al contrastar estos dos casos de estudio, el método panestésico surge como una propuesta metodológica para repensar el documental.

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