Federation University Australia
Federation University Australia
Federation University Australia
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Australian grain growers look to technologies of farming and cropping systems to maximise their productivity. Zero tillage cropping, variable rate inputs, soil moisture probes, and precision planting are a few practices that farmers may adopt to support their farming practices. To implement cropping technologies, and to achieve the outcomes promoted by the technological innovators, farmers need an alignment of machinery, mobile connectivity, knowledge, skills, farm services support, finance and people on the farm to make it happen. This paper shifts the focus beyond binary and hierarchical notions of humans versus technology and human versus nature, to insider research into the farming practice, alliances, and neighbourly relations to specifically examine how agency makes farmers enact a precision farming technique called controlled traffic farming. Using an actor network approach this paper examines what controlled traffic farming is, and why it makes farmers follow the ‘invisible road rules’ in the field using an actor network approach.
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INTRODUCTION
During harvest, as an observer-researcher sitting in the tractor with my camera, notebook and pencil perched on my knees, sharing the confined cabin space with a farm worker, I saw a precision farming system [a system designed to maximise crop yields] from a very different perspective to that of the designers of such technologies. Leo knew he was being watched. I asked him what he was doing every time he touched a new switch, button, screen or control stick. But then I realised that he was not abiding by the rules of a controlled traffic farming system. I didn’t say anything. And this was when I had my ‘uh-huh’ moment and I could see that no matter how prescribed a technological farming system was, there was room for human error and interpretation. Even with a prescriptive and precise cropping system, together with his employer’s instructions and his above average hourly pay rate because farm labour was scarce, technology and science fell short of accounting for everything. The farm worker was not abiding by the road rules in the field set down by the system.
This paper is an analysis of farmer agency in the context of a precision cropping system entitled ‘controlled traffic farming’. The paper uses ethnography to look beyond what industry expects from this kind of technologically-driven farming practice, and to offer a more nuanced understanding of how agricultural science and technological systems plays out on farms. With experience as a controlled traffic farming project consultant, as well as my thinking as a landholder and grain grower, I position myself as an insider researcher concerned with the roles and rituals of social interaction on the farm and the practices by which farmers maintain their legitimacy. As a place-based ethnography located in the vast farming spaces of Australia, my research also encompasses the hierarchies, positions, and ways of thinking that comes with geographical location, rurality and the social isolation within the farming landscape. In what follows, we take up each of these dynamics in turn.
This paper aims to draw attention to farmers’ relations with non-humans, like machines, technology and farming methods. Relational ties within the network are thoroughly explored. This approach is related to material-semiotics, but at the same time it remains faithful to ethnomethodology in its detailed descriptions of common farming activities, practices, sequences and the habits that makes Australian farming. Actor network theory offers a powerful approach for capturing the ways in which ‘agency’ is produced via a heterogeneous network of interactions of human and non-human actors such as knowledge, technology, money, farmland, animals, plants, and so forth, and how these interactions depend on both the quality of the actors and the networked context of interactions between actors (Noe and Alroe 2003). This analytical approach demonstrates that agency can be interpreted as a collective property of humans, non-humans and objects and seeks to present the relationships between things that form an assemblage of agents.
As a heterogeneous product, agency generates effects. The sociology of translation located within actor network theory is used to show where these effects are found. This study works with two farmers from commercial farming businesses to demonstrate that farmer agency exists to exercise control within the agri-food structures, but it requires specialized non-human relations and associations to generate such effects. This paper explores these concepts by interrogating farmer agency in the context of machination and technology for crop production. This research is place-specific in the dryland agricultural zone of the Wimmera Southern Mallee region of Victoria, Australia, however it contributes to a global understanding of how agricultural science and technology is adopted and held in place by agency.
What The… CTF
Controlled traffic farming (CTF) offers insight into how farmers organise their farm practices. Farmers who follow CTF have adopted the concept, by accepting the benefits and making the system fit their farm. This farming system is advocated by a specific group of scientists as well as CTF farm leaders. The Australian Controlled Traffic Farming Association has over 700 members. Some peer-reviewed CTF research includes the whole farm benefits of CTF (Kingwell and Fuchsbichler 2011), soil emissions of nitrous oxide and methane (Tullberg et al 2018), modelling to estimate environmental impacts (Gasso et al 2014), and estimating annual machinery costs for CTF (Bochtis et al 2010). This work aims to contribute to the CTF literature about how CTF science is adopted and held in place by agency constructed as a relational collective. Critical ethnography moves beyond the traditional agronomic perspectives that CTF scientists and farmers offer. This paper can support the innovators and designers of farm machinery and technology by showing that machines, technologies, humans, skills and land are a collective that work together to enact controlled traffic farming.
