Some scholars say that in recent years, technology giants have actively established agricultural big data platforms to fully grasp the agricultural supply chain. The picture shows the diagram of farmland.
Governments in recent years to actively promote intelligent agriculture, agricultural data, although conducive to increasing crop yields and efficiency, but the hidden dangers arising from technology is also worrying. Some scholars said that in recent years, technology giants actively establish agricultural big data platform to fully grasp the agricultural supply chain, from the farm to the table are the target of their control.
With the sudden advancement of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and high-speed network, the monitoring of society by technology giants has gradually increased. In terms of applications on smart agriculture, from sensors to instantly record the temperature, humidity, wind direction and intensity of soil and plants; Drones to photograph the changes in the fields to make the use of Medicine and fertilizer more accurate, and even the types of crops planted in the fields, growth stages, soil conditions, and water distribution can be observed through artificial satellites.
The data era is agriculture from a management perspective
Theo de Jager, president of the World Farmers Organization (WFO), said that entering the data era is to look at agriculture from a “management” perspective, and through technologies such as satellite positioning, prices can be more accurately predicted.
He said agricultural data includes biological, production, irrigation and other information, farmers are very sensitive to these, from the current dominant model of the Internet, users, consumers from their own output data, handed over to the technology giants, sold privacy, loss of ownership, and limited integration of the right to use.
“Data is the Gold mine of the future. Farmers’ data belongs to farmers, and ownership must go to them.” Diageo said that even with the ownership of data, farmers are still worried about the security of the information, especially after uploading the cloud, once the data is mastered, not only can predict future trends, but also manipulate trends, shape consumer behavior, and even guide public opinion towards.
After grasping the eyeballs, the next step will be to predict and grasp the stomach
Shen Rongqin, an associate professor at York University in Canada, said that from Alibaba’s 45-year-old deliveryman who recently set himself on fire to collect his salary, to Alibaba’s $3.6 billion acquisition of a 72 percent stake in Gao Xin Retail, these two events may seem unrelated, but they both reveal the same fact to the outside world: “The next goal of the technology giant is to take full control of our agricultural Food chain from farm to fork. .”
He said that three years ago a lot of reports started to appear in China on how big data is used to raise pigs, from raising, transferring and feeding pigs, to health care and vaccination, sow mating and expectation testing, and reconciling supply demand, all under the control of big data.
“Now the technology giants have been holding big data to make farms around the world”, Shen Rongqin said, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are busy developing digital agriculture platform, collecting a lot of data, competing with each other in various nodes of the agricultural food chain, and according to the soil, water, weather and other conditions, for the use of pesticides, fertilizers, etc. According to the conditions of soil, water and weather, they will make suggestions on the use of pesticides and fertilizers to control the growth of crops.
He said that in the future, technology giants will go further and make predictions on the world’s food supply, demand, price and type in order to provide more accurate data for crop farming, harvesting and sales recommendations, and finally combine with retail supermarkets’ big data collection on consumers in order to predict sales volume while distributing food to different supermarkets for sale.
“After the tech giants attempt to control users’ minds, attention and Time with social media, the next step is to control consumers’ stomachs.” Shen Rongqin said the problem is that big data platforms, for large farms with economies of scale, because of the homogeneity of information, and can have better predictions, but for small farmers with small farming areas and diverse species, coupled with the usual inability to load more expensive data technology, big data can play a limited predictive power.
Big data has full control over small farmers, but they are still small farmers
He said, technology giants with strong capital and technology capabilities combined with the relevant industry, once the establishment of a comprehensive agricultural supply chain, small farmers have to be forced to participate. As a result, like small farmers in India, all farmers participating in the big data platform must take loans at high interest rates to purchase the necessary agricultural inputs, buy insurance according to the recommendations of the platform robots, and sell their crops to these big data companies, and no bargaining is allowed, and electronic money is collected immediately on the App.
“With big data, a small farmer remains a small farmer,” he said, adding that any small farmer who violates this standard operating procedure will receive a lower credit score, which in turn will affect future growth. But this is just the beginning, technology giants are racing to the upstream and downstream of agriculture, not only the agricultural supply chain, including delivery, retail and delivery, from the farm to the table are their control targets.
Shen Rongqin said, “What consumers don’t know is that the software, social tools, cell phones, and computers they use are actually the same tech giants behind the vegetables and meat they buy, and in which supermarkets they buy them.”
Technology giants digital dictatorship is no different from the Communist Party
Gao Renshan, director of the Southern Taiwan Project Office of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, said that from this U.S. election, technology giants blocked the speech of specific political figures, using their own social media platforms to impose a “digital dictatorship”, “what is the difference with the Communist Party?” He even suspected that the current digital surveillance system in mainland China was set up with the help of these technology giants.
However, he believes that the outside world should not worry too much, these technology giants out of the ordinary behavior, but will cause the rise of a new “anti-technology” forces. He took Facebook as an example, because many Internet services are to charge, Facebook provides chat, share photos, and do not charge for the public platform, it will become popular, and the social system is very complex, the whole body, he does not think that technology giants can fully control.
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