Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

My current project explores if and how ‘mission driven’ agtech innovation intermediaries can significantly contribute to efforts to achieve ‘sustainability transitions’ through technology-driven ‘green growth.’

I am interested in these socio-technical developments in agriculture specifically as they relate to the shift from mass/industrial means of organizing food production to informatic/control-based modes of knowing and doing; the entry of venture capital and Silicon Valley into agriculture represents radical and potentially significant changes, shifts, and paradoxically, stasis.  Broader questions motivating this interest relate to social and environmental justice, climate crisis, surveillance and control, decoloniality, capitalism, human exceptionalism, and related issues of power, equity, and violence.

Briefly explain any commitments to sustainability that you or your organization bring to your work on agtech innovation. Be as specific as possible regarding what kinds of social and environmental impacts you aim to produce, and the relevant strategies you are pursuing.

I am interested in questioning the ordination and outlays of ‘sustainability’ as a framework for understanding and motivating action toward greater agro-ecological parity, diversity, and communion.  My committments are part and parcel of my professional trajectory; I have pursued this path more or less exclusively as a means for activism toward halting and reversing social-environmental destruction, pursuing justice and redress for these harms, and contrbuting to more equitable and flourishing socio-ecological cultural, political, and economic orders to come.

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

I am tempted to write N/A, but that’s the easy way out.  In truth, our project assess assessment, but has not developed a particuarly recursive means for assessing our assessments of assessment to date, nor how much carbon we’ve expended etc. in doing so.

Our research and this workshop aim to investigate tensions between the demands/imperatives of the tech-finance industry and the demands/imperatives of social-environmental problem solving. Please comment on this problem frame in general, and in relation to specific examples from your own experience.

Insofar as agtech development is advanced by powerful financially and politically significant actors as an engine of major importance for delivering green growth and absolulte decoupling toward sustainability transitions, it is imperative that the questions of fitness to purpose, contradictions, and tensions such an engine raises or intrinsicially generates not be taken for granted, be highlighted, and addressed with critical analysis.  It is important, at the same time, to question the framework of the question: what does it mean to interpollate something as a “problem,” does that not already beg the promise of a “solution?” Is this a path, if so, its it dependent on certain conditions?  What are the consequences or effects of these path-establishing dependencies?

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

This (mission drift) is an essential angle of analysis regarding a technologically-oriented, commercially organized means for constituting questions/problems about and solutions to these issues.  I am interested in the martial provenance of “mission drift,” but that history aside, the idea gets at something essential: what tensions exist, what is seen as a problem, what is at stake in using this technology [means, medium] – “agtech,” “the innovation ecosystem” – toward this “end”?  Given the imperatives of a market-mediated capitalist reality that demands growth, profit, reinvestment of surplus ad infinitium, how advocates of commercial means for ecological ends address this question is of great interest to me.

Please share something you would like to take away from the workshop.

I am most keenly interested in allowing time spent in conversation with the people of great knowledge and diverse experience attending this workshop highlight the limits, biases, and misunderstandings I bring to the table, while also extending and enriching my knowledge and thinking about these questions, proposals, frameworks, discourses.  I am very interested in seeing where, how, and if various groups/perspectives agree and disagree, align and depart from one another during our time together