Sippel Sarah Ruth
Geography Department, University of Münster, Heisenbergstr. 2, 48149 Münster, Germany.
Agric Human Values. 2023 May 1:1-15. doi: 10.1007/s10460-023-10453-3.
The nature of farming is - still - an essentially biological, and thus volatile, system, which poses substantial challenges to its integration into financialized capitalism. Financial investors often seek stability and predictability of returns that are hardly compatible with agriculture - but which are increasingly seen as achievable through data and digital farming technologies. This paper investigates how farmland investment brokers engage with, perceive, and produce farming data for their investors within a co-constructive process. Tackling land's 'stubborn materiality' for investment, I argue, has material and immaterial components: it includes the re-imagination of farming as a financial asset that delivers reliable income streams for investors; and the re-engineering of farmland's concrete materialities with digital farming technologies. Farmland investment brokers develop investor-suitable farmland imaginaries, underpinned by storytelling as well as the calculative 'evidence' of (digital) data. At the same time, digital technologies have become a key tool for transforming farms into 'investment grade assets' endowed with the rich data on farm performance and financial returns requested by investors. I conclude that the assetization and digitization of farmland need to be seen as closely intertwined and mutually reinforcing processes and identify key areas for future research on this intersection.
农业的本质仍然是一个基本的生物系统，因此具有波动性，这给将其融入金融化资本主义带来了巨大挑战。金融投资者通常追求回报的稳定性和可预测性，而这与农业很难兼容——但人们越来越认为通过数据和数字农业技术可以实现这些目标。本文研究了农田投资经纪人如何在一个共同构建的过程中与投资者互动、理解并为其生成农业数据。我认为，为了投资而应对土地的“顽固物质性”，有物质和非物质两个组成部分：它包括将农业重新想象为一种能为投资者带来可靠收入流的金融资产；以及利用数字农业技术对农田的具体物质特性进行重新设计。农田投资经纪人通过讲故事以及（数字）数据的计算性“证据”，构建出适合投资者的农田想象。与此同时，数字技术已成为将农场转变为“投资级资产”的关键工具，这些资产拥有投资者所要求的关于农场绩效和财务回报的丰富数据。我得出结论，农田的资产化和数字化需要被视为紧密交织、相互促进的过程，并确定了关于这一交叉领域未来研究的关键领域。
