This past week I have been collecting data and settling on interesting and doable methodology. My focus question is currently set as: To what extent have precision agriculture technologies been successful in achieving sustainable development goals in California and India? This question is driven by sustainable development goals and what current technologies are achieving. However, farming data is very valuable, and I was unable to a farm with public data for analysis. I could find some research conducted by others, but it was not something that I could further analyze and find unique, relevant results with.
So, I turned to how companies are selling these technologies and what sustainable development values they are appealing to. Specifically, the CrunchBase public company database provided a wealth of precision agriculture companies for me to study. I came up with the following methodologies:
First, I will code all US and India based ag data companies on the Crunchbase company database. From here I can conduct statistical and spatial analysis for what kind of companies are getting investments: Kind of tech (data analytics/geospatial analytics/drone/IoT), who, where?
Next, I plan to code homepages of above company websites for sustainable development values (economic security, ecology, labor, food scarcity, equity, etc.).
Finally, I will take a few companies for each technology in US and India and conduct discourse analysis: look at testimonials, news coverage, etc. Here I will be able to dig into the underlying sustainable development values and, perhaps more important, what is absent from the discussion.
One other way I thought I could still get at the reality of precision tech would be to look at sustainability reports, such as GRI. However, the only relevant report I found was for Monsanto, which included statistics with their subsidiary data science company, Climate Corporation. While this wasn’t enough to change my methodology to reflect these reports, I think Climate Corp would be an excellent candidate for deeper discourse analysis, and I could bring in the GRI report to talk about the validity of claims being made.
Overall, however, I am going to focus much more on the discourse around precision ag companies rather than what they are actually accomplishing. The jump from discourse to actuality is, of course, a treacherous one, but I think a discussion on discourse and advertising itself will be powerful as is. I will follow this plan and start conducting research this week. My focus question will certainly need to change to reflect my new focus, but I will leave that discussion for after I have begun collecting data.