Open Source Agriculture: Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era

I have spent most of my life (so far) in and around a farm in one of the most remote and  poor areas of Greece. Being surrounded by farmers and people working in the primary  and basic construction sector, I had not appreciated the ingenuity and collaborative effort  these people put in their day to day activities to achieve sustainability. It was not until I had spent several years away from my family homes that it dawned on me how  uncritically immersed urbanised societies were in the technology they are handed. 

I had always been enamoured with information and communication technologies. I was experimenting with free and open source software and tinkering with hardware to get my work done affordably and to have control over the digital technologies. But I came to  understand that the open source is something beyond an efficient approach to hi-tech. It  is a social movement.

Openness, sharing resources, and other terms like these are used today to add a “sexiness”  factor to products or institutions that do not deserve the name. This has led to the term  “openwashing” (borrowed from “greenwashing”) to call out this trend. Similarly,  participatory or user-driven design, co-creation or co-construction and other concepts  have been proposed to include the public or at least some diversity of stakeholders in the  technology development. However, such initiatives, mostly externally driven, are often  organised top-down and do not essentially involve citizens. Hence, the dichotomy is  maintained between expert and layman ignoring the social complexities of stakeholder  engagement. 

This book explores those initiatives that have been self-mobilised from within farmer  communities, in a bottom-up fashion, and are engaging in technology development for  the community itself. The practical lessons learned from this research project are being  applied in our efforts to provide the local community, where I grew up, with the tools to  formulate an effective organisation similar to the ones I discuss here. 

This book explores technology designed and produced by farmers to accommodate their  particular needs. I trace the emergence of a new social movement that facilitates and promotes this type of technology. I thus discuss two case studies of social movement  organisations and their technological communities: the Farm Hack network in the USΑ  and the L'Atelier Paysan initiative in France. The focus is on how they frame their  activities and how this translates in the alternative technology development model. I use  the following conceptual tools: Framing analysis and resource mobilisation theory from  the social movement research field; and the constructivist approach and critical theory of  technology from the technology research field.

This book illustrates how individuals refuse to embrace a technological system of  mainstream agriculture that does not reflect their values and interests, and instead rely on  alternative framings of technological culture to give meaning to their vision of how  agriculture should be. By doing so, I address a novel collaborative mode of technology  production, substantially different from the dominant market-driven one. 

I employ the concept of the social movement to describe this collective activity, albeit in  an early stage. This enables the tracing of the various ideological frames that contribute  to the creation of a common set of principles and goals for those engaging in this activity  as well as their efforts to gain support. That is why framing analysis has been selected as  a key theoretical approach, combined with an investigation of the incentivising and  resource management processes within the movement organisations.

I also examine the details of the production process in the broader sociotechnical  environment. I argue that this emerging mode of production signals a break from the  capitalist mode of technology production and formulates a more democratised alternative.