Controlled traffic farming is a science that enables farmers to potentially be more productive by following the same wheel tracks in fields for every operation. The objective of a CTF system is to minimize soil compaction and achieve all the benefits advocated by CTF scientists such as improved water infiltration, mitigation of randomized machinery passes which cause soil compaction, improved plant performance in non-trafficked zones, hardened designated wheel tracks for faster field access after rain, and reduced fuel consumption. CTF is a prescription based precision farming system. It relies on global positioning systems (GPS) for real time kinematics (RTK) auto-steering guidance. Axels on the prime mover, whether it be a tractor, combine or a self-propelled sprayer, share the same wheel base width. These are aligned with implements in a ratio to ensure that the machines travel on exactly the same tracks in the paddock for every field operation, indefinitely (see Figure 1). The GPS and the auto-steering software ensure that the implement, like the seeder or the boom-spray, are not overlapping nor underlapping. Machinery accuracy can be as precise as one centimetre.
In an increasingly automated world one may assume that farmers wholly submit and give over to their fully-automated machines and technology for their decision-making. Yet farmers do not give up control. When they apply a controlled traffic farming system they are actively re-shaping a technical system. Soil type, topography, micro-organisms, and knowledge are also part of the system. This work sets out to challenge that farming is more than just a farmer’s set of decisions. This work argues that agency is not purely human. Agency is defined as a property of humans and non-humans using an actor network approach to explain how technology and science re-articulate the agential properties of farmers, their machines and the other agents that enter the farming complex.
Controlled traffic farming has been used by grain growers in Australia over the last twenty years. However, not every farmer who grows grain has adopted this system. This article offers two case studies, one farmer who has adopted CTF and another farmer who has not. Empirical evidence is provided to show how agency is distributed as a collective and performed by farmers, machines and other entities. The paper marshals the methodological approach to analyse the social, cultural, material, natural, human and technological elements at play in these case studies. This analysis contributes to a broader understanding of the complex relationship between farmers, technology and their land.
Figure 1. This photograph captures the straight lines and mathematics of CTF ratios. The image shows the wheel tracks and the 12m swath of canola crop remaining to be harvested, parallel to the operating combine harvester. (Photograph taken by the author).
CASE STUDIES: AGENCY IN THE AUSTRALIAN GRAINS SECTOR
This is a story of two farmers who grow grain. These farmers are neighbours who reside in a small rural farming district in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region of Victoria. This rural district, marked only with a hall and a tennis court, is called Telangatuk East. They are aged in their mid-40’s and were once class mates at the local primary and secondary schools prior to their senior schooling years. They are both volunteer members of the district Country Fire Authority and occasionally have a hit of tennis in the local social tennis competition.
Tony, our adopter of controlled traffic farming, went to boarding school in Hamilton, a regional hub in the western district of Victoria, about 100 kilometres south of his farm. He did not complete his final year of high school, leaving early to undertake a farm apprenticeship in the Mallee in the mid-1990’s. The Mallee is a region, spanning the north western region of Victoria and South Australia that receives low annual rainfall, and features sandy soils and sparse low vegetation. It was on this 2400 hectare farm where he first experienced continuous dryland cropping. After three years he continued his education with a diploma in agriculture, and then he worked extensively in southern Queensland and the Riverina region of New South Wales laser-levelling greenfield zones for irrigation development. Wayne, our non-adopter, completed his secondary education at the state high school in Horsham, the regional centre of the Wimmera, before he commenced a farm apprenticeship in the western district. Wayne worked on a much smaller, intensive mixed enterprise farm, focussing on sheep production, pastures and high rainfall opportunity cropping.
Both Tony and Wayne returned to Telangatuk East around the same time to farm full-time with their parents, but they needed to supplement their farming income with some off-farm work. Over time Tony has undertaken contract windrowing and harvesting, owned a precision-planter and grader board machinery hire business, and managed a consultancy project for a multi-national Malaysian corporation for the re-development of economic land concessions in Cambodia. Wayne continues to operate a canola windrowing contracting business. Both of these farmers have married. They each have two children; all of whom attend the local community school.
