ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights two emerging bodies of scholarship coming out of critical food studies: one looking at big data; the other investigating how policies and practices are anticipatory, which is to say they do not just prepare us for future worlds but they create them. This chapter brings these lines of scholarship together by interrogating the world-making potentials that reside in practices tied to big data in agriculture. To do this, I engage in a style of scholarship that does not elaborate and confirm what we already know one that instead observes, interprets, and yields to emerging knowledge – what I call weak scholarship. This argument is informed with data from three case studies: (1) large-scale commodity farmers in Iowa and Illinois who use big data and precision agriculture; (2) employees from various big data companies located from around North America and the U.K.; and (3) 18 farmers from around the U.S. connected with the loosely organized group called “Farm Hack.” Out of this data I explore a curious example of resistance, with parallels to weak scholarship. In doing this, I note that the antonym of big data is not small but weak data.