Tony continuously crops 1350 hectares, leasing land from another neighbour and his parents as part of the farm succession plan. Tony has implemented a full controlled traffic farming (CTF) system. Tony has a farm worker called Leo who helps him at sowing and harvest times. Wayne crops 630 hectares and has over 2000 cross-bred sheep on 450 hectares. He owns half of the land, and all of the machinery, with a profit-sharing arrangement with his parents as part of their farm succession. Wayne does not practice CTF as he runs sheep as part of his mixed farming enterprise, but he is interested in the system. The fieldwork in this study examines these neighbours by tracing their actions to understand the agents in their actor networks and how they enrol machinery and technology in their farming practices to find meaning in what they do and do not control.
These farms are located in the water catchment of the Glenelg River; a border dividing political representation in the Federal Parliament and a natural division between high and medium rainfall zones in western Victoria. The landscape is diverse with the Black Range State Park to the east (see Figure 3 for aerial image of the landscape). Remnant paddock vegetation, shallow top soil, creeks, and native pest populations of kangaroos, cockatoos and emus are dominant landscape features. The mean annual rainfall is 550mm. The vegetation density, the undulation and non-arable zones are symbolic of the traditional grazing enterprises. Tony is the only farmer in the district who does not have stock on his property as a risk management strategy and for income diversification. The district population is 50 people. More broadly, the Wimmera Southern Mallee (WSM) region covers just under 34,000 square kilometres with a total population of 47,000 (WSM Regional Partnerships 2017). The agricultural sector accounts for 25% of jobs in the WSM and 47% of all businesses (WSM Regional Partnership 2017). The region has a projected estimated growth rate for the period of 2016–2031 of -0.6% (Wimmera Southern Mallee Regional Growth Plan 2014). Mobile telephone service and mobile data is limited. This locality is marked as a black spot in the detailed local government boundary map of Horsham Rural City Council (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Map of the Wimmera Southern Mallee region in Victoria (map sourced according to copyright laws from Regional Development Victoria)
This fieldwork took place over four months leading up to and throughout the harvest period of summer 2018 – 2019. The data for this project includes informal conversations, hand written notes capturing farmers’ sequences of action. These notes included what they touched or modified, meaning whether they reacted to a situation or if were proactive in what they did, as well as who they talked to and the topic of conversation. Digital images were taken to support the findings. In total 210 images from three different cameras, a DLSR, iPhone and a drone, to support the research methodology by capturing what took place inside machinery cabins, in the field, and from aerial views. The observations focussed on how the participants operated their harvesting machinery and technologies. To protect their identities, Tony, Leo, Walkers Machinery, Bert and Jake are pseudonyms. The results are succinct stories describing farming practices, decision-making and discussion of how CTF influences human agency. Actor network theory is used to examine agents’ associations and to explain from an insider perspective how agency is distributed as a collective and performed by farmers, machines and other entities.
The CTF Farmer
About twenty years ago Tony commenced implementing a CTF system. Back then he was still farming with his father and his younger brother. Tony saw that compacted soils, which was caused by decades of grazing, hay production and cropping, were limiting their crop production. After a bus tour with a grower group to outback New South Wales to meet a CTF farmer, together with expert knowledge from soil scientists from the University of Queensland who were publishing widely in farm extension magazines, Tony gradually introduced CTF to his family farm business. The process started by moving the tractors’ axels out to 3m spaces and matching the width of the seeder to the width of the combine harvester’s front. Tony removed fences and some tall paddock trees for easier traffic-ability and to reduce the trees’ interference with the GPS signal.
At the same time farmer case studies of the successful implementation of CTF were being regularly published for a farming audience. Tony was reading as much about CTF as he could. While modifying his farm and his farming network, Tony had access to new CTF knowledge, some basic farm soil data, a record of their annual yields, and a membership to a grower group.
In these published journal articles the CTF scientists tended to speak on behalf of the non-human actors who could not speak for themselves, such as residue, soil microorganisms, plant roots, rainfall infiltration and soil air pockets. On the other hand the CTF farmers spoke on behalf of their costs, machinery, a quicker return to the field after rainfall, and their crop’s performance. By enrolling a number of agents from the farm services sector who too shared Tony’s goals, his fields were transitioned to CTF so that machinery could only drive up and back on the same invisible lines across the fields, indefinitely. Tony, his father and his brother, all witnessed an increase in crop yields; controlled traffic farming was a translation in an actor network sense, by enrolling actors, aligning goals and stabilising the network.
Two decades later, in spring 2018 Tony was faced with a new problem. He could not find a new or second-hand combine harvester front to fit his CTF system. This was a moment when Tony could have forgone the CTF system and returned to randomized traffic widths, choosing a cheaper and readily available 10m front. This would have been easy. Instead, he chose to implement a new CTF ratio. In simple Australian language, he was getting bigger gear. This change meant that he would need a new self-propelled boom-spray as well as a new air seeder for sowing season. Paddock trees would need to be removed. Tony viewed the standing paddock vegetation as an obstacle, nonetheless they were still a contributor to his CTF collective. But the actors in his system were agents because they demonstrated agential capacity to translate the CTF science. CTF is a translation of humans, machinery, nature and technological agency, which as a collective enact the benefits of the science on the farm. Transitioning systems, Tony stabilised his cropping practice by replacing CTF agents with new CTF agents.
For a CTF system to be enacted at harvest the auger on the combine needs to extend over the chaser bin. The chaser bin is a cart that is towed behind a tractor, allowing the combine to harvest and empty its grain simultaneously (see Figure 3). The John Deere dealership had assured Tony that an auger extension kit on his new combine would be long enough for his 12m system. They installed a kit as part of the contract but it failed to reach the required length. This meant that the chaser-bin could not be filled while both machines remained on the CTF wheel tracks. Tony knew that the auger was too short. He said that another extension kit would have to be installed before the next harvest; it was too late this year.
Figure 3. This photograph captures the harvest where the combine’s auger is extended over the chaser bin to unload canola in transit. The farming landscape typifies the dry summers at Telangatuk East. (Photograph taken by the first author).
The Farm Worker
Combine harvesters are designed to auger grain into a chaser bin while harvesting to maximize harvest efficiency (see Figure 3). The tractor tows the chaser bin, which is filled with grain, to empty into a field bin or in a truck. This was the job for Leo, Tony’s farm worker. Leo was driving the John Deere tractor. He had GPS and auto-steering technology to drive in straight lines. Leo’s task was to follow the same wheel tracks as the combine harvesters once they had harvested the crop.
The chaser bin was limited in its technology, but remained mechanically sound and robust. It had no modern features to support Leo’s judgement of how full the bin was. It just had one window, like a port hole, for Leo to see the grain through the bin wall. Leo’s decision-making was based on his sight and feedback from the combine drivers, as they had a better view into the field bin that he did (see chaser bin alignment in Figure 4).
Figure 4. This photograph captures the tractor and chaser bin aligned with the field bins. The farm worker is auguring the canola from the chaser bin into the field bin with his judgement of sight for accuracy. (Photograph taken by the first author).
Leo was working alongside two large capacity John Deere combine harvesters; Tony’s combine and a brand new demonstration model. This combine had 3m axels and a 12m front which meant it fitted Tony’s CTF system. It featured the latest technologies and modern driver comforts. As a sales pitch the local dealership brought it to Tony’s farm to let him experience this new machine, while harvesting his crop and sharing the synced paddock data between both machines.
The paddock was heavily timbered with 10 remnant Eucalyptus trees. Two trees had dropped limbs which increased the area of the fixed obstacles. Figure 5 demonstrates the vegetated landscape where the combine harvesters were working.
Figure 5. Two combine harvesters, remnant trees and fallen tree limbs are captured in this photograph and demonstrate the complexity that the chaser bin driver must consider. (Photograph taken by the first author.)
Tony had instructed Leo to remain on the new wheel tracks that the combine left behind in the stubble. Leo drove along the headlands and watched the two combines; from a distance they were hard to differentiate. The chaser bin had to be positioned on the combine driver’s left side, on stubble only. Leo followed the combine, staying on the new wheel tracks before disengaging the auto-steer software. He had to steer the tractor straight, avoiding the combine on his right side, but staying close enough to collect the grain. He had to use his judgment of where to drive. He then set the speed on the control stick, and steered the tractor over to the combine and into a safe zone to fill the chaser-bin. Over his right-hand shoulder he watched the auger swing out from the combine and over the bin. The grain crept up the window of the bin. Once filled, Leo moved back onto the wheel tracks. He re-set the auto-steer to guide the direction of the tractor, and slowed down as he no longer had to keep up with the combine.
Leo wasn’t abiding by the CTF system. His hand movements were discrete; he switched software off and on, and he pushed the accelerator forward for speed and pulled it back to slow down. The GPS guidance and auto-steer system were over-ridden. He merged the tractor about one metre towards the combine to collect the grain while in transit. Leo was utilising his own relations with machinery and guidance software by operating the tractor manually. Considering a network approach, the actors were all present yet they were fluid. Leo was re-negotiating the assembled collective through the terms of the short auger, because the machine was not realising the full benefits of CTF. Leo wasn’t being negligent, disrespectful to Tony, nor sceptical of the CTF system – if he had remained on the CTF wheel tracks as he had been instructed to do, the grain would have fallen on the ground.